Maghrebian authors such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mouloud Mammeri, Rachid Boujedra and Mahi Binebine have used fictional narratives to expose racism in Maghrebian society. Images of Blacks in Maghrebian literature have changed over time. Early depictions of Blacks as slaves, concubines, eunuchs and domestic servants in Ben Jelloun’s, Mammeri’s and Boujedra’s writings occurred at a time when Black communities of ex-slaves remained absent from political and academic discourses. As the population of sub-Saharan African migrants in the Maghreb continues to grow, emerging literature addresses the mounting racism and escalating hate crimes against Blacks. The texts I discuss include Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Moha le Fou, Moha le Sage (1978), La Prière de l’absent (1981) l'Écrivain Public (1983), Sand Child (1985), Rachid Boujedra’s L’Insolation (1972), Mouloud Mammeri’s La Traversée (1982) and Mahi Binebine’s Le Sommeil de l'esclave (1992) and Cannibales (1999). Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Mary Louise Pratt, and Valerie Smith I argue that a common feature of these authors’ narratives is the spatialization of their Black characters’ experience in a way that is reflective of Blacks' curtailed agency. Blacks’ passive rather than active relation to space derives from their marginalization in Maghrebian society. They are positioned in a space where, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, the colonizers and colonized exist in “radically asymmetrical relations of power.” Living on the fringes of everyday life, Blacks occupy gray areas that are ambivalent and less enabling. Such spaces are also fraught with potential violence and degeneration. This resonates with Valerie Smith’ idea that the “gray area” is a “realm of danger and terror," associated with death and violence. All these novels depict Black spaces as associated either with the desire for self-destruction or the violent destruction of others.