Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence is an indispensable reference for students of memory studies, archives, and Moroccan history and historiography. In providing a new way of engaging with Morocco's post-independence history of violence, it is also destined to become a must-read for scholars of Moroccan studies.

This wide-ranging book offers a rich, nuanced, and historically grounded exploration of the role cultural production plays in remembering, reviving, and writing post-independence histories of Moroccan Jewish emigration, state violence against political dissidence, and Amazigh culture. El Guabli, a scholar of comparative literature, seamlessly deploys the expertise of historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, linguists, and literary scholars to examine the power of memory, testimonial writings, and literature in the writing of history. At once multidisciplinary and multilingual, this work's approach to rethinking archives in the context of migration, prison, and indigeneity is truly innovative.

Drawing on a corpus of creative renderings and texts from 1956 until 1999, El Guabli examines how the literary production of taboos grapples with the history and memory of loss. Before engaging with these topics, however, he sets the tone with a personal vignette that locates him temporally and spatially at the center of the region's re-inscription of its history and memory. El Guabli is a native of southern Morocco, where some of the prisons and detention centers in this book were set up by the post-independence government not far from his village. As an indigenous Amazigh, El Guabli asserts from the start that he personally witnessed state silencing and structural violence over the Amazigh movement's cultural and linguistic rights. As he came of age, he also realized how local Jews packed their belongings and left in the early years of independence, adding another traumatic layer to the post-independence nation. These instances of silence, violence, and trauma served as inspiration for what would become the Moroccan Other-Archives.

The book is divided into five chapters that are connected to each other but could easily be read as separate entities. Chapter 1 invokes the works of two Amazigh cultural giants: Brahim Akhiyyat and Ali Sidqi Azaykou. As representatives of the Moroccan Amazigh cultural movement (MACM), these activists and others struggled for state recognition of Amazigh identity not only through public celebration but also through visual, sonic, and literary documentation of histories of exclusion, denial, and shame. El Guabli skillfully demonstrates how this Amazigh renaissance (tankra) has restored and reinvented Amazighté through the implementation of the Tifinagh alphabet and writing in public spaces, producing Amazigh newspapers and documentation.

Building on the intergenerational transmission of memories, Chapter 2 delves into what the author calls the mnemonic literary recovery of Jewish-Muslim relationships. Literary works became microhistories of Jewish-Muslim encounters in Morocco before the establishment of the State of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. El Guabli centers these memories in both imagined and real homes and streets. In the resulting analysis, novels emerge as a strategy to engage with taboos and enable oneself to talk about Israel and Moroccan Jewish emigration without fear of being sanctioned by the government. After highlighting the social and cultural history of Jewish-Muslim Morocco, El Guabli uses Chapter 3 to explore the Moroccan Jewish exodus through another set of literary portraits of intimacy and distance, home and exile, which highlight the trauma of departure and imagine what kind of Morocco could have been if its Jewish population had stayed.

Chapter 4 revolves around Tazmamart, a secret prison that housed fifty-eight soldiers between 1972 and 1991. The author guides us through a collection of prison literature written by the individuals who survived this extraordinary detention. In writing this chapter, El Guabli allows former prisoners to talk back to state officials who claimed that Tazmamart “never existed” in Morocco. Instead of relying solely on official documentation made available after the creation of Morocco's human rights and truth commission on January 7, 2004, El Guabli centers the prisoners’ memoirs without losing sight of the international human rights movement that made this “scandalous archive” possible. While many books and articles have been written about Tazmamart and prison narratives during the Years of Lead in Morocco, more broadly, El Guabli brings something new to the saturated discussion. His argument about the scandalous, embodied, and fictionalized archives regarding Tazmamart histories allows us to think about individual trauma as history through “controversy, translation, and appropriation.”

By the early 1990s, as Chapter 5 lays out, Morocco started to witness a new era of historical writing where multiple stakeholders entered the business of history production. Previously dominated by the state, new archives slowly challenged official discourse, forcing Moroccan academic historians to participate in the new era of reconciliation with the Years of Lead. Writing “history of the present” (al-zamān al-rahīm) soon became central to historians’ agendas throughout Morocco's public universities. However, as El Guabli dexterously lays out, only a few historians were able to transcend the “psychological barrier” of writing histories that crossed the redlines for fear of censorship, leaving the domain of writing present history to sensational journalists or a few of their more “historically-minded” colleagues. At the same time, in this new era, outsourcing history-writing was not left solely to non-state agents. State actors and institutions, such as the Royal Institute for Research on the History of Morocco (RIRHM), deployed their research energies to become part of this era of history- and memory-writing. El Guabli does not shy away from challenging historians to engage with this memory and limit their occupation to the fetish of official archives.

In writing this book, El Guabli achieves many objectives. He has shown how Moroccan other-archives work in the age of state violence. He has played a role in unsilencing these archives. And he has managed to compile a rich array of sources for other scholars interested in archives, including materials in Amazigh, Arabic, French, and Darija. The outcome of these efforts is an unusually candid, clear, and delightfully readable book about serious post-independence issues, including trauma, pain, and violence. Useful to students and scholars of history, anthropology, and literature, in addition to Middle Eastern studies, North African studies, Jewish studies, and Amazigh studies, Moroccan Other-Archives is ultimately an opportunity, a challenge, and a call to state actors to unmute post-independence other-archives and amplify their historical voices to reflect the diversity of Morocco prescribed in the Constitution of 2011.