Modern-Day Scheherazades

In the preface to Stolen Lives (2001), originally published in French as La prisonniere (1999), Malika Oufkir's co-author, renowned French novelist and journalist Michèle Fitoussi, writes, ‘Malika is a remarkable storyteller. A Scheherazade. She has a thoroughly oriental narrative style’ (3). This introduction to a rather controversial prison and political memoir is a skillful marketing strategy. Scheherazade, the legendary heroine of Alf Layla wa Layla (A Thousand and One Nights), conjures images of an exotic ‘Orient’ for the French public to whom Oufkir's testimony was initially addressed.1 In the classic tales, Scheherazade stops King Shahrayar from continuing to marry and then execute virgins to avenge his first wife's infidelity. After offering herself as Shahrayar's next bride and victim, Scheherazade postpones her death for a thousand nights and eventually survives thanks to her captivating storytelling skills. Oufkir's story fits well this framework of patriarchal cruelty, feminine resistance and survival, and shocking reversals. Indeed, after living a life of luxury and excess amongst the Moroccan bourgeoisie and royal family, Oufkir was kidnapped and arbitrarily detained for two decades in horrendous conditions. Oufkir, her mother, and five siblings were targeted by the authorities, allegedly in response to direct orders from Oufkir's former adoptive father, King Hassan II.

The introduction turns the reader's attention away from the Oufkirs’ family history. General Mohamed Oufkir, Malika's biological father and a towering figure who held some of the highest positions in the Moroccan government, was well known by the French and Moroccan publics as one of the chief architects of the brutal repressive sociopolitical system that fashioned postcolonial Morocco. The Nights's reference offers the authors of Stolen Lives a method to rework Malika Oufkir's biography into literature, and to recast her as a victim of political violence, rather than an insider whose family fully benefited from a brutal system before it turned against them.

Stolen Lives's narrative strategies yielded mixed responses. The book was recognized for its captivating storytelling devices; however, this also led scholars and commentators to question Oufkir's sincerity and the testimonial quality of her account. As a result, Stolen Lives has generally been excluded from Morocco's resistance literature, as well as from studies of women's testimonies relating gendered political violence.