Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings

Chapter 6 analyzes Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazwine, a webzine founded by Moroccan journalist and blogger Fedwa Misk in 2011 and Naïma Zitan’s Dialy (2012), a play in colloquial Moroccan-Arabic (Darija), as exemplars of how women’s activism and cultural production reinvigorated and gendered contemporary discourses of contestation. Dialy, originally conceived as an adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), uses testimonies collected during encounters and workshops involving a hundred and fifty Moroccan women of different ages and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to inscribe in the public sphere major transitions in a woman’s life such as menstruation, sexual relations, marriage, pregnancy, and childbearing. Qandisha has attracted a significant number of writers, readers, and commentators who post their texts in French, Arabic, Darija, and English from all over Morocco as well as from Algeria, France, and Tunisia about sexuality, rape, sexual orientation, and individual freedom. Anonymity, easy access, the dissolution of boundaries (between locales, languages, readers, and writers) have all provided women with endless possibilities for self and collective representation. This chapter analyzes the content and the reception of Dialy and Qandisha to illustrate contemporary divisions around women’s rights and sexuality in the Moroccan context, as well as the uneasy cohabitation between the Moroccan society’s diverse make-up and transnational feminist discourses and global technologies.

Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women

Chapter 4 offers analyses of several images from Lalla Essaydi’s photographic series Converging Territories (2004), Les Femmes du Maroc (2006-2008), and Harem (2009), in which she exclusively depicts women from Morocco or the Moroccan diaspora. The chapter focuses on the feminist transnational discourse that emerges from Essaydi’s inscription of her biography—more specifically her experience growing up in a harem and living as an adult woman in Saudi Arabia and the United States—and her training in Western art. The chapter is structured around a set of key questions. Does Essaydi’s juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes and poses from canonical nineteenth-century European Orientalist paintings with the veil, calligraphy, henna tattoos, and Moroccan architecture disrupt or reinforce stereotypes in the depiction of Arab and Muslim women? Can Essaydi’s hybrid language be read as a form of feminist ‘double critique’ that resists Western and Islamic patriarchy? How do Essaydi’s images intervene in relation to the transnational and transcultural discourse and positioning of the ‘Muslimwoman’? What is the economy between the transnational, transglobal and translocal, and the simply local in Essaydi’s images? How do Essaydi’s photographs contribute to the critical (re)thinking of gender in the context of globalization?

Speaking for the Voiceless

Chapter 3 contemplates the collective dimensions of testimonies by renowned victims of political violence, something that has been emphasized by previous studies. The analysis focuses on the literary devices and content Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir chose to merge their experience of political violence and resistance with the collective experiences of Moroccan women. The chapter questions the assumption that testimonial writing is an ‘extraliterary’ or ‘antiliterary’ discourse (Beverley, 2004, 42) and demonstrates the ethical and political limitations of the of the idea of a ‘collective testimonial self.’ It also integrates alternative testimonial documents that have not been previously analyzed, as well as recent studies on women and political violence and resistance during the Years of Lead. Because of this, this chapter revises and completes previous research on the Years of Lead in two major ways. First, it demonstrates that dividing resisters and victims in testimonies by renowned female political activists and former political prisoners can promote a simplistic account of women’s experiences, as well as articulate a very reductive representation of victimization and resistance. Second, it addresses how the narration and memorialization of violence are impacted by class, ethnicity, religion, language, and education level, important differentiating factors that intersect with gender.

The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness in Saïda Menebhi’s Prison Writings

Chapter 1 reaffirms the historical importance of political prisoner and martyr Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison after her hunger strike in 1977. However, unlike previous studies that emphasize Menebhi’s biography, my analysis also focuses on her writings, particularly the inscription of the people and the revolution in her poetry and unfinished essay on female prostitution. In doing so, the chapter uncovers the nego-feminist strategies Menebhi used to circumvent restrictive sociocultural gender norms of the 1970s and feminize and localize the internationalist and seemingly genderless Marxist-Leninist ideology. The chapter also identifies aspects that make Menebhi a trailblazer who provided Moroccan women with a narrative and a political model for the construction of a feminine testimonial voice and feminist aesthetics.

Carolle Bénitah’s Photo-Embroidery

In ‘L’enfance marocaine’ (2009), Carolle Bénitah scans, reframes, and embroiders over black and white family photographs from her childhood in Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 5, analyzes Bénitah’s photo-embroideries, using theories on family photography and its ability to capture traumatic shifts that shape postmodern mentalities, as developed by Roland Barthes ([1980]1981), Marianne Hirsch (1997), Patricia Holland (1991), and Annette Kuhn ([1995] 2002). In tandem with these theorists, I draw on Sam Durrant’s analysis of the postcolonial narrative as a mode of mourning and an action partly meant to come to terms with traumatic historical events, and Mireille Rosello’s notion of ‘reparative mourning’ in her study of the reparative in postcolonial narratives. I read Bénitah’s images as a postmodern narrative that testifies to a fragmented subjectivity, situated at the intersection between public and private history and memory—the artist’s personal story against the backdrop of the twentieth-century history of Morocco and its Jewish community. The chapter analyzes spatial, temporal, visual, and cultural hybridity as a way of working through history while also engaging with transnational feminist strategies women use to undo gender hierarchies naturalized and perpetuated by photography and the family photograph.

Introduction

The introduction discusses the heterogeneity of Moroccan and Moroccan-born women’s self-referential practices and identifies the resources on which they draw, situating the diverse contexts in/from which they emerge. Women’s auto/biographies are products of the historical, sociocultural, and geopolitical contexts they mobilize and negotiate. These contexts dictate not only the content, but also the choice of the medium –writing, photography, body tattoos, embroidery, orality, and digital media. The introduction exposes these dynamics by unveiling the different media, styles, and languages of women’s auto/biographies in context. In doing so, the introductory chapter establishes the transdisciplinarity of my project as well as the critical routes I use to approach the topic including postcolonial and postmodern theories, transnational feminism, autobiography, and testimony.

Conclusion

The conclusion highlights the ways in which a transdisciplinary interpretative lens in Revisionary Narratives allows for connecting the specific devices women use to produce auto/biography to larger and ongoing demands of social change and their impact on gender and women’s issues in Morocco. The concluding chapter also summarizes the ways in which the book establishes new modes of inquiry and comparative frameworks that encourage and offer different models for future exploration of Moroccan women’s testimonial and autobiographical narratives. It does so while pointing at current events in Morocco and the MENA region that are shaping definitions of citizenship, freedom of expression, and protest, as well as ideals of femininity and masculinity, a reality that is also bound to produce pioneering life narratives that will deserve scholarly attention in the near future.

(Re)writing the Woman Resister

In Chapter 2, I argue that, despite significant differences in their socioeconomic and ideological backgrounds, El Bouih and Oufkir offer two literary representations of gendered political violence that seek to ground their individual experiences within the collective history of violence against women in Morocco. Even though El Bouih’s Hadith Al Atama [Talk of Darkness] (2001) is in the form of a fragmented memoir that constantly shifts from first to third person narration and Oufkir’s La prisonnière [Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail] (1999) is a retrospective and linear narrative, both narrators recast themselves into feminists who speak for silenced women. Focusing on the commonalities in Oufkir and El Bouih’s testimonies not only allows us to uncover the tenets of a female-gendered Moroccan testimonial voice, but also addresses the politics of the narration, memorialization, and criticism of political violence in Morocco’s era of democratic transition.