You’re with your king: Morocco’s Secret Prisons
Jeremy Harding, 10 February 2022
In Tazmamart it paid to forget family and friends. Aziz BineBine dismissed the past by an act of will. ‘I had no personal memories and no future,’ he writes. ‘I was here and here only.’ Expunging all trace of his father was easy: Mohamed BineBine had been King Hassan’s court jester. He is also the subject of a novel, Le Fou du roi (2017), by BineBine’s brother Mahi. When the king was out of sorts, BineBine Sr, a prodigious memoriser of the Arabic canon, came to the rescue with an apposite line of verse or a witticism of his own. He never once asked the king to pardon his son. But BineBine and his comrades in Tazmamart also had mothers, brothers, sisters, fiancées; many had wives and children. Those who pined for their families, BineBine suggests, put their own mental and physical health at risk. He had already become devout during his earlier incarceration in Kenitra: faith, he discovered, was a defence against the profanities of Tazmamart.