| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Biographies & Memoirs |
| Author: | Malika Oufkir and Mitchele Fitoussi |
I have been reading quite a number of books lately, luxury a housewife or should I say a home maker can afford; and some of the books have made quite an impact on me. so I decided why not write a review on some of them. My take on some of the compelling prose I have been fortunate enough to read.
I love reading memoirs, something very fascinating about reading a true life account.
Stolen Lives: Twenty years in a desert jail written by Malika Oufkir and Mitchele Fitoussi
As I was saying memoirs are a great read. They elicit a certain kind of emotional response specially when you know somebody has lived the story you are just reading. In a way it is an exact opposite feeling of the young starry eyed kids wanting to live a fairy tale. There is nothing fairy tale like about a memoir. Most often then not the account wouldn't be something you would want to live.
The book tells the story of a 5 year old Malika Oufkir adopted by the king of Morocco, Muhammed five as a companion to his own daughter-Princess Amina. She lived 10 years at the court in the seclusion of the harem never leaving the palace, prisoner inside a palace. On his death, King's eldest son took over the sultan-at and the upbringing of the girls. The story trails a little in the beginning trying to impress on us the grandeur of the life in the palace and how Malika felt out of place, away from kith and kin. At the age of 15 on her own request she was sent back home to live with her parents and she says the two years with them were the best years of her life. Just after her 17th birthday she and her family which consisted of her mother, brothers aged 13 and 3 and sisters aged 8 and 10 were banished and then imprisoned for long grueling 24 years. All because her father General Oufkir was accused and later convicted of planning a coupe to overthrow the king. The general was later executed.The book is about these 24 years.
The book is humorous to start with and turns heart wrenching in the end. Malika’s account of her spendthrift mom is amusing where at one point she says “she is capable of selling an apartment block to buy her self an entire collection of Dior or St.laurents." She seems quite undecided when it comes to her father’s role in the coupe.There is a fleeting mention of difference of opinion between the king and the general but no possible explanation to the attempt on the king and execution of the general. Its heartbreaking when she says “you don’t know who to hate, when your own father attempts at assassinating your adoptive father and the latter becomes your tormentor.”
There were some accounts which completely disgusted me. The king's concubines and the way they were treated in the palace, the king insisting that everybody be naked in the swimming pool which included his cart loads of female admirers ,sisters, daughter and mailka at the age of 14(Some Pervert!!) and the pitiful condition of black slaves who were treated as 3rd class concubines if need be.
There is a mention of something written in Koran which I need to cite here. The exact words were “ Women exist purely for seduction and submission. Their bodies serve first and foremost to satisfy men’s desire” I am quite tempted to add some very disturbing comments on how these men who believe this should be treated, but it being a public forum with no age restriction, I would defer.
The initial account of the imprisonment and the hardship isn’t very moving, it almost felt too good of a life for somebody who is imprisoned. But when she talks about collective hallucination where everybody heard voices and footsteps which they believed were ghosts and an incident when the author herself felt she was being strangled by a small women sitting on her chest, you know the life was taking a toll on them. After 5 years of this life, they spent next 18 years in solitary confinement with thick walls between them. It gets painful to read about how they would try to get a glimpse of each other in the gutter water and yearn for a touch from some one who was separated by just a wall. They weren’t allowed to step out for years together and the wasting body doesn't compare to the wasting minds.
The youngest of them was 3 years old when he was taken away and forced into this way of life. When they finally escaped the boy of 23 was ill equipped for life outside and still is.
I decided I will not go into grimy details of the story. Its for you to read and I wouldn’t even go on and say it’s a must read. Yes it shows endurance, but the book is disturbing to say the least. 20 odd years living all alone, no contact with the outside world or with your family next door, it will drive you insane. At certain points in the book I thought they did go mad with no concept of time, no reason to live, and no hope they were just alive to die.
Even for a story a very gripping one for that matter you wouldn’t want anybody to go through the fate they did. It’s a poignant account sometimes bordering at the brink of insanity. You want it to end. At one point you want all of them to die because that would put an end to the misery.
Is that what Malika wanted her reader’s to feel? I am not sure, but I think she wanted us to feel her pain. I frankly dint. I wanted to believe it was an exaggeration that she wrote about her experiences in such explicit details because they never happened. I know a lot of them did, its hard to come up with things like that or may be not…may be 24 years of living all alone can give you a fertile imagination, your only savior from lunacy.
If you are one of those people who like reading true stories, then do give it a try. If you think you will be left with another “triumph over evil” saga you are mistaken. It is not a feel good book, may be it wasn’t supposed to.
I will leave you with few lines from the book describing their frustration, “Over the years barriers of natural modesty between parent and offspring's eroded. We were no longer children, mother, brother, sister. Towards the end we were like caged beasts. No longer capable of feelings. We were tired, enraged, cruel, and aggressive. None of us wanted to go on wearing a mask of optimism. We longer believed in anything.” When she escaped to Tangier she said "I saw continual procession of people walking with their heads down not seeing where they were going. And I mused, Is this life? Is this freedom? They r just as much a prisoner as I was." For some one who has lived most of her life in a prison, it comes as an irony.
PS:They were finally released in 1991. Malika lives in France with her husband Eric Bordreuil. If you consider this happy ending, so long......
PS2: My husband asks me how come I haven't written anything about the author's style of writing. I am a novice at this, plus it is the author's own story so as I was telling him it is very hard to separate that fact and concentrate on the style. There was a regular flow to the writing, some attempt at integrating incidents from the past with the present. It almost feels like some body is speaking out her life story, narrating it and hence it feels quite natural and doesn't seem scripted. In the beginning it almost seemed like Malika was talking about a third person and not herself as a child. There was an element of indifference which wasn't very subtle. It seemed more of Mitchele writing than Malika there. As if Malika told her the story and Mitchele is reading out a book. But the writing picks up after that. The language is simple and there are some detailed explanations to some of the Moro con customs giving an insight into the monarchy in quite an eloquent style.
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