A stranger to the real world

IT seems that writing a memoir can be justified these days simply because the author made it to adulthood despite setbacks that may include substance abuse, ambiguous personal demons, a tawdry sex life or all of the above. Adoptees, bipolar celebrities and angry divorcees are among those whose life stories have been shared with the reading public.

So it’s refreshing when that rare memoir comes along, one with a truly compelling, harrowing narrative that also ventures beyond the writer’s life to explore a greater context. “Freedom” by Moroccan writer Malika Oufkir is such a book. Considering the volatile and vulnerable era in which we now live, Oufkir’s story of her years during (and after) her 24-year incarceration in a Moroccan prison raises provocative political questions. Above all, it’s a tale of deprivation and survival in their rawest forms.

Many readers will remember “Stolen Lives,” Oufkir’s 2001 account of her imprisonment, which became an international bestseller. It touched a nerve because it was a fairy tale turned horror story: Oufkir grew up in Morocco’s royal court, living in luxurious conditions. Once her father was found guilty of treason and executed, Oufkir, her mother and five siblings were thrown into a remote desert prison. Her graphic descriptions of torture and confinement and her family’s desperate attempt to escape were unforgettable.

With “Freedom,” Oufkir continues her engrossing, courageous journey. (For those who haven’t read “Stolen Lives,” Oufkir helpfully summarizes the narrative thus far.) Like her first book, “Freedom” isn’t particularly well written. But the story she tells is powerful enough that the author can be forgiven for her awkward, meandering prose and banal proclamations (“love is all there is”).

This time, Oufkir writes of learning to renegotiate the outside world, which may as well have been another planet given her estrangement from it. The book’s thematic structure -- wealth, poverty, fundamentalism and so on -- aptly mimics her disorientation when starting over again. Now 53, happily married for eight years and the adoptive mother of two children, Oufkir seems overwhelmed by the abundance and prosperity of her life. The ghost of her old one is never far behind. “How can I forget my attempts at suicide?” she writes. “The molesting hands of drunken inmates, for whom we were fresh meat? The despair, the surprise inspections by soldiers as brutal as they were stupid, the arrogance of petty wardens? How did we manage to hold on? Perhaps because we were a family.” Indeed, she reveals that her newfound freedom did not come without inexplicable resistance from within: “I remained in a prison of my own mind, a depressed and fearful recluse.... [E]very minute was long, threatening, unsettled. I had a distorted sense of time that, even today, keeps me from being on time for my appointments.” Recounting her day-to-day encounters as a “free” woman, Oufkir describes the most mundane tasks with a sense of wonder over her newly liberated self. At the supermarket, for instance, she is delirious at the surfeit of choices. She greedily scoops up cheese, oil, butter -- anything she can fill her cart with. “I buy two of everything -- generic dishwashing liquid, even ordinary corn flakes -- just in case. In case we run out.” She feels suddenly self-conscious when a fellow shopper stares at her cart, “which seems loaded to stock a survival bunker for World War Three instead of a small family kitchen.” Back home again, she reflexively hides some of her favorite purchased treats in the back of the refrigerator, making them hard to find, “protecting what belongs to me, because it might vanish in an instant.”

Some of her encounters with the modern world are hilarious: struggling to understand how to work a remote control, an automated water faucet in a public bathroom or an ATM as a line of cranky people stand waiting behind her. “I am a child,” she writes, “an infant in an adult body, and if this disorientation keeps up, I will have to learn to use a fork all over again.”

Oufkir’s many years of suffering have made her, much to her delight, tremendously empathetic. When she passes a homeless man on the street one day, she gives him $500. Never self-congratulatory, the life lessons she imparts with candor -- about privilege, generosity, understanding and gratitude -- might be forgettable were they not so hard-won. It’s rare that someone’s experiences proves genuinely inspiring, but Oufkir’s book does. It might just lead you to change someone else’s life for the better or, at the very least, your own.

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Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Solitude” and “Motherhood.”