It is only when the efforts of this judge to persuade Hamuda (and other prisoners) to reveal information about themselves, their “terrorist activities,” and, in Hamuda’s case, the whereabouts and activities of his cousin, fail to produce the needed results that they are consigned to Mama Ghula’s ministrations. The sequence of the narrative manages to provide a terrifying accumulative picture of this fiendish woman, but the narrator’s first actual view of her occurs when he participates in a vicious soccer game that she is supposedly refereeing between the prisoners and a set of thugs who essentially flatten their opposition. Soon afterwards, however, it is his turn in the torture chamber about which he has already heard so much. As one of the narrator’s cell mates has warned him:
They’ll hand you over to the professional torturess, who’s an expert in all kinds of degradation and torture. The worst of them, she’s learned in specialized foreign centers, but she’s also invented others of her own that she delights in testing on imprisoned suspects like you and me. Compared with the torture she inflicts, the torments of the grave are a joke, kid’s play. I don’t want you to fall prey to the woman they call Mama Ghula — and may God protect you from her barbaric madness!
Once again, the reader’s attention is drawn here to the “specialized foreign centers” where Mama Ghula has received training, but it is the “other” methods of torture that inject into the narrative aspects of sexual perversion that are indeed more than liable to “upset the squeamish.” Indeed, they involve “degrading” practices that are so extreme as not only to cause maximum harm and offense to those prisoners who adhere to beliefs of Islam and the norms of Arab society, but also to replicate in the reader’s mind the general outrage generated by the release of the photographs taken inside the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq and the debates over the practice and very legitimacy of “waterboarding.”1
It is only when these procedures fail to achieve their goals that the torturess resorts to other means of physical abuse — stubbing out lighted cigarettes on his body, hanging him upside down, thrusting a bottle into his anus, and then ruing the fact that he is too thin to scrape off parts of his flesh as she has done with other victims. Even with this, Mama Ghula is still not finished with her attempts at using forms of sexual torture in order to extract “information” from this particular victim. In a truly grotesque scene, Hamuda later finds himself in bed with his torturess. She claims that they are married and even brings in “witnesses” to corroborate her story. As if that is not enough, she enlivens the events of the night by summoning her “court jester,” a midget who specializes in telling dirty jokes.
Bearing in mind the vicious and perverted ways in which Mama Ghula has utilized sexual perversion as a means of assaulting the unfortunate inmates of this detention center, it is hardly surprising — indeed, perhaps fitting — that her own demise should result from violent confrontation. At a grotesque evening entertainment organized for the prisoners by the “administration”—all of whose principals are present, an enormous, deaf-mute black guard is invited to play his drum. As his expert performance works his audience up into a frenzy of action and movement, Mama Ghula gets to her feet and rides on the black drummer’s back, noting, as she does so, that she has previously been a wild-animal tamer. Suddenly, the drummer throws her to the ground and delivers a series of deadly blows before he is shot dead by guards. With that, the entertainment is brought to a rapid and chaotic close.
The narrator’s “re-rendition” is brought about through the intervention of the medical authorities at the center and with the tacit support of Na‘ima, one of the succession of secretaries to the investigating judge, she being a fellow Moroccan to whom the entire narrative is addressed at its beginning and end. She provides Hamuda with a vial of blood so that he can replicate the symptoms of tuberculosis in yet another interview with the judge. As the narrative reaches its conclusion, Hamuda has begun the process of resuming something approaching a normal life in the Oujda region. In fact, thanks to the good offices of a local shaykh, he is now residing in the plains outside the city at the house of an elderly widow whose daughter, Zaynab, he has married. It is in such quiet rural surroundings that he can begin his life afresh and write a record of his horrendous experiences.
In conclusion, it seems important to emphasize again that this work of Bensalem Himmich is indeed a contribution to fiction. However, that said, it clearly manages to fulfill one of the primary purposes of that particular genre of fiction that is the novel, in that, to quote Lionel Trilling’s description, it serves as “an especially useful agent of the moral imagination.”2
The reader of this text encounters in its starkest form the full impact of the policies adopted by the government of the United States in its attempts to counteract the perceived threats of international terrorism in the wake of the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and implemented at secret sites situated in a number of countries — apparently in both Europe and Africa. The resulting account, told from the point of view of a Moroccan who finds himself ensnared in the web of suspicion that results, is utterly shocking, and deliberately so. The novel reveals the moral depths to which humanity is capable of descending; it not only describes in painfully vivid detail the processes of torture — physical, mental, and, in this case, sexual, but also reveals all kinds of cultural biases that at times show themselves as overt racism.
The former Minister of Culture in Morocco, Bensalem Himmich, here paints an unforgettable picture of a prison camp somewhere, perhaps even in his own homeland. The period involved is six years of imprisonment — only computable at its conclusion, preceded by an apparently normal life and followed by a struggle to return to it. This novel is thus a very different contribution to its author’s oeuvre available in English translation — certainly concerned with a particular and highly controversial period in twenty-first-century history, but also a major contribution to prison fiction. But, above all, a wonderful novel.
I would like to thank Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar for accepting this novel in their excellent series of translations and also express my gratitude to the editorial staff at Syracuse University Press. A special word of thanks is due to the two readers of this manuscript, the majority of whose suggestions have been incorporated into the text.
Roger Allen
1. A detailed investigation of the Abu Ghraib Prison is: Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). The literature on waterboarding — particularly following revelations in 2007 of its use by the Central Intelligence Agency, its lengthy history as a form of torture, and its (il-)legality, is enormous.
2. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Scribner’s, 1940/1950, vii).
Glossary
‘Abbas ibn Firnas (810–77): of Andalusian-Amazigh extraction, he was a polymathic scientist, engineer, musician and poet.
Abu Zayd: the hero of one of Arabic’s most famous epic folk sagas, Sirat Bani Hilal.
‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (601–61): cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and fourth Caliph of Islam. The Shi‘ah community was founded in his name. The Durar al-Kalim is a collection of his short sayings and aphorisms.