Beyond Women-as-Nation: Speculative Recoveries of the Women of Marrakesh in Saeida Rouass’s Assembly of the Dead

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  • Chadi El Mtouni ORCIDFaculty of Letters and Human Sciences Saiss, Fes.
PDF (backup copy)Official version on IMISTDOI
Journal
Confluence Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (e-ISSN 3085-5411)
Issue
Vol. 2 No. 3 (2026)
Section
Articles
Pages
39-55
Published
22 July 2026
DOI
https://doi.org/10.34874/PRSM.cjms-vol2iss3.9422
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Copyright (c) 2026 Chadi El Mtouni

Abstract

Set against the 1906 Algeciras Conference, Assembly of the Dead exhumes the historical case of “Moorish Jack the Ripper” in Marrakesh to interrogate what Brahim El Guabli terms “gender-unaware history,” a Moroccan historiography that systematically erases female experience from the national record. Analyzing Saeida Rouass’s postcolonial historical novel Assembly of the Dead (2017), this study employs Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” to examine the speculative narrative recovery of thirty-six real serial murder victims. The article argues that Rouass’s diasporic memory-work disrupts the simplistic reduction of women to territorial allegories of a “penetrated” nation. By highlighting the victims’ individual agency, names, and private desires, the narrative stages a friction against both local patriarchal negligence and colonialist homogenization. Ultimately, this study positions the postcolonial historical novel as a restorative historiographical corrective. It demonstrates how a diasporic vantage point enables a transnational practice of memory to restore dignity to those whom the official record deemed expendable.

Keywords

Moroccan historiographygendered erasurediasporic memorycritical fabulationpostcolonial historical novel

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