Talk of Darkness (review)

This volume of prison memoirs presents the journey of Fatna El Bouih, one of the many students arrested in Morocco during the 1970s and 80s for their connections to the Marxist movement. Bouih's memoir covers the period from her initial arrest in 1977 through her internment in Meknes Civil Prison under preventative detention. Through her eyes, we see the faces of oppressive government agents, the communities within prison walls, the importance of political consciousness to the survival of both body and spirit, and the effects of detention on the prisoners and their families.

Despite the fact that Bouih initially spent much of her time in prison blindfolded, the text is bursting with images, sounds, and smells perceived through this lack of physical sight. The building of community in this sterile world is beautifully articulated. Bouih writes, "We became acquainted with each other in silence and darkness.… Our fingers dexterously and warily began to write on each other's ribs.… Fingers were transformed into pens, the sides of chests into pages" (11). Although the blindfolds were removed after Bouih and her companions were sentenced following seven months of detention, her articulation of the experience of confinement maintains this extrasensory perception throughout.

Bouih and her companions determined that they needed to be recognized as political prisoners. As a result, this memoir stands not only as a documentation of their experiences in prison but also as a record of their protest against the state-sponsored violence to which they had fallen prey. From the beginning, they would not let themselves be devoured. Bouih documents the reasons for and the effects of hunger strikes on their community and their captors. Though their health deteriorated day by day, they refused to back down. Eventually the authorities began to dialogue with them and a transformative process began within Morocco's prison system.

Bouih uses references to Islamic myth, legend, and culture to frame many different prison interactions. These references and the images they conjure up are evidence of the productive use of the last fertile ground left to the prisoner's control—her imagination. When prison authorities eventually allowed these imprisoned students to continue their studies, Bouih chose the subject of myth, as it fed her aching hunger for image and story. Within the prison world, she was able to dwell in the world of myth and cultural heritage even if she was unable to "narrate [her] own myths" (42).

As Bouih struggles to make sense of her time in prison, her text often wanders to the difficulties of imprisoned children. This is consistent with many other prison memoirs written by women in or from the Middle East. Children exemplify innocence, and the suffering endured by all was most painful for them. It is Bouih's little sister who suffers the most among all of her family members as she strives to understand her big sister's absence. Bouih articulates this longing as her sister's unquenched thirst (55). At the end of her letter to a young girl who has grown up in prison she writes, "I will move heaven and earth so that children your age will know a different world" (67). For many women who have had the courage to write of their experiences as political prisoners, this hope of a better future for the innocent is a powerfully sustaining notion.

This memoir, like many others in the same genre, opens windows into the possibilities that emerge despite the efforts of repressive regimes to control their opposition. This volume stands as a monument to the strength of the human spirit and the wonder of the sustaining power of community. The translators' Introduction and Chronology provide useful points of reference, and more importantly, greater context for the three years that are documented in the memoir. The same woman who as a young student waged both physical and spiritual war inside prison walls, went on...