Outside their prison, they had been expunged from Moroccan society. They sang, danced and re-created the casino at Monte Carlo, using a dried chickpea as a roulette ball. Oufkir gave lessons in English, Arabic and French to her younger siblings. We stored our provisions and trophies in another pokey little room: the place was riddled with horned asps and scorpions, and each time we caught one, we put it in a large bottle filled with alcohol." Below, a cavern with a beaten-earth floor served as our kitchen. "The nine of us were given two rooms to live in, on the first floor. "We entered the fort through a huge blue door," she writes. It exposes the brutality of Hassan's regime, and it gives us a way to measure the tensile strength of the human spirit.Īfter their father's death, Oufkir, her mother, and her five brothers and sisters were hustled by guards to a ruined desert palace in Tamattaght, Morocco. Elegantly narrated by Michèle Fitoussi, literary editor of French Elle, the book does double service. Stolen Lives - published as the best seller La Prisonnière in France - is Oufkir's story of exile and return. "It took a long time for me to die as Malika, General Oufkir's eldest daughter, the child of a powerful figure, of a past. And they would dig their way to freedom with a spoon and a fierce determination to survive. They would languish there for most of two decades, 10 in solitary confinement. 23, 1972, Oufkir and her family were arrested and banished to a desert prison. His attack against the king's aircraft failed, and his "suicide" was reported shortly afterward. In August 1972, Malika Oufkir's father launched a coup attempt against King Hassan II of Morocco.
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