The phrase the “Years of Lead” describes the ubiquity of state violence throughout the five decades between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the passing of King Hassan II in 1999. State violence impacted people, the economy, urban planning, and the production of knowledge, including the writing of the country’s postcolonial history.Footnote 1 These violations and their concomitant consequences were the object of the inquiries of Hay’at al-inṣāf wa-al-muṣālaḥa (the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, hereafter ERC) whose mission extended from January 2004 to November 2005. Highlighted as the first transitional justice experience in an Arab-Islamic country, the ERC’s “non-judicial” process culminated in the publication of a six-volume final report in which the ERC president and his fellow commissioners revisited the events of the “Years of Lead” and recommended reforms to strengthen the rule of law.Footnote 2 Issues of reparation and redress aside, the ERC’s final report presented preserving archives, establishing historical truth, and (re)writing history as fundamental guarantees of democratization, citizenship, and non-repetition of violations in the future.Footnote 3 Specifically, the ERC’s recommendations about establishing a national archive and (re)writing Morocco’s postcolonial history pointed to the fact that historiographical research is crucial for overcoming the wrongs the state committed against its citizens during the “Years of Lead.”Footnote 4 Thus, the (re)writing of history became an essential component of transitional justice and a foundational pillar of the desired democratic future.
This emphasis on (re)writing history as a cornerstone of a violence-free, democratic state has since put the Moroccan discipline of history under an unprecedented social and media spotlight. This article argues that (re)writing the history of the “Years of Lead” is an inherently interdisciplinary project that requires revisiting conventional notions of archives as well as requirements of temporal distance, which have prevented Moroccan academic historians from critically writing their country’s political history.Footnote 5 I conceptualize “other-archives” as all forms of testimonial and memory-based (mnemonic) cultural production that revisits Morocco’s postcolonial past and engages with the multilayered silencing of issues of historical significance.Footnote 6 Other-archives encompass all forms of sources that provide access to uncomfortable histories, which lie outside the purview of classical official archives.Footnote 7 These sources, I contend, create the conditions for a heteroglossic history over which state control is either absent or very limited, since they escape the intramural and power-laden nature of traditional archives.Footnote 8 Not only do other-archives have the potential to liberate history writing from the hegemony associated with archives, which condition the very possibility of historical statements,Footnote 9 but they also carve out a space for academic historians to engage in dialogue with specialists in other relevant humanistic fields, such as cinema, literature, sociology, and political science. Furthermore, the meticulous examination of other-archives as a means to write political history from an interdisciplinary perspective mitigates the apprehensions inherent to writing histories for which there are no conventional archives. If used adeptly, other-archival sources pave the way for an interdisciplinary (re)writing of the histories of the groups and taboo issues that were invisibilized by a combination of authoritarianism and historians’ self-censorship.Footnote 10
Indeed, the lack of archival sources stalled historiographical engagement with post-1912 Moroccan history until the passing of King Hassan II in 1999. The public servants in the authoritarian regime worked to foreclose the possibility of historical reconstruction of Morocco’s postcolonial history by actively erasing documents or leaving them to decay.Footnote 11 In particular, Driss El Yazami, the former president of the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR), stated that archives of state wrongdoing do not exist.Footnote 12 El Yazami’s revelation that documentation is scarcer the closer its relation to the present time indicates that, in the minds of state agents, archival evidence was tantamount to future accountability. Indeed, Moroccans witnessed a concrete example of this practice in the fire that engulfed the documents of Morocco’s political police, known as Territory Surveillance Directorate, on 29 October 1999, just three months after the passing of King Hassan II.Footnote 13 Thirty or more years’ worth of security archives were destroyed in this still-unelucidated conflagration. While this is just one example of archives of policing and political violence, other archives related to Jewish emigration, coups d’état (1971 and 1972), and Morocco’s colonial history remain inaccessible to historians. In the absence of what Moroccan historians call al-wathā’iq al-makhzaniyya/al-arshīf al-makhzanī (state/official documents or archives) about postcolonial Morocco, local academic historians have avoided writing their country’s twentieth-century political history and, instead, focused their attention on both document-rich and less risky periods prior to the twentieth century.
Despite the existence of a rich body of other-archives in the form of memoirs, testimonies, literature, and other materials that can be used to recover and problematize Morocco’s postcolonial history, most Moroccan historians have steered away from topics related to the post-1956 era. Particularly, histories related to Amazigh history, race, Jews, and political imprisonment remained understudied throughout the “Years of Lead” due to their taboo nature. In examining Moroccan academic historians’ navigation of history (re)writing in the context of the ERC process and the dynamic the production of other-archives infused in the historiographical scene in Morocco after 1999, we gain a better understanding of Moroccan academic historians’ epistemic ambivalence vis-à-vis other-archives and explain why an interdisciplinary approach is critical for the reconstruction of historical knowledge from these underused sources.
Archives, Testimony, and Other-Archives of Erasure
Engaging with the rich Western theoretical output about archives has proven limited for the study of historical silences in Morocco. Prevalent theorizations of archives as sources that regulate what can be said or loci marked by continuous loss and excision start from the premise that archives exist and are potentially accessible.Footnote 14 In view of the authority vested in them and the secrecy that feeds their authority, archives are therefore theorized as sites of loss governed by a double impossibility: first, the impossibility of complete access to the truth about the past and, second, the impossibility of recovering all the archives available about a given event.Footnote 15
Nonetheless, a place like Morocco, which did not have any official establishment for archives until 2011, defies these theorizations. Up until 2007, when Law 69.99 established Les Archives du Maroc, Moroccan authorities showed no interest in creating and organizing an official archive.Footnote 16 For sixty years, this legal vacuum facilitated the destruction of official documents with total impunity.Footnote 17 Historian Germain Ayache was the first one to have called for the organization of a Service National des Archives Historiques in 1966.Footnote 18 Moreover, specific topics, which came under the heading of taboo subjects, were both explicitly and tacitly censored. Lack of archival evidence and the state of fear that prevailed during the “Years of Lead” fostered research in social history and monographs about the precolonial period, which, unlike the postcolonial period, is thoroughly examined.Footnote 19 However, in contrast to academic historians—who had to navigate a situation in which they were aware of history’s cruciality for the monarchy’s political and religious legitimacy—political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists were able to write this history from their disciplinary lenses.Footnote 20
Where they exist, theorists agree that archives, in the conventional definition, are detained, consigned, housed, house-arrested, and confined to a closed, heavily guarded, and specially designed space, ultimately endowing them with their official and authoritarian character.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, this theorization of archives is undergirded by the premise that archives exist and have been endowed with their official mantle through the rites of passage of archivization.Footnote 22 Therefore, rather than asking what the inherent incompleteness of archives has excluded, one needs to attend to the even more fundamental and urgent question of creating archives where there are none and writing histories for which loss and silence have taken the place of archival sources.
Conceptualizing other-archives fills this void. Other-archives are directly linked to witnessing in its broader significance, which rehabilitates experience and opens a pathway for orality, embodiment, and life events to make a historical record. In Arabic, bearing witness comes from the verb shahida, which Lisān al-‘Arab defines as “to be present,” and shahāda, which means “certain account.” The notion of shahāda in Islamic jurisprudence encompasses both truth and certainty, which endows al-shāhid (the witness) with both the power and the legitimacy of truth-telling. Anthropologist Susan Slyomovics affirms that shahāda, with its double meaning of both testifying and witnessing, “narrates personal witness and puts it in a situation-specific register.”Footnote 23 Unlike Shoshana Felman’s assertation that “to bear witness is to bear the solitude of responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude,” shahada (testimony/martyrdom) in Arabic, and in the Moroccan context by extension, is equivalent to being a member of a community of both witnesses and martyrs.Footnote 24 Survivors/witnesses are not alone since both the shuhūd (witnesses) and shuhadā’ (martyrs) bear witness together through the voice of those who survived. Even those who were too young to witness the events and processes they portray in their narratives participate in a communal endeavor that is committed to producing other forms of archives that facilitate the writing of taboo histories. Shāhid also means proof (bayyina) and information accounting for an established belief, as well as a headstone. These latter meanings point to the materiality of other-archives to incorporate traces that lack an official seal to endorse the writing of previously silenced or unwritten histories. In expanding the notion of testimony and witnessing to be a basis for other-archives, we, first of all, respect the witnesses’ desire to go public with their stories and, second, we abide by our scholarly and ethical duty to allow the historical truth to emerge through records in which the silenced bear witness to their exclusion, silencing, and erasure based on their individual, collective, firsthand, or inherited experiences. Insisting on the materiality of other-archives expands the nature of the sources that can be used to examine and reconstruct uncomfortable pasts.Footnote 25
In contrast to brick-and-mortar archives, other-archives’ transformative power is in their existence and accessibility as part of daily life. They are activists’ texts, novels, artifacts, toponomies, alphabets, embodied experiences, material and embodied residues of colonial tests and wars, legacies of colonial lore, vestiges of secret prisons, and inherited memories where stories of the excluded, the disappeared, and the forgotten live in a ghostly state, ready to articulate lost knowledge of the past even as they are situated in the margins of what is considered canonical. They are sources that live outside the canonical. While conventional archives acquire authority through their movement from the private to the public domain, other-archives have, by necessity, to acquire their status by being both available and impactful in the public sphere.Footnote 26 They even defy the generative distinction that Aleida Assmann makes between “political archives,” which are still active and inaccessible, and “historical archives,” which are open and accessible to scholars.Footnote 27 In contrast to both political and historical archives, other-archives are both historical and political yet accessible, which generates debates and controversies in politics, society, and academic circles.
Historian Benjamin Stora has commented on the interest in history in Morocco in the 2000s, capturing the impact of what I have called other-archives. Stora highlighted that in “the ceaseless and dizzying proliferation of images, speeches, words, states progressively lose ‘control’ over personal destinies. Aspirations to more rights and individual liberties have implications for the writing of a history that is detached from the state’s needs.”Footnote 28 It is important to notice here that the proliferation of other forms of telling history and revisiting the past is a sign of the weakening of state control over public discourse and the past itself. Moreover, the desire to rewrite history as an exercise of citizenship presents further challenges to historiography and demands that it transcend its traditional, self-imposed boundaries.Footnote 29 Most importantly, however, is the fact that the addessee of this historical effervescence is placed in a critical, moral position of either overlooking the voices of the formerly silenced for disciplinary reasons or engaging with them as responsible citizens, which has very significant implications for historical knowledge.
The examination of the Moroccan historical field in light of other-archives reveals the impact of political repression on the discipline. Although scholarship has demonstrated the effects that enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention had on specific individuals or groups of prisoners, such as the Islamists, Marxist-Leninists, and Tazmamart prisoners, scholars have overlooked the archival and historiographical consequences of political repression.Footnote 30 For decades, most Moroccan academic historians dismissed questions related to Amazigh/Berber identity as a colonial invention, thus leaving research in this area to Amazigh activists and foreign anthropologists. Political imprisonment has not been the topic of any dissertations in history departments in Morocco, as opposed to political science departments. Concurrently with political detention and suppression of Amazigh/Berber identity, the emigration of Moroccan Jews, which in less than ten years decreased their number drastically from 250,000 in the early 1960s to 60,000–70,000 by 1967, and to only 2,500 today, is still a consequential omission in Moroccan historiography.Footnote 31 The historical silence that enveloped these topics remained in place until the passing of Hassan II in 1999, which opened up space for Moroccan academic historians to reflect on their country’s postcolonial history through the notion of tārīkh al-zaman al-rāhin (history of the present).Footnote 32 The existence of other-archives and the context created by the ERC’s investigations spurred a tremendous movement in the Moroccan historiographical field.
Other-Archives and Morocco’s Interdisciplinary History
Other-archives about the “Years of Lead” have haunted the state and transformed Moroccan historiography.Footnote 33 Starting from 1999, Moroccan historians found themselves at the heart of their “immediate history” amidst the ongoing official efforts to resolve the legacy of state violence.Footnote 34 The participation of some prominent academic historians, particularly the trusted ones who were not specialists of the post-independence period,Footnote 35 in the state-sponsored ERC process brought them face-to-face with a trauma- and memory-laden history. Moroccan historians—confronted with the significance of other-archives and the historical knowledge their existence allowed to seep into Moroccan social memory through print media, blogs, protests, commemorations, victims’ pilgrimages to prisons, and the emergence of a memory-focused publishing industry—could no longer turn a deaf ear to other-archives whose producers were playing a transformative role in retelling Morocco’s political history.Footnote 36
However, Moroccan academic historians could not instantaneously shed the traits inherent to the nationalist birth of their scholarly field.Footnote 37 Driven by the need to nationalize the discipline and establish a rudimentary national archive, academic historians in the early years of independence grounded their discipline in nationalist pride against colonial historiography.Footnote 38 Germain Ayache, the founder of the contemporary Moroccan history school, had strong positivistic persuasions.Footnote 39 His staunch belief that objective knowledge of the past could be gained through local official documentary evidence, namely al-wathā’iq al-makhzaniyya, enshrined a very particular understanding of archives as official documents, which later, according to his former students, prevented many young historians from adapting their methodological approaches to the changing sociopolitical and cultural contexts.Footnote 40 Ayache’s sanctification of local official documents became an obstacle to the trajectory of Moroccan historiography and its future evolution, particularly when faced with the emergence of unconventional sources after 1999.Footnote 41
As has already been indicated in this article, the limitations of nationalist historiography and its documentation requirements confined the vast majority of Moroccan historians’ research to the pre-1912 period. Apart from a few dissertations written in France, Moroccan historiography remained silent on Protectorate (1912–1955) and post-independence Morocco (post-1956) for a long time.Footnote 42 The focus on the “dead past” robbed academic historians of the institutional capacity to engage with both the theory and practice of new historical trends.Footnote 43 However, as historian Mohammed Kenbib underlines, the proliferation of other sources of historical knowledge, which I have called other-archives, directed “all the limelight fundamentally […] toward History” to illuminate the contested post-independence past.Footnote 44 As a result, Moroccan historians had to find a conceptual tool that would allow them to examine this recent history and engage the methodological questions its study posed.Footnote 45 Also, awareness increased among Moroccan academic historians about the need for their discipline to stay abreast of the developments in other social scientific disciplines in their study of this close past.Footnote 46
Developing theoretical and conceptual tools was all the more crucial since the state sought academic historians’ assistance to navigate its contested past.Footnote 47 Historians’ social responsibility was invoked in the context of the ERC, requiring them to put their historiographical expertise at the service of this commission in order to contextualize social and political events that took place in Morocco after 1956.Footnote 48 In addition to historical inquiry, academic historians contributed to the ERC’s roundtables and conferences and provided their reflections on topics as far afield as violence, truth, and prison literature.Footnote 49 Similarly to what happened in Europe after World War II, historiographical expertise had certainly, albeit slowly, become essential to the adjudication of a conflictual past and the formulation of recommendations regarding history and archives in post-ERC Morocco.Footnote 50 These professional opportunities brought historians into contact with victims of state violence, confronting them with new questions posed by survivors’ other-archives.Footnote 51
In particular, the circulation of testimonial other-archives of political prisoners was not merely a testimonial success—it was also a story of unprecedented publishing success and presence in social memory that brought history to Moroccan homes. When the al-Ittiḥād al-Ishtirākī daily newspaper serialized Muḥammad al-Rāys’s memoirs From Skhirat to Tazmamart: A Roundtrip to Hell,Footnote 52 the newspaper broke all records for newspaper sales in modern Morocco.Footnote 53 Countless Moroccan readers followed al-Rāys’s serialized memoirs about his eighteen-year (1973–1991) enforced disappearance into Tazamamart secret prison on a daily basis for over two months.Footnote 54 His cellmate Aḥmad al-Marzūqī’s book, Tazmamārt: Al-zinzāna raqm 10,Footnote 55 sold over twenty-five thousand copies a few weeks after its release in French in 2001 and some sixty-five thousand copies by 2014, a historic achievement for a book in such a limited market: a very successful book in Morocco sells three thousand copies on average. Additionally, La Chambre noire ou Derb Moulay Chérif,Footnote 56 the prison memoir of Jaouad Mdidich, a Marxist-Leninist activist who was imprisoned between 1977 and 1989, sold over eight thousand copies and was made into a very successful film by Hassan Benjelloun.Footnote 57 The international attention that the ERC garnered triggered al-Jazeera’s interest in testimonial literature as well. Shāhid ‘alā al-‘aṣr (Witness of an Era), one of the channel’s most viewed programs, invited survivors al-Marzūqī and Salah Hachad to participate in a series of interviews to bear witness to their experiences in Tazmamart.Footnote 58 As a result, media coverage and journalistic investment in revealing more details about the “Years of Lead” led to the unprecedented circulation of these audiovisual materials about state violence in social and cultural memory.Footnote 59
The societal popularity of written and audiovisual other-archives elicited a historiographical anxiety. Moroccan academic historians, including the ones who participated in the ERC process, expressed deep concern about reconciling historical truth with social demands and civic engagement.Footnote 60 Historians were also anxious about the likely confusion that might ensue from readers confounding other-archives with academic history. A series of conferences organized between 2000 and 2007 clearly indicates academic historians’ search for or rationalization of their role vis-à-vis the new historiographical reality in which other-archives were increasingly accepted as a form of history.Footnote 61 Although they remained principally methodological in nature, these discussions reveal Moroccan academic historians’ determined effort to formulate new approaches to history (re)writing in order to reclaim this post-independence portion of their country’s past for their discipline.
To address the methodological issues that arose from their new roles, Moroccan academic historians started using the concept of tārīkh al-zaman al-rāhin, which is a translation of the French histoire du temps présent and the equivalent of “history of the present” in English. Attributed to François Bédarida, the founding director of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in 1978, the history of the present offered Moroccan historians a much-needed conceptual tool to reflect on Morocco’s unwritten recent history of violence, trauma, and silence, which cultural producers consigned to other-archives.Footnote 62 History of the present’s accommodation of debates and counter-debates between historians and surviving historical actors in search of historical truth seemed to hold much promise for Moroccan historians.Footnote 63 Given that it provides methodological tools to examine histories in which living memory is still heavily present, history of the present afforded Moroccan historians the latitude they needed to address the challenges of historical silences on taboo topics and rationalize the use of sources other than official archives to (re)write history.
A combination of factors explains the history of the present’s appeal to the Moroccan historical scholarly community.Footnote 64 First, the francophone training of most senior historians involved in these discussions helped make the concept readily transferrable into the Moroccan academic context. Second, the ERC recommended the establishment of a national archive as well as a Center for the History of the Present Time (CHPT), confirming the relevance of this branch of history to Morocco. Third, the European Union, which funded several projects related to the implementation of the ERC’s recommendations, also allotted funds for the establishment of the CHPT as well as other human rights and contemporary history programs at Mohammed V University.Footnote 65 Last but not least, the history of the present allowed the relevant academic historians to safely remain in a purely theoretical realm of methodological discussions about history.
This methodological propensity has left the actual writing of history in the hands of foreign historians.Footnote 66 Morocco’s postcolonial history writing has thus become a specifically Euro-American domain.Footnote 67 Pierre Vermeren, Daniel Rivet, and Susan Gilson Miller have all penned histories of Morocco that recognize and incorporate the conflictual and all-too-recent post-independence era.Footnote 68 Combining theoretical awareness with the actual practice of history writing, these foreign specialists are ahead of their Moroccan colleagues in this area.Footnote 69 The perceived dissonance between Moroccan academic historians’ theoretical discussions at conferences about the history of the present and their abstention from writing the history of the present as such is an indication of the constraints that continue to govern their work. This attests to the fact that theorizing the (re)writing of history is not as risky as penning a historical narrative that involves authorial responsibility and making truth-claims.
It is crucial to note that most of the debates about history of the present took place at Mohammed V University in Rabat. This university benefitted from copious funding from the Consultative Council for Human Rights (CCHR) for pilot projects, implementing the ERC’s recommendations related to archives and history. Since 2010, the university has had a partnership with the CCHR to start new research units, such as a Master’s Degree in the History of the Present and a Master’s Degree in Human Rights, and to create the aforementioned CRTP.Footnote 70 Furthermore, Les Archives du Maroc, currently temporarily housed at the former headquarters of the National Library, are adjacent to Mohammed V University campus; the founding director has been a historian at this university for a long time. Therefore, this uneven territorial distribution of debates about the history of the present and the centralized allocation of funding have generated their own exclusions within the historiographical profession. History and history (re)writing discussions were unevenly shared across the national territory since both the funding and the conferences were concentrated in the Rabat-Casablanca axis for the most part.
This section has only focused on Moroccan academic historians as the main body whose members are involved in the methodological debates about the history of the present as a way to chart their path in the unfolding history in the context of other-archives. However, it would be misleading to conclude that they are the only ones who produce historical knowledge in the country. In fact, the state has been actively invested in rewriting its own violent past. In addition to the Historiographer of the Kingdom, who oversees an entire institution that has been writing history from an official lens since 1961 through its journal Inbi‘āth Umma (The Renaissance of a Nation) and affiliated series, other state institutions have been actively involved in (re)writing Morocco’s postcolonial history.Footnote 71 Thus, the Royal Institute for Research in Moroccan History (RIRMH), the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR), and the Council of the Moroccan Community Living Abroad (CMCLA) have all been involved in writing Morocco’s political history, albeit from different perspectives.Footnote 72
Both the CCHR, the precursor to the NCHR, and the CMCLA co-sponsored an international conference entitled “Migration, Identity and Modernity in the Maghreb.” Organized under the patronage of André Azoulay in the coastal city of Essaouira, 17–21 March 2010, the conference’s broad title blurs the fact that it was essentially about the emigration of North African Jews. The conference proceedings were edited in three rich volumes entitled La bienvenue et l’adieu: Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe–XXe siècle). Footnote 73 In the introduction, the editors address their particular thanks to the President of the Essaouira Mogador Association (André Azoulay), the CCHR’s leadership (Driss El Yazami and Ahmed Herzenni), and the CMCLA for supporting the conference.Footnote 74 Organized at a time when Morocco was opening up to the reclamation of its Jewish heritage, the CCHR and CMCLA’s co-sponsorship of this conference and their conspicuous contribution to the publication and wide dissemination of the proceedings demonstrate how the research agenda can converge with the political needs of the state.
The archival sources on the emigration of Moroccan Jews in the period between 1956 and 1967 and its consequences have yet to be found and organized. In the absence of such official archives, other-archives that pertain to this particular topic have taken different forms. In addition to the usual memoirs mostly written by Moroccan Jews, a vibrant “mnemonic literature” and a pioneering documentary cinema have restored and given larger dimensions to the history of Moroccan Jews as part of the Moroccan nation. Written by Moroccan Muslims who were either young or not-yet-born when Moroccan Jews left, mnemonic literature reimagines the erstwhile Morocco with its Jews and Muslims living together. Because of the absence of archival sources, the novel becomes the other-archive of a life that used to be but is no more. Documentary films focus on both the Jews who left and the places they left to depict how loss of both archives and people is inscribed in places as other-archives.Footnote 75
The NCHR undertook an even broader initiative by publishing Histoire du Maroc indépendant: Biographies politiques, which is now withdrawn from circulation for unexplained reasons.Footnote 76 Consistent with its newly acquired roles related to the setting of the historical agenda, the CMCLA co-sponsored the Moroccan Association for Historical Research’s conference, which convened from 14 to 16 November 2013. Published under the title Al-‘unf fī tārīkh al-maghrib: Ashghāl al-ayyām al-waṭaniyyah al-ḥādiyyah wa-al-‘ishrīn li-al-jam‘iyyah al-maghribiyyah li-al-baḥth al-tārīkhī (Violence in Moroccan History: Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Days of the Moroccan Association for Historical Research), the proceedings carry the CMCLA’s logo on the first page alongside that of both the organizing association and the publisher.Footnote 77 These examples reveal how state-funded organizations are now involved in historical research and production in a deeply transformed historiographical field.
Other-Archives and the Interdisciplinary Approach to Moroccan History
In light of the limitations of conventional archival theory to capture the writing of history in a context where official archives of controversial periods are not merely inaccessible but also do not exist, an interdisciplinary approach is required to tease out historical knowledge from other-archives. Aḥmad Shawqī Binyūb, a lawyer and former ERC commissioner as well as a member of the CCHR, has underlined the fact that the sources that I have conceptualized as other-archives were the foundation for Morocco’s ERC process. In Binyūb’s analysis, the existence of these nonconventional sources was what made the ERC and the recommendations which crowned its proceedings possible in the first place.Footnote 78 If we accept Binyūb’s reasonable assertion, then, other-archives are not just sources for the (re)writing of Morocco’s political history but also a major force behind the political process that took place in Morocco after 1999. Given these political implications, only a tight collaboration between historians and specialists of adjacent fields can elicit the historical knowledge other-archives contain while still adhering to notions of objectivity, scientific neutrality, and unbiased use of sources.
The scholar studying histories based on other-archives has to be in dialogue with critical theory, trauma studies, and narratology, as well as history in order to glean nuanced historical knowledge from these not-yet-conventional archives. The collaboration of these complementary fields is all the more urgent given the fact that the laws organizing archives in Morocco have made it almost impossible to access archival sources about postcolonial history in our lifetime. Although the Archives du Maroc were put in place in 2011 to implement the ERC’s recommendations, Article 17 of the 2007 Law 69.99 stipulates that a period of one hundred years has to pass before archives containing private health and employment information can be accessed. The same law sets the limitation at sixty years for archives concerning defense, foreign affairs, and personal information.Footnote 79 As a result of the existence of this law, all the ERC’s official documents will remain inaccessible to historians for the foreseeable future. Even the dossiers of the victims and survivors of state violence will not be available to historians until 2070 at least. This, in fact, goes against the ERC’s own initial recommendation, which suggested making its archives public.Footnote 80 The critical question then is whether Moroccans can afford to wait until these obviously narrowly defined official archives are made available, or whether historians should collaborate with their colleagues in other disciplines to exploit the abundant other-archives. It is within this spirit that the aforementioned Binyūb urged the “laboratories of research on the history of the present, political science, [and] sociology of the violations” to engage in a collaborative writing of the country’s contemporary history.Footnote 81
Interdisciplinarity is also justified by the fact that the (re)writing of this history is linked to political reforms. The ERC’s final report, entitled “The Components of Reform and Reconciliation,” posits that mending the relationship between state and nation requires writing a new history. This new history is contingent on recognizing the oppressed identities, such as Amazigh, African, and Sahrawi, as well as recognizing the country’s multilingualism, all with the goal of “strengthen[ing] national unity and reinforc[ing] national identity” and “enshrining cultural pluralism.”Footnote 82 The ERC’s recommendation makes Morocco’s democratic and state-violence-free future contingent on revisiting the past through the (re)writing of history.Footnote 83 As such, the desired civic state “based on the rule of law and institutions, to protect freedoms and to help to ensure non-repetition” is supposed to emerge from this history-to-be-written.Footnote 84 Historiographical justice is predicated on moving away from the silences and traumas of the past. In this regard, both political participation and testimony, which are foundational to the constitution of other-archives, are considered by the ERC commissioners a “legitimate practice and a patriotic duty.”Footnote 85 This imbrication of history and citizenship already underlines the overlap between the work of historians and specialists of political sociology and political science in the examination of these works. History rewriting is therefore posited as a crucial step toward redefining the cultural and social identity of the nation.
The spatial dimension of historical silences in Morocco also warrants an interdisciplinary approach. The reemergence of long-forgotten toponymies, utilized now to tell stories of disappearance and forgetfulness, redirects attention to the periphery, which has its own scholarly community. Amazigh activists and scholars have been at the forefront of the endeavor to reveal how a different history could be written based on topographical other-archives.Footnote 86 Places that used to be forbidden to talk about, like Tazmamart and Agdz prisons, have now emerged as crucial loci for the history of the Moroccan nation. The ERC, in its final reports, writes that “the history that was written in the past was the history of the center, nowadays the margins and the periphery are coming to the fore with their own histories, and these margins have become a partner in the rewriting of this history.”Footnote 87 Benefitting from the internal and external geopolitical conditions that work in favor of human rights, and conversing with the experiences of transitional justice worldwide, other-archives creators have turned their cultural production into a locus for the rewriting of Moroccan history from the margins. This reality shifts the discourse to history and memory as bedrocks for the effective exercise of citizenship, which is first and foremost the ability to define and rewrite what it means to be Moroccan today. A political history that will draw on other-archives to investigate the relationship between the center and the periphery will have to work with specialists in agronomy, geography, and rural anthropology, among others, to shed light on spatialized historical silences and the nature of citizenship that is fashioned by them.
The use of an interdisciplinary approach to write postcolonial history from other-archives is also anchored in the ERC’s recommendation that rewriting history will mark a rupture with the culture of authoritarianism. The ERC recommended reforms in history, education, the economy, social justice, as well as archive production and preservation of literature. The drafters of the ERC’s report underlined the need to
promote the importance of school in society and to inculcate a culture of human rights, beginning from the first stages of studies, and concentrating on educating people in human rights and creating university courses in areas related to human rights, especially since Morocco has accumulated significant experience in this field in recent years. Our country has witnessed a dynamism that has resulted in significant original productions, both novels and films, that handle issues that may further the entrenching of increased originality and develop the process of satisfying the Moroccan citizen’s desire for a human rights culture.Footnote 88
The ERC commissioners understood that writing a political history marred by silences and erasure requires the collaboration of specialists of human rights, historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, and political scientists, among others, whose skills will generate historical knowledge about the present. Historians and specialists in education as well as youth studies have much space for scholarly collaborations to examine the history of state violence and its impact on their areas of expertise.
One of the landmark examples of history (re)writing from an interdisciplinary perspective is the RIRMH’s edited volume Histoire du Maroc: Réactualisation et synthèse (Histoire du Maroc). This megaproject, which took six years and the collaboration of 51 historians to complete, covers all time periods in Moroccan history. In addition to its innovations in integrating the pre-Islamic period and creating a new periodization, Histoire du Maroc dedicates its tenth chapter to contemporary Morocco. Titled “Independent Morocco,” the chapter reviews the major events characterizing the power struggle between the monarchy and the opposition, as well as the “Years of Lead” and their impact on human rights and cultural activity in the country. Moroccan Jews and their emigration have also received ample attention as a constituent of the social groups that make up the diverse Moroccan nation. Marginalized aspects of the Moroccan past have thus been brought to light; it might be said that the taboo has been removed, albeit temporarily, through this collective work. Yet Histoire du Maroc glosses over important details about political repression and the various forms of trauma and losses that authoritarianism wrought upon Moroccans. More than a decade later, specifically in 2021, the consequences of these elisions can be felt in Moroccan historiography’s continued disengagement from the writing of the history of the “Years of Lead.” The national momentum afforded to it by the massive publication and discussion of other-archives in the public arena has passed, and the state is no longer invested in resolving the legacy of authoritarianism. The recent annexation of the RIRMH to the Académie du Royaume du Maroc and the appointment of a new director in the place of the more recalcitrant, albeit older Kably, in June 2021 are strong signs that the liberal page that opened in the mid-2000s is now turned, which is all the more reason for a continued existence of other-archives and the histories they tell in the public arena.
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated the complexity of the Moroccan historiographical field during and after the “Years of Lead.” The article offered other-archives as a conceptual framework through which an interdisciplinary history of postcolonial Morocco can be (re)written in the absence of conventional archival sources. The conceptualization of other-archives as sources that are grounded in experience, memory, and testimony sets the stage for interdisciplinary collaboration. Benefiting from the advances in relevant scholarly fields, Moroccan academic historians can use other-archives to write histories of the present and, in the meantime, remain cognizant of the need to uphold historical objectivity, documentary evidence, and impartial assessment of facts that will be elicited from these sources. Moreover, instead of merely enabling history writing alone, the use of other-archives can open up a copious space for scholarly reflection on the state and historiographical priorities in the aftermath of political violence.
The connections that victims, survivors, absented and repressed communities, and memory stakeholders have established between political transition and history further undergird the need for the use of other-archives as sources for a pluralistic history. Unlike exclusive, official, or conventional sources, other-archives are the province of all citizens who have a story to tell about their past. Un-silencing history starts from revisiting notions of archives, and accepting other-archives as sources of historical knowledge is one of several paths toward a silence-resisting, interdisciplinary history.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their engaging reading of the chapter and for the constructive feedback they provided to expand the scope of other-archives.
