This paper uses two Maghribi Arabic novels, Tunisian Bachir Khreyif’s Barg el-Lil (1961) and Moroccan Rachid El Hachimi’s Dhākirat al-Narjis (2018), to explore issues of racial terminology, the Saharan roots and routes and the imaginaries they evoke. The novels are mined for both the kind of archival notions they put forth and their own archival potential within the field of Arabic literature and Maghribi culture. For decades, a ‘culture of silence’ (Marouan 2016) has covered the history of trans-Saharan slavery and Maghribi involvement in the enslavement of sub-Saharans, despite notable contributions by historians (Ennaji 1994, Toledano 2007, Oualdi 2011, El Hamel 2013, Montana 2013) and anthropologists (Capranzano 1973, Ferchiou 1996, Kapchan 2007, Jankowsky 2010). In the aftermath of the so-called Arab Springs, discussions about ‘anti-black racism’ have emerged in Maghribi civil society, academia, culture and literature. Zarā’ib al-‘abīd (2016), which explores Libyan culture through the slave-master family relationship, was shortlisted for the Arabic Book Prize, and the memory of slavery is a central theme in the International Booker Prize winner Sayyīdat el-Qamar (2010). Other Maghribi novels in Arabic and French are also exploring racism and the memory of slavery, as is the case with Morocco in Dhākirat al-Narjis. As for Barg el-Lil, it is the first modern Arabic historical novel in which the protagonist is a Central African slave –although quite excluded from the Arabic literary canon archive. I read it against the backdrop of Negritude and African diasporic political culture in post-WWII, and as entangled in notions of ‘committed literature’ (adab multazim) that was so hotly debated in Arabic literary circles and the periodicals across the Third World in the 1950s-60s. Both novels insert the sub-Saharan element within a culturally-plural landscape including Andalusi, Italian and Mediterranean in sixteenth-century Tunis in Barg el-Lil and Amazigh, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean in postcolonial Morocco in Dhākirat al-Narjis. They evoke particular locations which shaped the protagonists’ identities and genealogies – the forced journey to Tunis from Central Africa where Barg was violently kidnapped and uprooted, and the Moroccan protagonist’s enslaved great grandmother’s route from Sijilmassa to Fez, and then to Essaouira. Likewise, both novels bring in elements of indigenous sub-Saharan cosmovisions – including matrilineality in historical (archival) transmission, and ways of unlocking memory based on sensorial knowledge, which ultimately challenge conventional understandings of the archive as a neat space, and archivability as a practice of preservation necessarily governed by a set of skills and epistemology.