Traditionally, memoirs are studied for their testimonial value, but this paper offers a new perspective on understanding the continual interpretative work that takes place in the written forms of a lived extreme experience of suffering. During the period between 1956 and 1999, post-colonial Morocco witnessed different uprisings against the monarchy, such as the war of the Rif (1958) and the two consecutive coups d’état in 1971 and 1972. The state did not hesitate to use its sovereign ability to exercise absolute power and inflict destruction on individuals and groups. Consequently, a sizable number of Moroccan citizens—about fifty thousand in total– experienced the Moroccan state’s necropower (Achille Mbembe) in prisons and secret detention centers. To reify its boundless ability to effectuate destruction, the state deployed myriad torture techniques that left their enduring mark on the victims’ bodies, souls and memories. These marks, however, are not confined to the imprisoned body; by means of an “intersemiotic translation” they transition from the sphere of “nonverbal signs” (physical and psychological pain) to the signs of language and literary text (memoir, novel, poetry, graphic novel). Using a reversed paradigm of Jakoboson’s theory of intersemiotic translation as transferring nonverbal signs—pain, suffering, and torment—into written form, I argue that the prison memoirs of Ahmed Merzouki (Cellule 10), Aziz BenBine (TAZMAMORT), Fatna El Bouih (Hadith al ‘atama/Talk of darkness) and Jawad Mdidich (La Chambre noire) are elaborate intersemiotic translations of state-inflicted suffering. This paper interrogates the processes of description, understanding and transformation, which are integral operations to the very notion of translation, in these former prisoners’ representation of their disappearance experience and detention during the period of political repression in Morocco. Additionally, I analyze the multiple levels of translation at play in these memoirs as a reflection of the Moroccan state’s endeavor not only to punish, but to transform its detainees into a state of living death. While these writers translate their own pain, they also interpret and reflect on the suffering of their colleagues, and hence allow an inter-subjective interpretation of pain. These memoirs, therefore, serve as a passageway to revisiting the historiography of a crucial era in modern Moroccan history.

Algerian Women at War: from Independence to Civil War Recently, Algerian women have begun to explore women’s experiences of the Algerian War of Independence and participate in a discussion previously dominated by a masculine perspective. This study examines how texts such as Louisette Ighilahriz’s autobiographical Algerienne and Djamila Amrane’s collection of testimonies Les femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie illustrate how traditional constructions of gender were challenged during this period. However, as this examination argues this war-time transgression led to a return to traditional roles upon independence and an attack on women during the civil war. As seen in La Bataille d’Alger, women frequently unveiled and submitted to the sexual gaze of the French ‘other’ to pass through checkpoints carrying bombs for the FLN. However, as Ighilahriz and Amrane’s texts illustrate, women fighting with the Moudjahidin outside of Algiers were required to desexualize themselves by wearing ‘masculine’ clothing to negotiate the tradition of separating the sexes. Although women were only permitted to perform conventionally ‘feminine’ tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and nursing; they had to withstand the harsh rural living conditions and also resist capture and torture by the French forces as well as their male counterparts. Far from being an accepted requirement of the war, as suggested by Franz Fanon, writers such as Mohammed Dib expressed anxiety associated with the changing role of women in society. Masculine unease provoked a return to conventional gender roles upon Independence. Meredith Turshen a specialist in public health policy notes that the majority of women re-occupied a place in the home rather than in the professional world after the war. The civil war perhaps best symbolizes the transformation in women’s roles. Rather than participating in the war, women became the targets of aggression. Algerian writers such as Rachid Boudjedra and contemporary films such as Viva Laldjerie and Bab El-Oued City, represent the Islamists’ brutal treatment of their female victims and the forced disappearance of Algerian women from society. As this examination demonstrates, women writers often relate the more recent violence against women to the War of Independence and accuse their FLN ‘brothers’ of betrayal.

Modern Algerian literature was born in a time of colonial terror and anticolonial resistance. Since the 1990s, Rachid Mokhtari has characterized this literature as a ‘graphie de l’horreur’ and novelist Rachid Boudjedra as a ‘palimpseste du sang’. Contemporary Algerian novelists remain preoccupied by the historiographic dilemmas and testimonial demands first articulated by an early generation charged with forging a national identity through literature, including Kateb Yacine, Mouloud Feraoun, Malek Haddad, Mouloud Mammeri, and Assia Djebar. As the liberation war has become as a touchstone for political authority in postcolonial Algeria, its historiography is an important matter of state; novelists both facilitate and contest nationalist emplotments of the revolutionary past. Writers have played an especially vital role in documenting and denouncing the harrowing violence that killed or disappeared more than 200,000 Algerians during ‘la décennie noire’ of the 1990s. Under the guise of promoting peace, the Algerian government has recently passed amnesty laws that mandate collective forgetting and prohibit legal redress for those unresolved crimes. In the absence of institutional justice, literary texts have not only created a space for mourning but also for insisting on new forms of justice in the face of ongoing state repression. By closely reading fiction by Yamina Mechakra, I explore the dissenting capacity of literature to challenge the state’s narrative and epistemological authority. Algerian literary texts have long been treated as documents of social reality and national allegory, but Mechakra’s La grotte éclatée (1979) and Arris (1999) pose significant barriers to such interpretations. Composed of fragments on which she dwelt for decades, Mechakra’s connected novels meditate on the precarity and loss erased from sanitized narratives of the anticolonial war. Despite renewed interest in her work since her death in June 2013, these texts remain obscure. Mechakra’s only published story can be found in a 1976 back-issue of El-Moudjahid. Arris is out of print and nearly impossible to find, and despite an ardent preface by Kateb Yacine, La grotte éclatée (1979) has yet to be published outside Algiers. I suggest that Mechakra’s relative opacity signals the unassimilability of her work to nationalist ideologies. Drawing theoretical insight from Nasrin Qader (Narratives of Catastrophe) and Emily Apter (Against World Literature), I argue that the formal and aesthetic qualities of Mechakra’s fiction insist on untranslatability and incommensurability in ways that demand close reading and that expose the limits of narratives that serve the interests of the state.

The vast body of primary and secondary works dedicated to the prison experience in Morocco since the late 1990’s alone calls for its examination within any particular study of contemporary Moroccan cultural productions. Though deeply rooted in the cultural and solidarity ties that still exist between France and Morocco since a large number of these testimonies are in French and were written and diffused with the assistance of French activists, a quick consideration of the evolution of the narration of the experience of incarceration in recent decades unfolds broader genealogies. Moroccan testimonial narratives share with literature from the African continent –whether Francophone or Anglophone– the obsession with jail. As is the case for prison narratives from Eastern Europe and the Arab world, Moroccan prison narratives spring from the wave of political change in recent years and are both part of and an alternative to unstitutionalized investigations into the country’s traumatic recent historical past. Finally, these narratives expose the injustices that inspired recent contest in the Arab world and the dynamics of hatred that animate current conflicts. This paper situates Moroccan prison narratives within this continuum while analyzing them as an expression of “postcolonialism” that seeks to “reorient ethical norms, turn power structures […] upside down, [and] refashion from below.” It focuses on extreme manifestations of repression and punishment as exposed in francophone testimonial narratives, especially texts dealing with the infamous secret prisons Bir Jdid and Tazmamart. It examines the significance of the voice of the former political prisoner and its occupation of the public space in light of actual and symbolic mechanisms put in place by the authoritarian regime to negate the dissident’s body. While keeping the analysis grounded in Morocco’s political and cultural histories, the paper uses various critical approaches –Michel Foucault’s analysis of the regicide and parricide’s punishment, Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “differend,” Derrida’s conceptualization of the radical “gift,” and John Beverley theorization of Latin American testimonio – to show how testimonial narratives in Morocco move from sites of survival and reconstruction of the mutilated body to sites of resistance in which demands for radical justice and democracy are articulated.