HISTORY OF ASH, debut novel from Moroccan civil rights campaigner and literature professor via American University in Cairo Press

HISTORY OF ASH
KHADIJA MAROUAZI (tr. Alexander E. Elinson)
Hoopoe Fiction
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An unforgettable and eviscerating novel of human frailty, brutality, and resistance as told through the first-person prison narratives of a man and a woman

History of Ash is a fictional prison account narrated by Mouline and Leila, who have been imprisoned for their political activities during the so-called Lead Years of the 1970s and 1980s in Morocco, a period that was characterized by heavy state repression.

Moving between past and present, between experiences lived inside the prison cell and outside it, in the torture chamber and the judicial system, and the challenges they faced upon their release, Mouline and Leila describe their strategies for survival and resistance in lucid, often searing detail, and reassess their political engagements and the movements in which they are involved.

Written with compassion and insight, History of Ash speaks to human brutality, resilience, and the power of the human spirit. It succeeds in both documenting the prison experience and humanizing it, while ultimately holding out the promise of redemption through a new generation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kafka meets de Sade in Morocco.

Cruelty is such a defining trait of human beings that I really don't understand why it still shocks me to what depths the forces of social control will sink to enforce hegemony, specifically in this case the hegemony of Morocco's royal government. It was a desire to experience the chaotic good of democracy and cultural self-determination that motivated the narrators of these separate prison stories to resist, at long last, control from above. Morocco lived with this both as a colony of France then as an autocracy. Generations of pent-up frustration on the parts of millions whose lives weren't in significant ways their own led to a repressive response. It's now called The Years of Lead, and the details of it events and abuses are stomach-churning.

What most histories forego is the personal costs of repressive regimes to their victims. As History is supposed to be academic and impartial, not immediate and visceral, this makes some sense...the issue is that history is never impartial and "academic" is coded language now for sanitized and watered down, attenuated enough to avoid letting real experiences in. This, then, is why historical novels must exist, why we must read them, and why they ought not be held to an artifical standard of "impartiality" like historiography is.

The role of fiction by academics is often a marginal one, one not centered in the commercial world for many reasons. One of them is very clear here. While Leila, an academic, relates her torture a bit more viscerally than does Mouline (the male narrator), she also uses more allusions to the vast literature of imprisonment, resistance, and injustice than does the younger, but still culturally very literate Mouline. This presupposes either familiarity with or curiosity about this body of literature in the reader. Commercially oriented publishers on the order of Simon & Schuster, to take an example much in the business news of late, can't trust this interest to exist and are certain their consumers haven't read those kinds of books. While I am not at all sure that's a reasonable thing to be certain of, I'm aware that the economics under which publicly-traded companies operate demand aiming for the lowest common denominator. Luckily this is not the only avenue for readers with either familiarity or curiosity or both to get their fix of enriching, exciting, challenging works like this one.

Hoopoe Fiction is a line of works, mainly in translation, centering Maghrebi and African more broadly voices. The American University in Cairo Press does us a great service by bringing these works to market. August being Women In Translation Month, I've centered works like this by women, and/or translated by women. My purpose is to alert the audience for book reviews that I'm grateful to say continue to find me here in their hundreds about. The Press offers great opportunities for discovery of reads that expand and furnish one's mind with viewpoints we don't come across with any regularity in US capitalist culture.

This book's deeply personal take on the prison narrative is based in the author's generational identification with the Years of Lead. She's also personally acquainted with resistance figures and prisoners of conscience, and has included details of the experiences she's learned about in this work. It is, as one can readily imagine, very hard to read the accounts of torture. It's far more difficult for me personally because I know the author isn't inventing them but transmuting the real experiences of people she's met into fiction. This is not a story for the faint of heart's amusement and delectation. It is a very hard read but one that is, in so many ways, urgent for the complacently comfortable to discover. This is what totalitarians do. Heed the warnings implicit in the existence of these two characters' narratives. They're fictional and based on fact; resist with EVERY FIBER the increasing possibility of experiencing, or knowing someone who experiences, these horrors. Learn the stakes you're risking when you don't believe political rhetoric coming from those you might agree with about some things. They mean it. And somoene will be paying an awful price for your mistake.