The Inmate’s Two Bodies: Survival and Metamorphosis in a Moroccan Secret Prison

• Main Author: Zakaria Rhani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra 2019-12-01
• Series: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais
• Subjects: detention of people; political violence; slow death; survival; Tazmamart (Morocco); testimony
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9884

Tazmamart is not an ordinary prison. It is a system of secret detention that challenges the Foucauldian model and its rationale is best understood outside a universal paradigm of modernity. All rational forms, all the proceedings, the choice of place of detention, the organization of the cells, and the policy of rationing are driven by the will to undo life. The prisoners either die or transmute to survive. This paper reports the experience of one of the survivors who, compared to his fellow inmates, narrates his bodily metamorphosis in confounding and unparalleled terms, with the purpose of grasping his experience of becoming in its intertwining with a theory of becoming. His own metamorphosis, I argue, is concomitant with a radical “revolutionary” act that transfigures the meaning and the relation to confinement and to the world, thereby converting suffering into joy, bodily death into a transcendent corporeality, madness into wisdom, and total seclusion into cosmic amplitude – a universal being.