Saida Menebhi

Saida Menebhi (1952, Marrakesh - 11 December 1977, Casablanca) was a Moroccan poet, high school teacher, and activist with the Marxist revolutionary movement Ila al-Amam. In 1975, she, together with five other members of the movement, was sentenced for seven years of imprisonment for anti-state activity. On November 8th 1977, inside the jail in Casablanca, she participated in a collective hunger strike, and died on the 35th day of the strike at Avicenne Hospital.^[1][2]

Her poetry, collected and published first in 1978, and later again in 2000, is considered a prime example of Moroccan revolutionary and feminist literature. She wrote in French.

Abduction[]

On January 16, 1976, Saida Menebhi was abducted and detained—along with 3 other female militants, Rabea Ftouh, Pierra di Maggio and Fatima Oukacha—in the secret Moulay Sherif Prison in Casablanca, now known as a prominent center of torture in the period of King Hassan II.^[3] There, they were subjected to a number of different kinds of physical and psychological torture before being transferred to the civilian prison in Casablanca.^[4] Menebhi and her comrades Fatima Oukacha and Rabea Ftouh were sentenced to indefinite^{[citation needed]} solitary confinement in the civilian prison of Casablanca.^[5][4]

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