Mahi Binebine, a Moroccan writer and painter, was born in Marrakesh in 1959. He emigrated in his early twenties to Paris, moved to New York in 1994, and returned to live in Marrakesh in 2002. While still in the diaspora, Binebine wrote his first two books, both relating to his early life in Morocco. Les Funérailles du lait (The Milk Funerals, 1994), is constructed around the image of his mother, who single-handedly raised seven children in the medina of Marrakesh. The main theme of the book is her constant anxiety about whether her son was alive or not. That son was Mahi’s brother, Aziz, an army officer who participated in the failed coup against King Hassan II in the early 1970s, and was subsequently imprisoned at Tazmamart for eighteen years, his family denied any information about his fate (Jay 2015: 99; Salon maghrébin du livre 2018: 52–3).

The plot of Binbine’s second book, L’Ombre du poète (The Shadow of the Poet, 1997), is also set in Marrakesh and its environs but a few decades earlier, during the last twenty years of the French Protectorate. The book describes a conflict between two childhood friends who, on growing up, find themselves in opposition to one another. One is a protesting poet who joins an underground nationalist cell, the other became a man of power – al-Glaoui’s secretary – who ends up killing the poet (Binebine 1997). One key insight of the novel is that the character who ends up working for al-Glaoui is not necessarily a villain and that the one who joined the nationalist movement is not automatically a hero. Both were driven by their aspirations, emotions, constraints, and by coincidences, all unfolding within very complex situations.