The prisoner

Author's name: Malika Oufkir - Michel Vétusidar Publisher: Arab Cultural Center Year of publication: 2019 Brief about the novel: The Prisoner novel, a true story written by "Michel Vétusidar" in the voice of the novel's heroine "Malika Oufkir." The novel is painful and tragic to the utmost extent, to the point that I reach some passages and doubt that they are true. The novel tells the story of Malika, daughter of the Moroccan General Oufkir, who was close to the palace and his wife. The exciting events begin when Oufkir attempts a failed coup against the rule, is killed, and his family is sentenced to twenty years in prison, during which they endure the harshest types of oppression, pain, and diseases. They were even prevented for some years from seeing each other, and they were distributed into prison cells, receiving only poor food, and their books and radio that transmitted news from the world were confiscated. The events continue until Malika and her brothers attempt to escape from prison despite strict guards, and they come out into life with strange appearances, as if they came from other eras. The strange thing is that Malika lived her childhood in the king's palace, who adopted her, and she lived the life of princesses for 11 years. At the beginning of the novel, I saw Malika only as a liberated girl, then I admired her leadership personality and her ability to adapt to all those difficult circumstances, despite the many criticisms against her, including her conversion from Islam to Christianity and her belief in the Virgin Mary's ability to protect them from death. However, the novel remains wonderful and powerful, and it excellently discusses prison literature and how it was a factory for ambitions. Revenge is a fierce beast. This is what Malika Oufkir, the adopted daughter of King Hassan II of Morocco, learned on the day when fate turned against her family after the failed coup led by her father, General Muhammad Oufkir, in 1972. The family—her mother and six children, the youngest not exceeding two years—moved from the luxury of palaces and their indulgence to the darkness and harshness of prisons. After nearly twenty years in forced stays and dungeons, Malika regained her freedom, and fate brought her together with writer and journalist Michel Vétusidar. With a pen as if it were Oufkir’s own, Vétusidar re-authored what the girl and her family experienced over those years. Thus, the prisoner, the dual-authored book read in many languages, including Arabic, crowned her as a queen, even without a crown, over the female prisoners of the twentieth century!