Book Piracy in Morocco

Here is an  Agence France-Presse article from 2018 about what was then a thriving trade in pirated books in Morocco. Somehow we missed it then, but one wonders what the situation is now. 

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Thriving trade in pirated reads vexes Moroccan bookshops

Tuesday, 02 Oct 2018

 With a backpack filled with pirated books, Khalid wanders the streets of Rabat peddling cheap reads – part of a flourishing black market eliciting howls of protest from Moroccan bookshop owners.

“It’s true that it’s not legal, but the price of these books attracts readers,” says Khalid, 25, who hawks his wares at cafes in Morocco's capital.

A little more than a year ago, he sold pirated DVDs, but Khalid says that market was hit when it became possible to watch films on a smartphone.

One of a large number of young Moroccans working informally in a country with high youth unemployment, he quickly found bookselling the only way to make a living.

Along the main streets of Rabat’s historical centre, dozens of other street vendors sell books in Arabic, English and French.

FULL ARTICLE

Book Review of Tazmamart by Aziz Binebine

Here is a review of the book Tazmamart by Aziz Binebine, a memoir of his experience in the now infamous Moroccan secret prison with that name.

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Incarceration in a purpose-built dungeon in Morocco has produced a memoir that is a tribute to human fortitude and imagination 

Toby Lichtig
Fri 15 May 2020 02.30 EDT

...Tazmamart was a purpose-built dungeon situated in the Atlas mountains, searing in the summer, freezing in the winter, cramped and hellish all year round. The rations were meagre, the clothes spartan, the sewers open. Exercise consisted of “the diagonal of life” – “four steps one way and four the other, a half-turn to the left and right alternately, so as not to get dizzy”. The prisoners were repeatedly reminded that their sole exit was death. Only following international pressure did Morocco admit to the prison’s existence and close it down. Of the 58 men sent there after the coup attempts, more than half had died.

Tazmamart was a pit of despair – but also a well of stories. Several memoirs and documentaries have emanated from its horrors, along with a novel, This Blinding Absence of Light (2001) by Tahar Ben Jelloun, probably Morocco’s most famous living author. He had based it on a three-hour interview with BineBine, whom he renamed Salim...

FULL ARTICLE