Synthesis essay on the book stolen lives

Stolen Lives

Malika wanted to grow up to be a film actress. What elements of her story seem cinematic, the ones that would translate the best to the big screen? Why? Do you think that her desire to be an actress actually helped her through this ordeal? Please provide specific examples from the text to support the position.

The story of Malika Oufkir's life rivals that of the made-up tale of the supposed surviving princess and daughter of the last czar, Anastasia. Only Oufkir's memoir is nonfiction, and perhaps more worthy of cinema. "Although Stolen Lives would be a smashing good tale if it were fiction, it is all the more compelling since it is true," wrote one reviewer (Sherrer, 2001). Imagine this beginning of a film. A young girl, selected by the capricious hand of fate, is given the honor of becoming the adopted daughter of the King of Morocco, King Muhammad V and is sent away at the age of five from her parents to be raised with the king's daughter as the girl's companion in a harem. The girl has been taken away from all that is familiar, but she lives a charmed life of luxury. When she is a teenager, she is sent back to live with her parents, her usefulness exhausted to the royal family. She must get to know her parents and siblings again, for they are now strangers.

Then, again because of fate, not because of an action of her volition, her life changes again. Her father acts against the great king. Malika's father was Hassan II, also known as General Oufkir. Oufkir's father was a close military aide of the king and attempted a coup. The coup failed. With that action, the charmed life of the fairytale young princess came to an end. Because of political forces over which they had no control, her entire family was condemned to a horrible fate.

Again, the story is cinematic. Her father was quickly executed. Oufkir's family was removed from their sumptuous circumstances and began a life of imprisonment that was to last more than twenty years. From a place stocked with the finest food and toys and the finest French designer clothes of whispering silk, the family was taken to a barrack in the remote desert. Instead of jet-setting with Louis Vuitton luggage they were captives. The pictorial contrast is striking.

Every time the family was removed to a new barracks, their conditions grew worse, like a sinking into Dante's Inferno of hell. The once-spoiled girl who was upset that her meals did not have enough butter was starving. Sometimes she was isolated from her family and could only communicate through walls. She had to save her rations to celebrate the holidays, in an effort to make some semblance of normalcy in her life. The children learned to make playthings of bits of cardboard. Rats and other pests covered the floors and walls of the prison and gnawed at the family's food and skin. Vermin ate and urinated upon the captives' food. The family members collectively tried to commit suicide out of understandable despair, even Oufkir's brother who was only a young boy -- yet eventually they find within themselves the determined to keep themselves alive, if only to spite the Moroccan state.

Ironically, Malika's childish desire to become a glamorous actress and to live the life of a film star sustained her through the ordeal, as she used her internal resources of humor to help her weather the hard times, and her imagination as an escape valve to liberate her mind and soul, if not her body, from her horrible circumstances. 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.