I was born in a country where color is seen but never named, where Blackness is present yet Black history is absent. A country where one can be Black without anyone ever explaining what that means. This silence is never neutral. It shapes, molds, wounds, and organizes the way one sees oneself. You can grow up in a home where skin is constantly commented on, yet the word “Black” is never spoken positively; in a school where you are the only child with textured hair, yet no one ever speaks about history, roots, or Africanness.
I am African, Moroccan, Amazigh. I am not Arab. I am Arabic-speaking through schooling, Darija-speaking in daily life. And yet, my entire experience as a Black child in Morocco was built around a strange paradox: visible through the difference of my skin, invisible in every possible narrative.
1. Growing Up in a Country That Does Not Say Your Name
As a child, I was the only Black child with textured hair in my class. My hair sparked both fascination and rejection. It was touched, commented on, judged. In a society where beauty is hierarchized, where light skin and straight hair are valued, the Black child learns very early to negotiate her existence. It is a pedagogy of silence, but also a pedagogy of shame.
I remember a science class where the teacher was speaking about “different human races.” When she said the word “Black,” the entire class turned toward me. Literally the entire class. They pointed at my skin, my hair, they giggled, they asked me if “it hurts” when someone touches it. That day, I became a living chapter of the school curriculum. I was no longer a student; I was a demonstration object. I was nine years old, yet I already felt foreign to myself.
It was not an isolated incident. In middle school, a teacher called me to the board while I was wearing my long braids loose. He interrupted my answer: “What is that hair? Do you think you’re a star? Tie all that up right now.” He had only called me up to humiliate me. Another teacher explained to me that wearing hair extensions was “haram,” because “God gave you hair like that, kinky, and you should be ashamed to change what God created.” In reality, it was not God she was defending; it was a certain colonial idea of social order.
Home was not spared. My mother often said my hair was “too kinky,” “too unruly,” “not beautiful enough.” She wished—with the painful sincerity of those who themselves grew up in negrophobia—that my hair looked like “so-and-so’s,” curly, soft, “pleasant.” She repeated that once I reached adolescence, I would have to start relaxing it. In the meantime, I wore braids constantly to hide my “gouffa.” If I spent a single day without covering it, I cried in front of the mirror.
My hair became my first complex. I could not look at myself without a blowout or braids. I only recognized myself through artifice. My entire relationship to myself was built around erasure: hiding, smoothing, taming, correcting. My hair was not a part of me; it was a problem to solve.
How can a little girl grow up without complexes when she has no positive representation of what she is?
Until recently, the rare Black people represented on Moroccan television were silent domestic workers, building guards, invisible helping hands… Never heroes. Never powerful figures. Never children. Never someone like me.
2. Everyday Racism, the Kind Called “a Joke”
I could tell dozens of anecdotes. My sister coming back from the grocery store in tears because the shopkeeper called her “little negress” in Amazigh. The Black Moroccan woman a man loved for ten years without ever daring to introduce her to his family “because she’s Black, you understand…” The one who dated a Black man but refused to commit “because I don’t want to have ugly children.” Parents telling their daughters to “never ever bring home a Black man.”
Moroccan negrophobia has this particular trait: it dresses itself in humor, familiarity, custom, religion, tradition. It denies itself. It hides behind “it’s not mean,” “it’s normal,” “we’ve always spoken like that,” “Moroccans tease everyone, no one is spared, we joke about rural people, Amazigh people, people from Rabat, from Fez…,” “my Black friend doesn’t get offended when I call him ‘azzi’ (the equivalent of the n-word in Darija), I don’t understand why you take everything so badly,” “he didn’t mean to insult you, you’re getting upset for nothing…”
This denial is as violent as the insults themselves.
3. In France: Hypervisibility After Invisibility
In France, I encountered the other side of the same coin.
If Morocco made me invisible, France made me hypervisible.
There, my Blackness was implicit—never named but omnipresent.
Here, it was explicit—commented on, analyzed.
People asked me where I was “really” from.
They told me I “didn’t look Moroccan.”
They placed me in “the islands” or in a fantasized Africa that was not mine.
My Amazigh identity was denied.
My Moroccan identity questioned.
My Arabic-speaking identity suspected.
My body spoke before I did. My skin told a story others wanted to read into it. I had no control over how I was named.
Where Morocco deprived me of history, France imposed one on me that was not mine.
This identity shock was violent, but it also opened a breach.
4. Reclaiming Black Memory: An Inner Turning Point
It was by joining the association Makeda Saba, which advocates for the rights of African and Afro-descendant women and children in Lyon about ten years ago, that I began to understand the condition of Black communities in a broader sense. Through reading groups, conferences, and Afro-feminist and anti-racist cultural events we organized, I learned about the structural dimension of oppression, misogynoir, negrophobia, institutional and systemic racism.
Then, while reading Le Maroc Noir, I understood that my experiences were not isolated events but the expression of a silenced history. Black Moroccans are either Indigenous or descendants of enslaved people. Morocco has long erased the memory of trans-Saharan slavery, minimized its racial dimension, concealed hierarchies inherited from the past.
The marginalization of Black Moroccan communities and this historical silence produced family silences, school humiliations, normalized racist jokes.
By discovering this history, I understood that the shame I carried did not belong to me.
It was inherited.
Transmitted.
Normalized.
So I began to write.
To speak.
To search.
To connect my personal wounds to a collective memory.
To affirm my Amazigh and African identity in a country that had never named it for me.
The day I understood that my Blackness had a history, I stopped believing it was a flaw.
5. Care as Resistance: Hair, Motherhood, Transmission
Between invisibility on one side and overexposure on the other, I drifted for a long time. Until I became a mother.
Motherhood forced me to look at myself differently. To ask what I would pass on to my children: silence, erasure, shame? Or something else?
Care came later. Slowly. Painfully.
During my first pregnancy, I stopped relaxing my hair to protect my baby. My natural hair grew back—textured at the roots, relaxed at the ends. I did not embrace it. I could not find a single salon in Lyon that styled natural hair. I eventually relaxed it again, reluctantly. I cried. I felt imprisoned by a norm I wanted to escape but could not break.
Then one day, I decided to love myself differently. I did my big chop. No turning back. I discovered my face as it was—without a hair mask, without artifice. Care became political: the refusal to let a colonial norm dictate the value of my body. Loving my hair meant refusing a silent oppression. It meant choosing myself.
Motherhood and community engagement forced me to rethink transmission. I wanted to offer my children what I never had: accurate words, a full history, a possible pride. I wanted to tell them that they are Moroccan, Amazigh, African—and that these identities do not contradict one another. I wanted to pass on respect for others, but above all, respect for oneself.
Today, I understand that care is not superficial, and that transmission is an act of healing. Care is resistance. It is memory. It is reconstruction.
Writing is also care. Speaking out means breaking an old chain. It means telling the story. Breaking taboos. Naming what our parents could not say. It means protecting the child I once was by raising my own children differently.
6. Writing to Open a Breach
This text is an invitation to look at Maghrebi Blackness differently: as a presence, a history, a strength. To move beyond silences. To offer Black children of the Maghreb what we did not receive: permission to recognize and celebrate themselves.
Writing is not a luxury. It is a gesture of survival. A political act. A way of reinscribing our existences into the history of Morocco, the Maghreb, and the diaspora. I no longer want to be defined by others—neither by Morocco’s silences nor by French assignments.
I want to exist fully.
And I want other Black Moroccan, Maghrebi, African women and children to recognize themselves in that existence.
We grew up in silence and shame.
Today we write so that our children—especially our daughters—grow up in freedom and pride.
If I speak, it is not only to tell my story.
It is to say that our stories matter.
That our bodies are political.
That our memory deserves to be named.
That our voices must resonate.
Writing is opening a breach in an ancient wall.
And inviting other women, other people, to walk through it with me.
Myriam QUATABOU
Leave a Reply