History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi

    History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi transports the reader to Morocco following the Years of Lead in the 1970s and1980s, focusing on political prisoners Mouline, Leila, and a range of other figures that occupy the jail, suffering torture at the hands of guards and the isolation endemic to their confinement. Marouazi’s work finds itself in a particular literary tradition of prison novels, sidling up beside the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Herta Müller’s THe Hunger Angel, or even Assata Shakur’s autobiography.

    What History of Ash does, essentially, is demonstrate the impossibility of the prison novel as a genre.

    Prison novels like History of Ash are trapped in a paradox: by definition, prison restricts the agency of its occupants. In order to do justice (as it were) to the nature of prison, it requires characters in the story not to be able to effect changes in their circumstances. Unfortunately, the more accurate the representation is, the less characters are able to drive a narrative—which might, in my mind, explain why so many prison novels are episodic in nature, offering these brief slices of prison life without a grander narrative regarding liberation. To do otherwise might tend toward the glorification of fundamentally inhumane practices.

    Similarly, the characters in the novel are reduced to numbers in the eyes of the state. Marouazi replicates that feeling for the reader, somewhat, in that most of the characters are decontextualized from their circumstances. For instance, the book gives very little information about why the characters are actually imprisoned (perhaps to value their identities and avoid making their crimes the defining feature of their identities). Narratively, it serves some purpose—as a reader with no knowledge Morocco’s Years of Lead, it makes it difficult to connect. As much as it should have felt like an intimate look at their lives, what ended up happening is that the characters often fell flat; I needed more to latch onto so that they didn’t feel like empty signifiers.

    That said, there are some moments that are genuinely beautifully done that provide a glimpse into the hearts of these figures. For instance, the first chapter sees Mouline in his cell being routinely taken out in order to be tortured. When a mouse comes to occupy his cell, he starts screaming in terror, concerned about infection and disease. Over time, though, Mouline starts identifying with the mouse, gives it a name, and treats it as a kind of secret friend. Then, when the guards are interrogating and torturing Mouline, he gives the mouse’s name as a secret informant. It’s a wonderful moment of humour and rebellion—nobody knows the name of Mouline’s mouse (or that it even exists), and then the politicians are sent on a wild goose chase to apprehend this high level leftist that doesn’t exist. There’s also an entertaining scene where the prisoners arrange a heist of sorts to ensure that married prisoners are able to meet surreptitiously to time their sex with the woman’s ovulation to guarantee a child.

    On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, there’s a fracture in a relationship that feels devastating. Mouline fractures his relationship with Leila while in prison—it’s actually darkly funny because the premise seems to be that Mouline would like to be polygamous but hypocritically denies Leila the same opportunities. The sexist hypocrisy isn’t funny, but it’s a little ironic that the man in prison is insisting on having multiple women—it seems amusing and impracticable. In any case, Leila stops visiting him in prison, and Mouline does not know the reason for it immediately. The implications are devastating: he is abandoned for reasons unknown and that lack of knowledge is heartbreaking. The existential implications are somewhat understated—when you’re a prisoner, you don’t have the freedom to see people by your own choice and you have no control in trying to remedy a situation if the relationship has been fractured.

    Stylistically, the novel is often beautifully written. One of my favourite lines I feel can stand on its own without context: “That’s how all beautiful things are in my country … they only come as echoes and rust” (4). Some of the beauty emerges in the discussion of characters, as well. When describing Leila, Mouline says, that “I was constantly putting off trying to catch her, because once you caught this woman, she would just slip away again. Leila would slip away like water from the palm of your hand, or like air you won’t be able to breathe in a second time, or like a wave you can’t dive into twice. [...] Leila was the lily of the soul, and I was the sad desert thorn” (37). It’s a beautifully constructed passage that combines water imagery and floral imagery. The idea of Leila slipping away like water is lovely, and then the idea of him being a “sad desert thorn”, with the implication of being deprived of water, is a powerful turn.

    It’s in these small moments of beauty that History of Ash really shines. In a novel made bleak with isolation, confinement, and torture, it’s as though these poetic moments are what express the indomitable spirit of the characters in the text. Despite their lack of agency and despite their reduction to being numbers, there is still something that remains. 

    In that respect, the ending of the book is an interesting turn. A lot of the time in prison is glossed over and then we are able to witness the return home. It’s a moment with very little fanfare and great anxiety. The moment of the key being used in the lock is a powerful one and the recognition of all that has changed and all that has been preserved is a poignant note on which to end the text.

    Overall, it’s hard to grapple with the paradoxes of prison novels and History of Ash in particular. I feel like I have misunderstood a number of details or missed out on some of the nuances. As an overall text, I think its main highlight is its style and its main detraction is the episodic nature of the text. In some ways, reading the text feels as if I’m as adrift as these prisoners: a sense of the unknown becomes the darkest cloud.