We’ve all heard the saying that the sins of the father shall be visited upon his son. If, however, you were General Oufkir, a prominent aide to King Hassan II of Morocco, that saying would have to stretch to cover your 3-year-old son, 4 daughters, wife, and a cousin-in-law.
Why is your family being made to suffer in this manner? Because you participated in a failed coup against the king in a country where the monarch is believed to have a divine right to rule. You are executed for your role in the plot, but your family members are rounded up and herded off to a desert jail for the next 20 years, while the government waits for their memories to fade from public consciousness and for them to wither away and die, forgotten.
This is the true story of the family of General Oufkir, as told through his eldest child and daughter, Malika. Together with her mother, brothers, sisters, and cousin, she survived (without ever being raped or tortured) and eventually fled to France and has told her remarkable story to a Tunisian author, Michèle Fitousi, the co-author of this book.
However, the book is not entirely devoted to the story of the family’s time in exile, but begins with Malika’s own unique upbringing, a first stolen life. At the age of 4, her presence was requested at court to be a companion to the Princess Lalla Mina, and so she was taken from her parents to be raised at the Palace. Certainly, to most of us, the concept of growing up in a harem in a royal palace sounds highly exotic and mysterious, but Malika reveals a life of isolation and loneliness from being separated from her beloved mother. She was considered to be one of the royal family, and that extended to her punishments for disobedience, and she tells of some truly dreadful occurrences that in any Western country would qualify as serious child abuse.
Her first stolen life is given back to her when she finally leaves the palace, and for a portion of the book, her joy and sense of freedom (and rebellion) is palpable. She wants to be an actress, she lives in Paris, sneaks out at night; in short, she has a relatively normal teenage life. What makes these portions of the book so much more poignant is the way these memories come back to her while she languishes in jail, and how they become absorbed as the memories of her experience starved siblings.
That life comes crashing to a halt, however, one afternoon when it is learned that General Oufkir has been implicated in leading a failed coup against the king. Within hours, he is arrested and executed, and a few days later, the family is told they must leave Rabat. They are taken to the first of a several jails, where they remain, virtually forgotten, for the next 20 years.
It’s absolutely incredible to read about how desperate they got for survivial, and Oufkir makes no bones about just how low a human being can sink (at one point she reveals that shreds of human decency and morality stopped them from acting out their frustrated sexual fantasies with each other). They invent stories, devise ingenious ways to keep in touch, and even make such a fantastic escape at one point that if it weren't sworn to be true, you wouldn't believe it.
What makes this story so touching though is that these were all young people cut off from society in the prime of their youth. When most experienced the rush of first love, the joys of being intimate, shopping, gossiping, seeing movies, these children were denied it all. When they finally do escape, it's almost heart-wrenching to see how prison has affected their mental ages - a grown man is reduced to the three year old he was when he entered. You question what sort of regime would inflict this upon completely innocent civilians, regardless of what their father did.
You are driven to feel compassion, sorrow, sympathy, and anger on behalf of this family and the suffering that they had to go through, by the end of the book, you feel as though you are someone they've let into their own private hell. When the happy ending results, you feel joy on behalf of the family, if only for the fact they were denied it for so long.
Asides from being a gripping personal narrative, the book also lends insight into the appalling conditions in which political prisoners are kept in Morocco. Oufkir's family members were fortunate enough never to be raped or tortured, but one can only imagine what it is like to those who do not have their good fortune to evade those treatments while at the same time languishing in the same abominable circumstances. You learn bits and pieces of Moroccan culture, and despite everything, the country sounds fascinating, and I would love to visit there someday.
More than that though, I think this book truly exemplifies the reslience of the human spirit, cheesy as that sounds. This family went to hell and back for nothing they had done, and the fact that they were able to re-piece together their fractured lives and find a measure of happiness (although the 20 years have left a definite scar) leave you to marvel at how much a human being can withstand, and leaves you feeling good that they managed to be happy and enjoy life.
The story is well written and well told; intelligent, intriguing, critical yet loving at the same time. Oufkir's emotions are riddled with contradictions, but that adds the fascinating element to this book, and to me, sets it apart from other similar works. It's an easy read, and a highly interesting book that I would recommend to most people.
Happy reading!
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