The modern-day conversation over slavery In the Middle East and North Africa, is usually stunted by the oft-regurgitated apologetic trope on the benign treatment of slaves in the Islamic world, that stands in contrast to the brutality of chattel slavery. Although historians warn us from reducing the history of black presence in the Maghreb to slavery, the black-Maghrebean subject’s presence in the North African belt is still linked to his/ her servile origin. Even less are the visual and literary narratives on women within this particular demographic. Historically, female slaves have outnumbered male slaves in the northern Muslim milieu. Yet, their absence in contemporary historiographies and the scarcity of their narratives is striking. Stories of concubines and female slaves were only retrieved in the fictional and autobiographical writing of North African writers who spared little ink to flesh out their stories. Through an analysis of a literary Maghrebean artistic productions, this paper seeks to probe into the multiple ways in which the black-Maghrebean female is represented. I pay a special attention to the theme of gender, seeking to recover the buried stories of the black concubines and their female descendants, who in the word of historian Chouki Elhamel are the “tragic heroine in North African slavery”. I retrieve scenes I encounter in the fictive memoir of Moroccan Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass, Taher Ben Jelloun’s Moha Le Fou Moha Le Sage and the Libyan writer Najwa BenShatwan’s The Slave Pens.