THE "HIDDEN TRANSCRIPT" OF RESISTANCE IN MOROCCAN TAZMAMART PRISON WRITINGS

Both men spent eighteen years in the enforced disappearance camp of Tazmamart for executing military orders from their superiors during the failed coup d'état of 1971. Because the Moroccan state denied their whereabouts and jailed them in a prison that operated outside the purview of the Ministry of Justice, the inmates of Tazmamart prison meet Amnesty International 's definition of victims of enforced disappearance.4 I argue that instead of crushing their will, weakening their endurance, or turning them into malleable uncritical beings, imprisonment and disappearance in the prisons of the makhzen-the Moroccan regime-endowed these two men with a greater consciousness of the oppressive nature of the Moroccan regime and to resist prison authority, if subtly. [...]Tazmamart became synonymous with disappearance, "ghabra,"15 or even "deletion" from the face of the earth in the collective imagination.16 Postcolonial Morocco emerged from its struggle against French colonization (1912-56) only to be caught in the throes of what Jack Mapanje defined as "the Kenyan predicament,"17 which manifested itself in almost every independent African country, where variants of colonial legislation were never substantially revised; instead they were extended to sustain African leaders' programmes of cor- ruption, nepotism, imprisonment, exile, torture, and elimination of political dissent.18 The Moroccan version of the "Kenyan predicament" engendered a violent political struggle between the monarchy and the elites of the colonial period on the one hand, and the leftist opposition on the other hand.