The gripping memoir of a Moroccan human rights and women’s rights activist.
Series: CMES Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation
Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader with connections to the Marxist movement. Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master's degree.
Beginning with the harrowing account of her kidnapping during the heightened political tension of the 1970s, Talk of Darkness tells the true story of one woman's struggle to secure political prisoners' rights and defend herself against an unjust imprisonment.
Poetically rendered from Arabic into English by Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics, Fatna El Bouih's memoir exposes the techniques of state-instigated "disappearance" in Morocco and condemns the lack of laws to protect prisoners' basic human rights.
- Author's Dedication
- Translators' Introduction
- Chronology
- Chapter 1. Derb, the Secret Prison: "Or the Narrative of Suffering"
- Chapter 2.
- Chapter 3.
- Chapter 4.
- Chapter 5.
- Chapter 6. Behind the Walls of Ghbila: The Trip to Meknes Prison
- Chapter 7.
- Chapter 8.
- Chapter 9. Diary of a Hunger Striker: "Imposed Violence"
- Chapter 10. A Night's Sojourn in Laalou Prison
- Chapter 11. Trial Day
- Chapter 12. The Inseparable Twosome
- Chapter 13. An Incredible Visit
- Chapter 14. "The Minaret Collapsed and They Hanged the Barber"
- Chapter 15. Season of Spring, Life, and Happiness
- Chapter 16. A Prisoner Gives Birth to a Free Person
- Chapter 17. Ilham: Despairing Screams, Suppressed Grief
- Chapter 18. Shards of Time in the Life of a Woman Prisoner
- Chapter 19. The Autumn of a Life without Spring
- Chapter 20. The Prison House of the Woman Jailer in Sidi Kacem
- Chapter 21. The Prison that Was a Refuge after the Isolation in
- Police Stations: Testimony of Widad Bouab
- Chapter 22. The Police Station, Torture, Prison, and Torturers:
- Testimony of Latifa Jbabdi
- Notes