Used – The Foreigner Malika Oufkir

Grasset: Essays and Documents The Stranger: Malika Oufkir: 05/03/2006 Who doesn't remember Malika Oufkir's incredible destiny? In The Prisoner, like Scheherazade weaving her stories, Malika recounted the fate of a child adopted by Mohammed V, then raised like a princess at the court of monarch Hassan II, within the high walls of the Palace. She was a prisoner hidden from all eyes, a victim of Morocco's ancestral traditions, but cherished by her family. Following a coup d'état in 1972 where her biological father, General Oufkir, tried to overthrow her adoptive father, the King of Morocco, her entire family – mother, brothers, sisters – was imprisoned for nearly twenty years. Malika then rose to the rank of an ancient tragic heroine; a plot where nothing was missing, neither murder, vengeance, the foul desert prison, the cruelty of punishing children in place of the father, nor the miraculous outcome: a desperate escape across Morocco after digging a tunnel with her bare hands! Malika survived. In 1999, she co-wrote an extraordinary memoir with Michèle Fitoussi: but what was the price to pay? How do you walk the streets of Paris, Marrakech, Miami, or New York when you still have fear in your stomach? Why consume if you don't have the essentials? What sensations does a woman's body experience after twenty years deprived of desire? How can you be a mother when you can no longer bear children? How do you face Oprah Winfrey on her famous TV show, where Malika was the only foreign author ever invited? What can she say about her mutilated past to Nawel and Adam, her adopted children? Freedom. Or bitter freedom? The Stranger is the true story of a Martian returned to Earth. Or, if one prefers the nickname her friends gave her, the return of Hibernata. Malika Oufkir has a great sense of humor, keen observation skills, rage in her heart, and that "touch of madness" that definitively gives her a place apart.