Fatna El Bouih and the Work of Memory, Gender, and Reparation in Morocco

Abstract

Fatna El Bouih stands as a well-known Moroccan activist whose life embraces a remarkable trajectory and a wide array of roles: former political prisoner, writer, academically trained sociologist, witness, individual claimant for truth commission reparations, and, most recently, maker of museum-based memorials at Derb Moulay Cherif, once Casablanca’s torture center during the country’s colonial and post-independence era regimes. The museum project also focuses on Morocco’s largest urban agglomeration, Casablanca, and targets a sector of the city and its inhabitants’ rights as citizens in order to consider the variety of ongoing and future Moroccan communal reparation projects. By analyzing governmental, quasi-governmental, and international initiatives that enlist architecture, women’s testimonies, museum-making, and monuments, this essay focuses on Morocco’s post-truth commission efforts to document a Casablanca working class district—simultaneously as a site targeted for communal reparations, as an urban and historical space of dissidence, and as the location of Morocco’s infamous space of incarceration and human rights abuses.