Performing the Memory of the 'Years of Lead' in Morocco

Abstract

During the Years of Lead in Morocco state-sponsored violence was embedding not only the privacy of victims’ bodies, but also their affective and psychological well-being to the extent that many attempts at the narrativization of violence via testimonials and prison memoirs mostly fail to convey the trauma experienced in Moroccan secret prisons. My concern in the present undertaking is the fragility of testimony as a performative act inhabited by the impossibility of telling together with an obligation of voicing out pain and trauma. After the hearing sessions organized by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2004 (ERC) another narrative turn, then, has emerged in Moroccan theatre and other artistic forms whereby re enactments of prison memoirs, testimonials, and other registers of repressed personal archives are employed onstage and else as means of breaching the walls between the personal and political.