This presidential-theme panel proposes three presentations that focus on alternative models of citizenship that have emerged in Moroccan writing composed in response to State-sponsored political violence and exclusion in the Years of Lead—the decades from Morocco’s independence in 1956 to King Hassan II’s death in 1999. Citizenship defines a person’s legal status while determining their cultural, social, and political rights within any given polity (Marshall 1950). However, the positive assumptions embedded in this definition of citizenship obscure the forms of discrimination and exclusion that the Moroccan State performed during the Years of Lead. The period’s political violence and de facto state of exception (1965-1970) contributed to alienating entire swaths of the population from the privileges of citizenship, be they disenfranchised young Moroccans emigrating legally or illegally, or imprisoned political opponents (Slyomovics 2005; al-Marzūqī 2015).

Since 1999, citizenship and its attendant attributes has been a matter of debate in Morocco in the context of the country’s “Truth and Reconciliation” process, which aimed to help the nation face its past human rights violations and enact a more inclusive model of national belonging (ERC 2006). This endeavor has been consecrated in the 2011 constitutional reform, which recognized Morocco’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity and confirmed Moroccan people’s entitlement to the rights and duties inherent in citizenship (Constitution 2011). Engaging these debates, Moroccan writing of the past twenty years has rehabilitated various models of citizenship that were previously repressed under Hassan II’s authoritarianism. Though most scholarship on Morocco examines citizenship from a legal perspective, this panel focuses on recent writing in Tamazight, Arabic, Darija, and French to investigate how citizenship has been refigured in narratives to foster justice and social reconciliation. Each speaker will be given 20 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for unstructured discussion.

In “Moroccan Mnemonic Literature and Jewish-Muslim Citizenship,” Brahim El Guabli explores the vibrant literary corpus published after Hassan II’s passing that recovers Morocco’s pluri-confessional history before the departure of its Jewish population after independence. This sub-field of Moroccan literature, which he calls “mnemonic literature,” makes uses of the memorial legacies of older generations to reconstruct a past that authors were too young to experience. By challenging amnesia and subverting the State-sponsored silencing of Morocco’s long-standing Jewish-Muslim past (Boum 2013; Gottreich-Benichou and Schroeter 2011), the recently published novels in French, Tamazight, and Arabic discussed here deploy memories of earlier moments of Jewish-Muslim intimacy that highlight historical forms of solidarity and community-building that belie the supposed prevalence of enmity in Moroccan interfaith relations. Against the regime’s exclusion of the Jewish community through the facilitation of their emigration, El Guabli argues that this mnemonic corpus of texts foregrounds an alternative form of citizenship marked by cross-confessional connections and interpersonal loyalties forged through daily interactions. Reappropriating shared experiences uniting both communities throughout history (i.e., the common struggle for Moroccan independence, interfaith adoptions, or unexpected neighborly gestures to protect the Jews during the June 1967 War), this body of texts reactivates an ecumenical, all-embracing community of citizens—a valuable model for reimagining citizenship in post-dictatorship Morocco.

In “Gender, Class, and Citizenship in Moroccan Women’s Narratives of the Years of Lead,” Naima Hachad engages another site of repression and oblivion—the state-sponsored political violence against women memorialized through testimonial narratives. Whereas scholarship on gendered violence in the Years of Lead has often focused on a few prominent activists purportedly speaking for all Moroccan women, this presentation argues that overemphasizing the representative dimension of these testimonies ignores the narrative and ethical limitations inherent to the creation of a collective voice inclusive of the voiceless (Sommer 1999: 43). Indeed, these prominent political activists use writing to perform a view of citizenship defined by women’s active participation in the social, political, and civic spheres. Yet their leftist feminist model was disconnected from the concerns of most Moroccan women, who saw themselves doubly excluded by the state and the secular feminist movement on account of their class, ethnicity, and linguistic identity markers. In contrast, this presentation studies transcriptions of oral testimonies in Darija and Tamazight written by illiterate and marginalized women, which formed the bulk of victims of gendered political violence. Women Who Broke Down the Wall of Silence (National Human Rights Council, 2005) and Hicham Houdaïfa’s Dos de Femme, Dos de Mulet (2015) offer fresh understandings of resistance and citizenship that foregrounds the diverse ways in which women reimagine their participation in Morocco’s democratic transition beyond elitist, exclusive models.

A counter-example of sorts, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev’s “Impossible belongings: Allegorical Ghostings in Tahar ben Jelloun’s Partir” approaches the question of alternative citizenship through the lens of impossible belonging, using the example of the clandestine migrant from Morocco (harraga). Incontestably bound to the Moroccan nation-state, which simultaneously entraps him and excludes him, the harraga’s departure reveals his disenfranchisement within the postcolony. Conversely, the harraga remains blocked from the privileges of citizenship in Europe. Recent research has emphasized the power of literature to undo this double alienation by writing the harraga into being, against the grain of state-sponsored criminalizing and dehumanizing rhetorics (Pieprzak 2007; Abderrezak 2016). Yet, through an examination of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s 2013 novel Partir, this presentation queries the forms of belonging available to the migrating subject within the literary text. Ben Jelloun’s novel renounces any claim to citizenship, ending instead with a failed allegory of repatriation in the wake of Hassan II’s demise. Enticed by the promise of democracy, the protagonists embark on what will be exposed as a journey of no return, suspended in the heterotopic space of the Mediterranean Sea. Caught between space and time, they dissolve into fictive characters in a diegetic novel, “revenants” in a polysemy linking virtuality (the unrealized voyage) to spectrality (ghosts). Replacing mobility with never-ending errantry, the ethical imperative of literary hosting yields to the disquieting process of “ghosting” at work in the novel, definitively precluding belonging. Partir thus queries literature’s hospitality and its pretension to memorialization in the pursuit of social redress.