El Guabli, Brahim. Moroccan Other-Archives: History and citizenship after state violence. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 288 pp.

Faska Elhoucine
Doctoral Candidate in History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Brahim El Guabli’s Moroccan Other-Archives is a study into the annihilation of the histories of marginalised groups. It is a critical response to the “astounding distance” maintained by influential scholars regarding the systematic repression and violence during the Years of Lead (1956-1999) under King Hassan II. El Guabli’s book is a rigorous exploration of Morocco’s fraught postcolonial history: decades of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and cultural repression under a regime that sought to consolidate power by silencing dissent.

The author employs loss as a central analytical framework, demonstrating how absence and erasure connect the experiences of Imazighen, Moroccan Jews, and political prisoners. Deemed threats to national unity, these groups endured extreme violence, including imprisonment, assassination, and exile. Drawing on cultural productions including testimonies, fiction, and embodied memory, El Guabli constructs a so-called other-archive: alternative spaces of memory and historiography that challenge the state’s hegemonic control over the writing, production, and maintenance of history. In contrast, other-archives are microhistories that offer a counterpoint to the top-down historiographical frameworks which have dominated Morocco’s official discourse and democratize access to marginalised and silenced narratives.                      

Each of the five chapters address a distinct dimension of Morocco’s contested past showcasing how cultural producers have reclaimed historiographical agency to intervene in the national narrative. The work is especially noteworthy for its detailed analysis and adept use of cultural texts to advance a theoretically sophisticated analysis of complex questions such as citizenship, identity, and resistance.

The introduction establishes the theoretical and historical foundation of Moroccan Other-Archives, critiquing the absence of comprehensive documentation and official acknowledgement of the Years of Lead, during which state violence was systematic and deliberately concealed. Although King Mohammed VI’s enthronement in 1999 marked a shift toward reconciliation, culminating in the establishment of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) in 2004, El Guabli argues that this effort ultimately failed to fully address the cultural and historiographical silences of the period.

The author positions himself as both a scholar and a “child of the Years of Lead” (ix), foregrounding the urgency of rewriting Morocco’s suppressed histories. His work draws on Derridean notions of the archive and Trouillot’s work on silence and historicity to conceptualize other-archives: dynamic and decentralised forms of memory encompassing texts, oral histories, artifacts, journalism, embodied experiences, and inherited memories. They contest official narratives and articulate collective traumas, facilitating the democratisation of historical narratives and functioning as acts of citizenship. In this reconceptualization of the relation between citizenship and history, the right to citizenship becomes integrally related to the right to conceive and propose pluralistic histories.                             

The first chapter, “(Re)Invented Tradition and the Performance of Amazigh Other-Archives in Public Life,” introduces the Amazigh cultural revival as a resistance to state-sponsored Arabization. El Guabli investigates the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement (MACM) from the 1960s onwards, showing how it sought to reclaim Amazigh identity against state policies of marginalization. Following independence in 1956, the Moroccan government emphasized a homogenous Arab-Muslim identity that sidelined Amazigh language, culture, and history. For nearly five decades, state-controlled historiography excluded Imazighen from the national narrative, framing them as peripheral to Morocco’s postcolonial identity. The chapter is a balanced and sophisticated analysis of the dual dimensionality whereby (re)invention points to an instability and malleability within Amazigh identity while it also represents a foundational challenge to official state narratives.

El Guabli highlights the role of sociocultural organisations in resisting erasure, including the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange (AMREC), founded in 1967 by Brahim Akhiate. AMREC spearheaded the so-called “Amazigh Renaissance,” aimed at reviving and institutionalising Amazigh culture. Among this movement’s achievements are the establishment of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) in 2001, the adoption of the Tifinagh script in 2003, and the integration of Tamazight into the education system. The adoption of Tifinagh, the author shows, symbolized Amazigh resilience while creating a visual dissonance in public space. The movement exemplifies the role of cultural activism in transforming the public sphere and challenging state monopolization of history and identity.                                                     

Chapter Two critically analyses mid-twentieth century Moroccan Jewish emigration within the country’s cultural and historical memory. El Guabli introduces the concept of “mnemonic literature” – drawing on memory to reconstruct Jewish-Muslim existence in Morocco’s past. These works serve as other-archives by preserving and reimagining Jewish life in the Mellah (Jewish quarters), cafés, and neighbourhoods that once flourished across Moroccan cities.

El Guabli examines novels by Moroccan Muslim authors, including Leila Abouzeid’s Return to Childhood and Fouad Laroui’s The Tradition of the Last Jews in Morocco. These texts fictionalise microhistories of Jewish-Muslim intimacy, transforming everyday spaces into loci of memory and identity. He argues that this literature emerges from a “forbidden zone,” a realm of silence imposed by both state and societal norms. While the chapter showcases how mnemonic literature addresses gaps in official narratives, the author critiques the idealization of Jewish-Muslim relations in some of the literary depictions that overlook structural inequalities within the dhimma framework. 

Chapter Three focuses on the political and cultural consequences of Jewish emigration, specifically the disruption of Jewish-Muslim intimacy. Between 1956 and 1967, more than 200,000 Moroccan Jews emigrated, largely due to political tensions surrounding Israel. El Guabli examines literary depictions of this rupture as a “belated recuperation,” imagining a national history that could have existed had Jews remained in Morocco. He critiques the Moroccan state’s failure to integrate this loss into the national narrative, highlighting a broader crisis of identity in postcolonial Morocco. Foregrounding cultural productions that mourn the loss of Jewish-Muslim intimacy, the author stresses the intertwined nature of personal and collective memory.

Chapter Four examines Tazmamart, the notorious secret prison that became a symbol of state repression during the Years of Lead. El Guabli identifies three forms of other-archives related to Tazmamart: scandalous accounts written by human rights activists, embodied testimonies by survivors, and fictionalised narratives by Moroccan and foreign authors. Memoirs such as Ahmed Merzouki’s Tazmamart: Cellule 10 and Mohamed Raïss’s La Chambre Noire serve as powerful counter-narratives to the state’s denial of Tazmamart’s existence. These texts document the horrors of enforced disappearance, transforming Tazmamart into a transnational symbol of resistance. El Guabli highlights the limitations of transitional justice mechanisms, such as the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC), which failed to address the socio-political impacts of repression. Prison literature addressed this shortcoming through visceral accounts of the psychological and physical toll of enforced disappearances. The author enriches the discussion by placing Tazmamart within a global context of state violence, drawing cross-cultural comparisons with carceral sites in Latin America and South Africa. 

The final chapter reflects on the broader implications of other-archives for Moroccan historiography. El Guabli demonstrates how peripheral narratives break the state’s monopoly on historical truth, resulting in tangible changes – e.g., the recognition of Tamazight as an official language in the 2011 constitution. Similarly, mnemonic literature has profoundly impacted public discourse regarding Morocco’s pluralistic past. El Guabli’s emphasis on the concept of tarikh al-zaman al-rahin (the history of the present) highlights the potential for new methodologies that incorporate memory, testimony, and trauma into the writing and production of history. He critiques Moroccan academic historians for their reluctance to engage with memory studies, calling for interdisciplinarity through literature, oral testimony, and non-conventional archives. 

The work marks an important contribution within postcolonial studies, particularly in the context of memory, identity, and power in Morocco. The analysis is vastly enriched by its interdisciplinarity, combining anthropology, history, literary studies, and archival theory. The book provides an examination of state repression and historical silences in Morocco that is both thorough and nuanced. However, individual chapters might have been strengthened with further illustrations. For example, Chapter One provides a strong theoretical foundation that would be enhanced with additional case studies of cultural productions. Chapter Two would be strengthened by providing a closer examination of specific state policies that facilitated Jewish emigration. The closing discussion might have benefitted from a comparative lens onto Morocco’s archival practices in relation to other North African/Tamazghan contexts. And although the author calls for the digitisation and accessibility of the archives, he provides only limited insights into how technology can facilitate this.

Despite such minor limitations, Moroccan Other-Archives is a seminal contribution to memory studies and postcolonial historiography, challenging scholars to rethink archives and historiography in societies affected by historical trauma and state censorship with a focus on marginalized groups. The book’s interdisciplinary approach offers a compelling framework for analysing the interplay between power, cultural memory, and resistance. This is a vital study for scholars, archivists, and anyone interested in the politics of memory and the ongoing struggle for historical justice towards redemption.