‘Descending into hell’: Tazmamart, civic activism and the politics of memory in contemporary Morocco

In the aftermath of two unsuccessful military coups (1971 and 1972) against Morocco’s King Hassan II (1961–1999), 58 officials and soldiers were disappeared for 18 years into what was then the secret prison of Tazmamart. Eventually released in 1991, some of the prisoners, who survived madness, illness and death, have been bearing public witness to the atrocities taking place in this desert prison. Concentrating, in particular, on the questions of place and ‘emplacement’ of the memory of Tazmamart, in this article, I explore the many enactments of memory by which survivors have challenged the state-imposed politics of silence and oblivion, and which today continue to counter the official narrative of democratic transition. Tracing memory’s transformative potential, I show that survivors’ orientation towards the past, but also, crucially, towards the present and future makes memory a vital site of collective agency and political imagination.