Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts by Naïma Hachad (review)

Naïma Hachad advances Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies of the postcolonial Maghreb with her monograph, extending the work of such scholars as Valérie Orlando and Susan Slyomovics, and one welcome way she does so is through multilingual source material. The book begins with prison narratives from Hassan II’s Years of Lead (1961–99) and concludes with contemporary multimedia social activism. Throughout Part One, Hachad works around autobiography and testimony, noting where they overlap and where they do not, how both can be literary acts, and how testimony can be a strongly political one. Testimonial narratives by Saïda Menebhi, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih reveal the effects of gendered violence, state/political violence, and the symbolic violence inherent in silencing during the Years of Lead. With La Prisonnière (1999), Hachad affirms that Oufkir, adopted by Mohammed V and raised in royal palaces, was nonetheless subjected to ‘archaic patriarchal norms’ (p. 81) and ultimately to the prison system that her father, General Oufkir, helped to erect. For Menebhi, who died of a hunger strike while imprisoned, and El Bouih, emphasis falls on their Marxist–Leninist orientation, through which they are situated to represent a collective voice. Meaningful tension arises regarding the three authors’ positionality as it relates to what they voice: do these women writers speak for other women, namely the concubines of the king’s palace and common-law prisoners not of their social class or ideological perspective? Hachad ultimately says they do not — that Menebhi, Oufkir, and El Bouih use the stories of women with less privilege in ‘inherently political and functional ways’ (p. 100) while promoting themselves as ‘agents of resistance and change’ (p. 108). In qualifying the accounts as transactional, this final chapter flattens some of the complexity Hachad established in previous chapters. Part Two considers representations of female subjectivity in a broader range of media, in relation to displacement, migration, and diaspora. A transnational artist known for her photographs of women in interior spaces with re-figured Orientalist imagery and tropes, Lalla Essaydi’s privilege and mobility again raise the question of representativeness. Left as ‘potentially unsolvable’ (p. 144), Hachad concludes nonetheless that through an œuvre based on theatricality and modes of resistance, Essaydi opens up new representations of and for Moroccan women. Like Essaydi, Carolle Bénitah has experienced transnational mobility, living and working in different locations; her photo-embroidery explores subjectivity through family history and her personal and communal history as a Moroccan-born Jewish woman. Here Hachad connects incomplete telling in autobiography to incomplete realism in photography, reflecting both as inventive media for diasporic selfhood. The final chapter focuses on Naïma Zitan’s play Dialy (2012) and a webzine by Fedwa Misk as demonstrative of ‘revolutionary imagination’ (p. 218) following family code reforms and the 2010–11 social uprisings. It is a fitting conclusion to a book that shows how Moroccan women have been resisting gender disparities for decades, negotiating forms of patriarchy and censorship as they construct life narratives in a range of written and visual cultural production. Hachad provides an engaging overview that feels new and important.