Book review: Hicham Houdaïfa looks at Morocco’s forgotten women

Dos de Femme, Dos de Mulet

by Hicham Houdaïfa

En Toutes Lettres

Look around certain areas of Morocco, and you could be forgiven for thinking the country’s women have their feet planted firmly in the 21st century. In upmarket cafe-bars in Rabat, young women wearing jeans and boots sit chatting and swiping smartphones. In the cosmopolitan Morocco Mall in Casablanca, Spanish and French fashion is displayed in dazzling shop windows. It all seems a portrait of the progressive.

Hicham Houdaïfa’s fascinating book Dos de Femme, Dos de Mulet (A Woman’s Back is Like a Mule’s) reminds us with a jolt that another reality entirely exists outside these enclaves, whether in the quartiers populaires of Casablanca or in the isolated corners of the High Atlas mountain range, where snow and poor roads often leave villages cut off for weeks during winter and few girls go to secondary school.

We hear eight unique stories. There are teenage girls pressed into underage marriages by their families, often without official paperwork; women who rise at 4am daily in the hope they might occasionally get a back-breaking day’s work picking fruit; women who have never been able to grieve for fathers and husbands who disappeared in the backlash against a rebellion in 1973.