The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (review)

In The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco, Susan Slyomovics presents an anthropological approach to writing about the historical and current struggle for human rights in Morocco. Her unconventional use of the term "performance" as participation, social action, and political value makes her book useful to many different academic audiences. She argues that the absence of official testimonies about prisoner torture is perpetuated both by the prison system's creation of a particular category of the "disappeared," and by the various ways in which prisoners create performative narratives of their experiences. Through her discussion of the relatively recent opening of public spaces where people can congregate, Slyomovics outlines how a narrative of human rights struggle in Morocco is increasingly possible. The experiences of the various categories of prisoners and subjects of torture that have been muted are now being articulated through personal testimony, performance, and poetry. Through fieldwork done over two years, interviewing former subjects of prison torture and examining their diaries, books, and artwork, Slyomovics discovered that the physical pain inflicted on the tortured was intended "to destroy the voice that would express torture in language, thereby eliminating any representations by the victims" (3).

Slyomovics analyzes prison writings, drawings, and poetry spanning the thirty-eight-year reign of Hassan II (r. 1961–99). She is most interested in this period of Morocco's history as it was the longest and most cruel and oppressive reign of the monarchy that was reinstated with the end of the French colonial protectorate in 1956. She writes that during his reign, the climate in Morocco was one of pervasive fear, police surveillance, and censorship; throughout this period, all political activity and thought were criminalized (6). Therefore, one of the main goals of her book is to give the oppressed a voice through her emphasis on performance.

Slyomovics uses a non-normative definition of performance in her examination of the various expressions of torture and abuse by prisoners. She defines performance as "the practices, discourses, events, occasions, and cultural behavior associated with enacting human rights onto the public arena… everyday life can be viewed as performances of human rights" (9). These activities are the funerals, mock trials, vigils, sit-ins, political rallies, conferences, public testimonies, letters, slogans, graffiti, and poetry that serve to empower the "performer," document the atrocities endured, and commemorate the long history of human rights abuses in Morocco.

In order to examine these performances and their relationship to the postcolonial context of Morocco, Slyomovics begins her book with a discussion of the official laws as opposed to the actual practices that characterized the authoritarian regime. The brutal treatment of prisoners can be seen in her chapter two discussion of what it means to be disappeared in Morocco. Like her unconventional definition of performance, disappearance as "a Moroccan phenomenon" is not simply a matter of conventional physical removal (54). Due to the importance of kinship relations, entire families virtually disappear when family members are abducted and imprisoned. The metaphor of performance is most vivid in her discussion of women's torture testimonies. Particularly significant is the police technique of restructuring and recreating the identity and gender of women prisoners by assigning them numbers and male names. The book closes with a discussion of Morocco's contemporary prison system and its detainees, and the emerging public narrative about past abuses of human rights. Slyomovics notes that Hassan II's son and heir, Mohammed VI, has created an official state ideology that claims a commitment to human rights law and the collective freedom of the Moroccan people—although she is skeptical of the veracity of this claim.

Throughout her book, Slyomovics emphasizes the particularly "Moroccan" aspects of these human rights abuses and their origins in the French protectorate. The postcolonial monarchy appropriated protectorate prisons for the torture of its own political prisoners, and French writers were the first to document these abuses. Even the names of these prisons echo the colonial era—such as Kenitra Central Prison which was used to house Algerian political detainees during...