Stolen Lives Malika Wanted to Essay

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One can imagine a film including dream sequences to illustrate the liberating and sustaining power of the life of the imagination for a young and resilient woman. Then, finally, like escaping from an old-time war film, the captive family dug a tunnel and escaped. They were recaptured but the world was at least alerted to their plight. Their publicized effort lead to improved circumstances in their captivity, although Malika still did not leave her nation freely until many years afterwards.

Malika's tale is a tale of a fall from Eden, followed by survival -- a narrative made for the movies, and Oufkir as a young girl did dream of becoming a movie star. The true, most unsavory aspects of her narrative, like the reality of living in a brutal Moroccan prison ridden with human rights violations might be too real, however, even for film. Also, the authoritarian regime that allowed Oufkir's family to be punished for the transgressions of her father, while condemned in the book, might be difficult to contextualize in the medium of the cinema if the film was solely told from the family's perspective.

Putting Oufkir's subjective memoir on screen, though, and using additional historical sources might actually contain some advantages not possessed by the nature of the woman's memoir. A memoir can only encapsulate one person's experience and perceptions. Oufkir's is a tale of victimization, a stolen life, to use the title of her book. But according to one reviewer who lived in Morocco, Oufkir's father perpetrated terrible, similar crimes upon others while he was in power.

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The reviewer had lived in Morocco in the 1980s, around the time of the end of the Oufkir's captivity and subsequent escape: "Malika says that people were often frightened of her father, but this fails to capture [no pun intended] what I've read elsewhere: that he was the most feared and hated man in the country, who ordered police to shoot demonstrators and who personally tortured political prisoners. So it seems that there is a certain amount of wishful thinking in Malika's portrayal of her family and, in particular, her family's relationship with the rest of the country," although the reviewer stressed "the children should not be held responsible for the sins of the father" (Regehr, 2001)

Despite its subjective nature, the book is a compelling portrait of political imprisonment and injustice that took away the best years of a young woman's life. The lavish lifestyle of the princess' companion before the companion's fall from grace makes the level of barbarity that still exists and is allowed in many prisons today more striking, because of its extreme contrast. As recent events have brought the question of the rights of the politically imprisoned to the forefront of our own national consciousness, Stolen Lives is a worthy dramatization of the issue. Through drama and the role of the world media in securing Malika's liberation, her memoir becomes even more relevant to read today than when it was first published in 2001.

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