FREEDOM: The Story of My Second Life [Paperback]

I wouldn't call this a "story". It is more a series of short vignettes or remembrances of her journey back into the free world in 1991. Some of her recollections are humorous, some sad. Some are beautifully written. Some drift and leave the reader lost. And that is the problem I have with this book. There is no "there" there. No order. Her memories move back and forth in time, and it is often difficult to follow her train of thought.

It is interesting to read about some of her experiences in adjusting to life among the "free people". After living on scraps in prison, she is amazed at the rows of fresh food at the grocers. She describes a hilarious scene where she learns how to use the water faucet in the ladies' room. She finds she has a special empathy for the homeless people she meets.

It would be hard not to like the author. She's charming. Just be aware that this is not a story that reads from point A to point B, but is more like a series of random thoughts from a diary or a journal.

As one reviewer has commented, this book does not recount a "story" in the sense that one might expect from the word. If Malika Oufkir's first book, "Stolen Lives," was mostly a chronological account of "facts" (as co-author Michèle Fitoussi required), "Freedom" is the retelling of an inward and intimate journey, from victimhood to the strenuous apprenticeship of a self in the "normal" world beyond prison. Although Malika Oufkir's humor, wit, and genuine warmth shine through this book, her account is not necessarily meant to be a heartwarming or comforting "story," it is the witnessing of another kind of struggle than the one we read in 2001, as the author makes her often painful and occasionally joyful way toward a renewed self.

The publication of "La Prisonnière" in 1999, and subsequently of its English translation in 2001, thrust Malika Oufkir into stardom. This proved to be a mixed blessing since the media tended to package her in the confining role of a "victim," a role designed to elicit compassion and sympathy. At one point, she recounts in "Freedom", she "felt like a strange creature being exhibited for the civilized white man" (p. 217). In her second book, she attempts to free herself from this role, as she repeatedly asserts. We have to take such declarations seriously. This is a woman who managed to survive extreme adversity in great part through her ability to imagine another life and to create fictional characters or settings through which she could momentarily forget her circumstances. Now she is dipping into this pool of creativity in order to become the writer that she potentially was in prison. "Listening" to her voice, which rings with authenticity in the French original (a quality that no translation, not even a good one as in this case, can fully convey), I sense that Malika Oufkir is acquiring her own, distinct personality as a writer. Rather than living in her imagination with no product to show for such intense inner activity, she has found writing as a critical means of discovering her identity, beyond that of victim and prisoner, and of constructing herself. It is of course significant that this book represents her first achievement as a writer on her own.

If at times Malika Oufkir appears to judge the "free world" in severe or condescending terms, she hardly spares herself either. Apart from a gentle form of revenge against this world for having ignored her family while they were in prison, there is great honesty in her account. Naturally drawn to the homeless in Paris and to their "desperate" way of grasping the world, for instance, she then measures her own limits when attempting to help people in distress, and she goes so far as to accuse herself of cowardice. She is aware of her own contradictions as well, even blaming herself for having participated (however indirectly) in the tyranny that plagued Morocco, her country of birth, under King Hassan II. At no time does Malika Oufkir claim to give an entirely objective account of her life or of her surroundings. Instead, she focuses on her perceptions and emotions as a way of understanding herself and her surroundings through the process of writing. After the publication of her first book in 1999, she spent years speaking in public to raise people's awareness about the atrocities that had been perpetrated in her country. The time then came for her to turn her "mission" inwards. What we take as self-evident, she has had to learn, slowly and often agonizingly. Who, never having undergone circumstances remotely similar to the ones she endured, can evaluate the laborious nature of such a renewal?

Malika Oufkir accomplishes other goals in this book. By providing updates on her brothers, sisters, and mother, she responds to the concern expressed by many readers of "Stolen Lives" over the fate of her family. Through nuanced judgments, she also aims to redress the overly negative perception of Morocco that her first book precipitated. And she aims to correct mistaken perceptions of herself; though raised like a princess at the royal Moroccan court, for instance, she stresses that she comes "from the people" (p. 126).

The process of literary creation surfaces in this book as well. Malika Oufkir discreetly shows that she is a reader, the precondition for being a writer, as when she describes herself reading in the (symbolic) underground world of Parisian subways. Echoes of Proustian reminiscences and mistaken perceptions, for example, infuse the hilarious account of her experience in a Parisian café washroom. Or take the opening chapter of the book, entitled "Adam." Here, the English translation loses the subtlety of the French original, for the chapter is literally entitled "The First Man of My Life" ("Le premier homme de ma vie"). This first man is Adam, Malika Oufkir's adopted son, whose name also serves as the first word of the book. This aptly chosen figure of renewal is present in other passages, reminding us of the author's purpose in writing her book: "Now that I have Adam, I know that I'm through being a victim" (p. 107-08).

Provided its essential purpose remains clear in the reader's mind, this book will be of compelling interest to those who cared about "Stolen Lives," but also to those who care about survivors and their ways of coping once they are freed from the hardships that taught them to forge a defiant identity in order to resist their circumstances.

Note: The voice in FREEDOM is different than that in STOLEN LIVES because only Oufkir wrote this book, whereas two other authors contributed to STOLEN LIVES.

In the memoir FREEDOM: THE STORY OF MY SECOND LIFE (a sequel to STOLEN LIVES) author Malika Oufkir describes relearning how to live as a free person. She was 19 when she, her mother, and her brothers and sisters were confined to a Moroccan prison. Before that she was adopted by the king and basically locked up in the king's court. She was 39 when she escaped; she later moved to Paris, France. She talks about her fear, present even after she's safe:

"Even though I am now far from my jailers, shielded by the media [the media learned about her family's imprisonment then spread the word], I'm afraid everything could collapse around me in instant. What exactly am I afraid of? I don't even know myself. Certain terrors are so deeply rooted that they defy all logic. Even now, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, in those eerie hours when you can't quite tell whether you are awake or still dreaming, and I think I hear footsteps out in the hall... the apartment door opens and out of nowhere my jailers come to get me for crimes I haven't yet committed. Perhaps innocence begets its own guilt, planting suspicion both in oneself and in the eyes of others. That fear of being punished for things I haven't done, or haven't done yet, intensifies the hellish whirlwind of doubt. Like a battered child, I throw my arms up over my face, warding off blows and caresses, in order not to see what awaits me...."

Freedom isn't the gift she expects it to be; she is often confused about how to manage aspects it, particularly time: "Most free people are painfully dependent on their watches and alarm clocks, an almost physical addiction that makes them cling to each second as if were their last. I have all the time in the world." She contrasts free people's perceptions with her own: "I had to relearn everything. I had trouble with the notion of time, not knowing when I had to hurry and when I had time to spare, not understanding the imperatives of schedules."

Oufkir describes her struggles to figure out what a motion sensor sink is or how to operate an ATM--things people in Paris have probably used for more than 15 years--which is about the same as you or me trying to use laundry facilities in a foreign country when all the directions are written in a language we don't understand; this only beomes humorous later. These struggles are listed to illustrate what it means to straddle the gap between "what was" and "what is."(The German film "Good Bye, Lenin!" offers a funny take on this concept; the characters go to great lengths to keep someone from seeing "what is.")

FREEDOM's strength is Oufkir's focus on the small things that make up, for her, freedom. It's beautifully written and translated from French. Read FREEDOM first, then go back and read STOLEN LIVES. FREEDOM raises questions that are, to this reader's delight, answered in STOLEN LIVES.