SOURCE: Mahjoub, Jamal. “Lightening the Darkness.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5133 (17 August 2001): 20.

In the following review, Mahjoub examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Cette aveuglante absence de lumière.

In July 1971, a group of army officers attacked the palace at Skhirat on the Atlantic coast of Morocco in an attempt to usurp King Hassan II. After the failed coup d'état, the leaders, all high-ranking personnel, were executed and the soldiers and junior officers imprisoned. Fifty-eight of them were blindfolded and taken secretly to Tazmamart in the Moroccan desert. More than half of them died there. Conditions in the prison were unbelievably brutal. The inmates were locked in tiny cells, three metres by one and a half and so low that it was impossible to stand upright. There was a hole in the floor and air vents in the cement walls and that was it—they lived, as...