Saïda Menebhi: A Trailblazer

Political activist Saïda Menebhi composed the above message while she was in prison in 1977, during Morocco's notorious Years of Lead. At the time of writing, she was serving a seven-year sentence for undermining the security of the state, a common charge used by the Moroccan regime against political opponents at the time. Born in Marrakesh in 1952, Menebhi was a high school English teacher and a member of l’Union marocaine du travail (the Moroccan Work Union) and the Marxist- Leninist group Ila al-Amam (Forward). Like many young activists of her generation, she was targeted by the Moroccan regime, and on January 16, 1976, she was forcibly disappeared and secretly detained in Casablanca's infamous torture center, Derb Moulay Cherif, for three months. In January 1977, she was brought to trial in Casablanca along with a hundred and thirty-eight other political opponents and sent to the Casablanca civil prison. On December 11, 1977, Menebhi died at Ibn Rushd hospital in Casablanca at the age of twenty-five as a result of a forty-day hunger strike that she and other activist prisoners in Kenitra and Casablanca observed to protest their status of political prisoners and to call for the end of the isolation of detainees such as Abraham Serfaty, Rabea Ftouh, Fatima Oukacha, and Menebhi herself (Slyomovics 2005b, 149).

As Menebhi's declaration and biography suggest, prison, incarceration, and torture have played fundamental roles in subjectivity formation— the construction of identity in a particular time and place and in relation to available ideological discourses—for political activists in postcolonial Morocco. Institutionalized political violence has also had a significant impact on how personal and collective identities are constructed in recent Moroccan autobiographical production. For decades, the Moroccan ruling elites targeted members of the left-wing Marxist-Leninist parties, student unions, intellectuals, trade unionists, and anyone perceived as a threat to the monarchy. A significant number of these political prisoners wrote prison memoirs and other forms of prison narratives in which they articulate their experiences of political violence, survival, and resistance from the point of view of victims and activists.