Moroccan Female Other-Archives: Literary Activism in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass and Mhani Alaoui’s The House on Butterfly Street

Despite Moroccan women’s significant contributions to national independence and literature, their writings did not receive serious academic attention in Morocco until the 1980s. This article builds on the premise that such neglect has delayed crucial discussions about the role of Moroccan female narratives in mirroring social challenges and reshaping discussions on gender identity. It foregrounds the works of Fatima Mernissi and Mhani Alaoui as two authors whose narratives challenge the silences of official history by reconstructing alternative archives of Moroccan female identities through the lens of gender and race. Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood and Alaoui’s The House on Butterfly Street both reflect a sense of literary activism that reconstructs marginalized identities and neglected histories, including those of dadas, harem girls, and pioneering women such as Aicha Chenna, Qaida Tamou, and Meryem Fassi Fihri. Drawing on archive theory and postcolonial feminist criticism, the article analyzes how the implicit sub-narratives in these works of fiction serve as what Brahim El Guabli calls “Moroccan-Other Archives.” While Moroccan women’s writings have been significantly discussed in Arabic, French, and Spanish scholarship, they remain underexamined in Anglophone criticism. By reading Mernissi and Alaoui side by side, this article highlights how Moroccan women’s writings not only reclaim silenced histories but also reimagine cultural memory and identity in ways that resist reductive categorizations of the female experience.