Moroccan Other-Archives

How does one tell the story of postcolonial Morocco “in the absence of any organized archive between independence and 2011 when the Archives du Maroc was created” (13)? This is the opening gambit of Brahim El Guabli’s thoroughly researched foray into what he calls “other-archives”: “texts, artifacts, alphabets, embodied experiences, toponymies, and inherited memories where stories of the excluded, the silenced, and the forgotten live in a ghostly state, ready to articulate loss even as they are situated outside the margins of what is considered canonical” (1). Informed by the pioneering work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Ann Laura Stoler on colonial archives and postcolonial amnesia in other contexts (Haiti, Indonesia), Moroccan Other-Archives examines the traces that emerge from the archival silences of postcolonial Morocco. In answer to the question, “how does one write histories for which there are no archives?” (14), El Guabli sets out to produce an alternative archive of the Years of Lead (sanawat al-rasas), the period of autocratic rule between Morocco’s independence from France, under the reign of Mohamed V and King Hassan II, and “the short-lived liberal period that opened in the early 2000s” with the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) initiated by King Mohamed VI in 2004.A French and Spanish protectorate from 1912 to 1956, the Kingdom of Morocco was one of the first African colonies to gain national sovereignty, four years before the watershed year of 1960. The French authorities notoriously removed all archives pertaining to their labyrinthine colonial bureaucracy when they pulled out of Africa. More surprising is the fact that the newly sovereign Moroccan authorities did not rush in to fill in the archival gap. While the violent repression of student protests in Casablanca on March 23, 1965, by King Hassan II’s forces is often taken as the symbolic start date of the Years of Lead, El Guabli begins the story of archival silencing with the return to power of the beloved King Mohamed V in 1956, and questions the tendency to consider the advent of King Mohamed VI to the throne in 1999 as its end date. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources in Arabic, Tamazight (“Berber”), and French, and on the seminal work of scholars of postcolonial Morocco, including Susan Gilson Miller, Susan Slyomovics, Emily Gottreich, Katherine Hoffman, and Aomar Boum, El Guabli reconstitutes a rich if fragmented and dispersed archive of resistance to autocratic rule in postcolonial Morocco.Moroccan Other-Archives focuses on three sites of loss and alternative archiving practices: “Amazigh identity, Jewish emigration, and political imprisonment during the Years of Lead” (5). Without conflating the specific histories of disappearance and loss in these heterogeneous sites of oblivion and memory, El Guabli argues that the Moroccan state was responsible, to varying degrees, for the erasure of Amazigh culture, the mass exile of Moroccan Jews, and the disappearance of scores of political dissidents in the postcolonial period, as well as for silencing the other-archives emanating from these disparate sites of loss. In assembling these heterogeneous other-archives, El Guabli also seeks to put them into dialogue, against the grain of identity-based demands for memory and restitution. Whether or not such a coalitional politics of memory can succeed in the absence of Moroccan Jews, most of whom relocated to Israel, France, and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, is a question that El Guabli does not address. But his book proposes a clear path out of cloistered memories.The five chapters of the book map out several intersecting archives of loss in postcolonial Morocco. The first chapter is a fascinating case study of the unlikely revival of Amazigh culture and language, culminating in the establishment of the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture in 2001 and the official recognition of Tamazight as “an official language of the State” in the 2011 Constitution. El Guabli usefully grounds his study in the vexed question of Amazigh indigeneity in postcolonial Morocco, a question overdetermined by both French assimilationist policies targeting Imazighen (e.g., the Berber Decree of 1930) and the fact that the leaders of the 1971 and 1972 attempted coup d’états against Hassan II were from Amazigh regions. The proliferation of Amazigh movements since the mid-1960s is all the more remarkable given the state’s repression of these movements, and this reader would have liked a more granular account of the repression of Amazigh movements by the state. But El Guabli’s focus is squarely on the emergence of these movements and on their remarkable achievements, not least their reinvention of the Tifinagh alphabet which now adorns all street signs and many official buildings, flanked by Arabic on the right and French on the left. El Guabli’s detailed account of the “battle over the alphabet” that led to the adoption of Tifinagh, a script few Moroccans, including Amazigh Moroccans, can read, is particularly fascinating (50). So is his account of the appeal to the discourse of indigeneity within the Amazigh movement.It would have been interesting to track the emergence of claims to indigeneity within the Moroccan Amazigh movement in relation to planetary indigenous movements, which culminated in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. But El Guabli does suggest a productive relational approach to claims to indigeneity, noting that the Amazigh cultural movement “[extended] the notion of autochthony and indigeneity to Moroccan Jews. . . . Among Amazgha activists too, Tamazgha [the Amazigh homeland, stretching from southwest Egypt to the Canary Islands] is considered an Amazigh-Jewish homeland” (39). Not only does such a plural claim to indigeneity counter Zionist claims to indigeneity in Palestine, it also pluralizes the claim to indigeneity itself, offering a form of native belonging that is not based on a single ethno-religious identity. El Guabli’s speculations about whether the Amazigh movement’s “fascination with the Israeli model of linguistic and cultural revival is contingent on condoning occupation” are of particular urgency in the wake of Israeli state violence unleashed against Palestinians after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. What other-archives might we find to answer El Guabli’s question?Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to novels by Muslim Moroccan writers that recover the memory of Moroccan Jews and Jewish-Muslim intimacy to imagine “the Jewish-Muslim citizenship that could have been” (25). Drawing on recent novels by Kamal El Khamlichi, El Hassane Aït Moh, Ibrahim Hariri, Hassan Aourid, Mohamed Ezzedine Tazi, Abdelkarim Jouaiti, and Driss Miliani, El Guabli sketches the contours of a “mnemonic literature” dedicated to remembering Morocco’s Jewish communities and bringing their loss to bear on the present. A neglected archive of writings—scholarship on Moroccan Jewish communities has tended to focus on earlier writings by Jewish Moroccans such as Edmond Amran El Maleh—the corpus El Guabli discusses also makes a critical intervention in “linking the process of Jewish emigration and loss of the community citizenship to the political instability of these years,” in particular the “Moroccan authorities’ passivity vis-à-vis Zionist networks that were active in the country and prodding Moroccan Jews to leave” and the state’s persecution of leftists activists who advocated for Jews to remain in Morocco, chief among them Abraham Serfaty, who figures briefly in this chapter and in the following chapter on political prisoners (112, 114).Chapter 4 focuses on other-archives of the infamous Tazmamart prison, in which political dissidents spent decades living and dying in inhumane conditions: documents by human rights activists such as Christiane Daure-Serfaty and Gilles Perrault; testimonials by survivors such as Mohamed Raïss, Ahmad Marzouki, and Aziz BineBine; and novels by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Belkassem Belouchi, and Youssef Fadel. Although it was not the only secret prison of Hassan II’s rule, Tazmamart has become an allegory for the Years of Lead, one that has in turn provoked “literary fascination,” as well as a global market for Moroccan prison literature (133).The fifth and final chapter of the book offers a critical view of Moroccan historiography’s attempts to grapple with the profusion of other-archives in the absence of state archives, which are normally the purview of historical research. The recent turn to the “history of the present” in the wake of the process launched by the Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2004 is, El Guabli suggests, a welcome if belated development, one that risks being recuperated by a state eager to “rebrand post-1999 Morocco as a democracy,” for example, through the foundation of the Royal Institute for Research on Moroccan History (151). More promising, for El Guabli, are the collaborative efforts by historians, novelists, and journalists to produce alternative accounts of silenced episodes such as Tazmamart or the assassination of opposition leader Mahdi Ben Barka in 1965, although he acknowledges that these efforts remain relegated to the margins of historiographic respectability, particularly in light of the “tightening of national security’s grip on society since 2014” (174).El Guabli makes several important scholarly contributions. The first is his insistence on the dialectical nature of other-archives, which arise in opposition to the state but also risk being recuperated by it, providing a kind of alibi for the continued practice of state control over history and its representations. The second is his attention to the relations between and among other-archives that are usually treated separately, looking, for example, at the interplay between Amazigh and Jewish claims to indigeneity or the role mnemonic literature has played in revealing the state’s complicity in the dislocation of Jewish communities. Memory is a fraught terrain even within communities of dissent, and El Guabli tells the story of the debates and struggles that have produced other-archives as well as the unlikely, and sometimes ambivalent, successes they have obtained. Thoroughly researched, ambitious in scope, and daring in its arguments, Moroccan Other-Archives is a welcome addition to the rich literature on the cultural memory of postcolonial Morocco

Citizenship · Political science · State (computer science · Archaeological Research and Protection · Computer Science · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · History · Law · North African History and Literature