Nation, Gender, Trauma, Resistance and History in Moroccan Prison Writings

Nation, Gender, Trauma, Resistance and History in Moroccan Prison Writings Ismail Frouini Chouaib Doukkali University, El Jadida, Morocco This doctoral thesis aims at studying the intersectional mode of existence of power, gender, trauma, resistance and history in the prison writings of the “Years of Lead” Morocco (1956-1999). This period is notorious in the Moroccan history for the cruelty and the abuse of power, forcible disappearance, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of the opponents of Hassan II‟s regime. Consequently, between 1974 and 1976, waves of arrests targeted thousands of dissidents and activists. Many of these voices of the dissidents, who were opponents of Hassan II‟s regime, were arrested owing to their political strategic locations as well as affiliations (predominantly, Leftist and Marxist affiliations). The dissidents and activists who have spoken truth to their hegemonic and coercive powers have been arbitrarily driven into the prison repressive apparatuses on false allegations and long prison sentences. Nation, Gender, Trauma, Resistance and History in Moroccan Prison Writings examines different forms of resistance, state-sponsored, gendered, systemic as well as epistemic violence and trauma in the Moroccan prison writings. Post-colonial Moroccan society‟s traumatic experiences are a reflection of the impact of power on the course of history, society, culture, politics, and gender relations (El Guabli, 2014 & 2018 & Orlando, 2009 & 2011). Post-colonial Morocco witnessed many transformative/traumatic events that shaped its transitional process. These events include the two failed coups d‟état in 1971 and 1972 and the Casablanca uprising in the 1980s, among others. These events were met with the Moroccan authorities‟ abuse of power, arbitrary imprisonment of the people involved, and violations of human rights. The silence that repressed this trauma kept it hidden until the early 2000s. Since the beginning of this new century, Moroccan political prisoners have broken their silence and had a voice of their own. This moment marked the birth of the Moroccan resistance literature and the beginning of (re)writing the Moroccan history project. 275 (Re)writing the history of antagonism, dissidence and opposition of the silenced, suppressed and marginalised voices is dictated by the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion as well as power relations that shaped the post-colonial Morocco. Moroccan historiography is also dictated by circulatory coercive relations of power and the politics of inclusion and exclusion (Kozma, 2003, Moukhlis, 2008, Laroui, 2015 & El Guabli, 2019). Prison writings, as a discursive practice, offer novel alternative ways of looking at the subaltern history by offering the subaltern political prisoner, as an (auto)biographical writing subject, an opportunity to rewrite their history. Nation, Gender, Trauma, Resistance and History in Moroccan Prison Writings argues that in the face of the Moroccan prison system‟s use of coercive and hegemonic practices to shatter the prisoners‟ agency, generating gendered, reshuffled and traumatised subjectivities, these prisoners of conscience have developed myriad mechanisms of resistance to reject and then subvert docility and subalternity. The post-colonial Moroccan trauma of imprisonment could be articulated through some theoretical concepts, such as Barbara Harlow‟s (1987) “resistance literature”, James Scott‟s (1990) “hidden transcript” or in Susan Slyomovics‟ (2005) “performances” of human rights. This thesis examines the hegemonic discourse and the state-sponsored epistemic, systemic and symbolic violence exerted on prisoners in the notorious Moroccan prison apparatuses. To implement this examination, this thesis draws on the unprecedented number of publications about the “Years of Lead.” Included are Abdellatif Laâbi‟s Chroniques de la Citadelle d'exil: Lettres de prison 1980-1981 (1978) (Chronicles from the Citadel of Exile: Prison Letters 1880-1972), Sous le bâillon le poème (1981) (The Poem under the Gag), Rue Du Retour (1989), The Bottom of the Jar (2002), Fatna El Bouih‟s Talk of Darkness (2008) (originally Hadith al Atama, published in Arabic in 2001), Khadija Merouazi‟s Siratu Rramad (Biography of Ash) (2000), Malika Oufkir‟s Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (2001a), Ahmed Marzouki‟s Tazmamart Zinzana 10 (2001) (Tazmamart: Cell N. 10), Abdelkader Chaoui‟s Al-Ssahatu al-Sharafiyya (2005) (The Courtyard of Honour), and Mohammed Raiss‟s Min Skhirat ila Tazmamrt: Tadhkirat dhahab wa iyab ila al jahim (2000) (From Skhirat to Tazmamart: Roundtrip Ticket to Hell). Nour Eddine Saoudi‟s Femme- Prison Parcours Croisées, (2005) (Women prison, Crossed Paths), Tahar Ben Jelloun‟s 276 2001 This Blinding Absence of Light, Youssef Fadel (2016) A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me: A Novel, and Abdelaziz Mouride‟s On affame bien les rats (2001) (They Starve Rats). To articulate its arguments, this thesis adopts an intersectional comparative cultural studies methodology in its investigations of these prison works. The thesis builds upon the Foucauldian notion of knowledge, power (relations), discursivity, inclusion and exclusion to account for the hegemonic practices exerted on the prisoners. To articulate its main arguments, this thesis adopts a feminist, post-colonial, Subalternist, new historicist and a Foucauldian methodological approach to study the intersectional framework of power relations, gender, resistance, trauma and history. This intersectionality is informed by the post-colonial studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, subaltern studies and New Historicism. This doctoral thesis draws its main conclusions and findings from the analysis of the aforementioned corpus. It puts forward the argument that political prison writings articulate the antagonistic subject position of prisoners of conscience and survivors of the “Years of Lead” trauma, thus challenging the view that post-colonial female dissidents are silent and agent-less. The cultural and historical trauma experienced by the whole society in the so-called post-colonial Morocco. The lost promise of emancipation, independence and human rights in the “Years of Lead” Morocco (1956-1999) presupposes rethinking the post-colonial project— the project whose horizons of expectations are divided and lost. This is attributed to the exclusionary discourse of post-colonialism. As a result, this thesis has made a call to come up with a spatially and temporally conscious project of a Moroccan post-colonialism. In line with this conclusion, the whole thesis has argued that there is a kind of what Derrida calls “différance” of and in the post-colonial project in the “Years of Lead'' Morocco. This latter has its idiosyncratic post-coloniality. The Moroccan post-colonial condition is shaped by the “insidious” and “belated” trauma of the arbitrary imprisonment, epistemic as well as systemic violence, ubiquitous fear, detachment, torture, rape, isolation, and overuse of power. This conclusion has ultimately proposed that the emancipatory project of post-colonialism is deferred in Morocco. As a result of this status quo, Moroccans political prisoners have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder inside and 277 outside the repressive apparatuses. All the prisoners of conscience and their families have experienced some sorts of loss, trauma, exile, and abnormality, which are all akin to the aftermaths and legacies of colonialism. This thesis has additionally highlighted the fact that Moroccan prisoners of conscience are oppressed twice. First, they are already subject to the coercive, hegemonic, traumatising, disciplinary power circulating their subjectivities in the Moroccan repressive state apparatuses—more particularly, in the notorious prison of Tazmamart. Second, they are subject to the systemic as well as epistemic violence that denies their agency to articulate their dissidence and voice themselves as “post-colonial” agents. Not only does this research look at the various forms of resistance adopted by political female prisoners to speak truth to hegemonic power, but it also shows that Moroccan female prisoners have retrospectively offered historical narratives in which their subaltern/silenced voices are „strategically essentialised,‟ (re)deemed as the subjects of the “Years of Lead” Moroccan history. As a form of “resistance literature,” female prison writings aim at redefining and reshuffling of the gendered subjectivities. Moroccan female dissidents and prisoners have generated a good number of scholarships, say of female “combat” resistance literature, to redefine, voice, canonise and rewrite the female subjectivities that have been academically and historically excluded. The thesis finds that female political prisoners have articulated their political consciousness that informs and shapes the epistemic foundations of their resistance. This consciousness has helped locate the subaltern “feminine voices” within an academic “order of discourse”. When these women are positioned within an organic “order of discourse,” they have been active agents in writing their excluded history. Moreover, there is a singular intertextual (his)story of trauma that these prisoners of conscience articulate. This thesis works towards attributing agency to the trauma victims to write themselves. Like other forms of subaltern writing, prison (auto)biographical writings, which have been referred to throughout this thesis as counter-narratives of the dominant historiography, provide an alternative history of the nation.

Load more