The memory of slavery in Mauritania is layered and contested, including the extent to which it can truly be considered history passed and past. Although the entrenchment of servitude has become a trope through which outsiders hastily sketch Arabo-Mauritanian society—as with the oft-repeated fact that Mauritania was the last country to legally abolish slavery—histories and literatures of resistance assign agency instead to those who lived through enslavement or inherited its legacy. This can be seen in fictional works such as M.B. Bamba’s Outside Servitude (2019), which follows a single day in an enslaved man’s life as he starts to question his status and imagine a new place for himself in his society. In addition to drawing attention to everyday resistance, fiction also creates a space in which women of varying backgrounds can engage with the history of slavery in Mauritania. While inherited oral and written sources such as fatwas (legal rulings), poems, and political manifestos almost exclusively center the views of men, novels in particular give women the chance to conjure, imagine, empathize with, and portray feminine perspectives absent from the archive. Such voices are integral to both Aichetou’s novel 'Je suis N’Date' (2018) and in Samira Hamdi Fadel’s 'Asmāl al-ʻAbīd' (2019), both of which portray enslavement through women’s stories. However, empathy is not necessarily solidarity and fiction is not without its own absences and silences. The continued exclusion of some women’s perspectives is nakedly apparent in the fact that there is not yet a single novel by a Mauritanian woman author of Hartaniyya (freedwoman) origin in print. Keeping in mind both the potential and the limitations of women’s solidarity across other social boundaries, this paper examines two Arab-Mauritanian women’s novels on the history and practice of slavery in their country and questions the extent to which they represent a more inclusive archive that breaks enforced silence or merely a new form of exclusion which fails to move the margins.