Susan Slyomovics works to bring together the fields of anthropology, performance studies, and legal scholarship centering on human rights in this installment of the extensive Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series.
Since Moroccan independence from France in 1956, thousands of people from the student and intellectual communities have been arrested, secretly held in various facilities, tortured, and tried in waves of political trials for “plotting against the state” in sentences ranging from a few months to the death penalty. A community of human rights activists, many of them former victims, has endeavored to reconstruct this hidden dimension of postcolonial Moroccan history to account for what truly happened in the face of organized efforts on the part of the perpetrators to remove material evidence and human witnesses. The broader claim at the center of the book is that specific acts of expressing the experience of torture, disappearance, and incarceration on the part of victims of legalized human rights abuse in Morocco highlight the more general importance of performance in social and political life.
Slyomovics draws on Deborah Kapchan’s definition of performance to formulate a core conception of what she calls “the performance of human rights.” [1] This model allows her to account for a wide range of what she describes as “heightened esthetic expressions”—vehicles for performing, enacting, and expressing human rights in a newly public arena in Morocco that includes funerals, eulogies, mock trials, vigils and sit-ins, political rallies, conferences, public testimony and witnessing, storytelling, poetry recitals, and letter-writing campaigns. In doing so, Slyomovics attempts to investigate how Moroccans think creatively about what legal scholar Paul Schiff Berman calls “the idea of alternative assertions of jurisdiction.” [2] In her own words, “by analyzing changing repertories of public protest and dissidence, the outlines for postcolonial transformations of Morocco are charted” (12).
Slyomovics doesn’t so much analyze these repertories as offer them to us in the rich detail of case studies presented in serial form. In that sense, the book reads much more like a series of interrelated essays that appear without a logical sense of progression. Chapter 1 describes in detail decades of change in Morocco’s legal system before turning to a consideration of the Indemnity Commission proposed by Moroccan authorities as its initial form of redress and contrasting it with remedies proposed by the regime’s victims. Chapter 2 considers what it means, historically and personally, to have been “disappeared” in Morocco. Chapter 3 describes various sites of secret imprisonment and torture, establishing a historical continuity between prison architecture and torture practices in the French Protectorate and postcolonial Morocco. Chapter 4 takes the mock trial as a point of departure to consider the 1981 Casablanca uprising and its contributions to the configuration of the political victim, examined in particular through the lens of officialized identification. Chapter 5 explores the narratives of women political prisoners and the victims’ mothers who are the progenitors of a culture of human rights activism in Morocco. Chapter 6 focuses specifically on Islamist political prisoners and their establishment of a group identity and a cultural life inside prison walls. Chapter 7 concludes with an assessment of where the progress of governmental redress stands, highlighting the goals of victims and contrasting them with the Equity and Reconciliation Commission’s focus on economic indemnification.
The content of these “essay” chapters rapidly and disjunctively shifts back and forth between two primary poles: interesting historical connections and victims’ testimony. This structure is augmented by the presence of numerous chapter sub-headings, many of which tend to be Arabic or French concepts and terminology, not surprisingly, given Slyomovics’ privileging of linguistic performance. Slyomovics never really integrates these two subject areas, but rather juxtaposes them within chapters, in the same way that these interrelated essay-chapters are juxtaposed but not cohesively integrated within the overall structure of the book. Slyomovics seems to rely upon her frequent iterations of performance texts (and accompanying assertions that they constitute new spaces for the performance of human rights) to glue these juxtaposed parts together. This could work quite well if it were not for the fact that very little analysis of performance is employed in these sections: performances are more anthologized than analyzed. As a result, Slyomovics makes highly relevant and interesting points about poetics and meaning for the victims, while offering very little information about the settings for such performances, differences between various genres employed and the participants who perform them, and dimensions of communication that lie beyond the written and spoken word, such as pragmatic features. Moreover, other expressive forms are hardly considered; music is a conspicuous absence, for example, especially given the important protest pieces written by chaabi groups such as Nass El-Ghiwane during the apex of the time period that is her focus.
These omissions, however, would be easily rectified if Slyomovics simply reframed her discussion to narrow its proclaimed focus to account only for that which it does in fact address. This would help cultural anthropologists situate her discussion from the outset while linguistic anthropologists and cultural studies scholars would be alerted to the riches that Slyomovics offers—and there are many. The book is amply annotated with endnotes expanding on all aspects of her study, revealing an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge about the legal and historical dimensions of contemporary Moroccan life. Additionally, Slyomovics draws heavily on a variety of sources from bibliographic research to government documents to oral testimony, and does so in at least three languages—English, French, and Arabic. This is no small feat, and this book is thus also an important node point for the acquaintance of English readers with non-English sources that might otherwise escape scholarly purview. Finally, Slyomovics offers an important contribution to scholarship on an area of the world that receives relatively little attention in the context of either African and Middle Eastern studies, as well as an important contribution to what is fast becoming a fifth subfield for anthropology: legal anthropology. Read it for the brilliance of its historical connections and the moving accounts of victims’ torture and triumph.
[1] Deborah A. Kapchan 1995. “Performance.” Journal of American Folklore 108:479-508.
[2] Paul Schiff Berman. 2002. “The Globalization of Jurisdiction.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151:506–12.
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[Review length: 1026 words • Review posted on November 28, 2006]