Zainab Fasiki

Biography

One of her best-known images is a nude green figure who stands over Casablanca and keeps watch on the city. It is called “The Protector of Casablanca”, and the artist sees it as an attempt to answer the daily harassment on the street.

Zainab Fasiki was born on 21 July 1994 in Fez and grew up there. She began drawing at the age of four. She finished her studies with an engineering degree, according to one account in June 2017, and she is a mechanical engineer by training. Since 2014 she has lived in Casablanca.

In Casablanca she joined the comics collective Skefkef. In 2017 her first feminist comic, “Omor” (“Things”), appeared: through three young Moroccan women she showed the inequality between men and women. She also made comics about sex education for Skefkef magazine. In 2018 came the series “Feyrouz versus the World”.

Her drawings are published mostly on social media and as graphic novels. In them she criticises censorship, taboos and the notion of shame. Many of the works are self-portraits, often nude: she draws on women in the traditional Moroccan hammam, or draws herself as comic-book heroines such as Wonder Woman. The women in her comics sometimes have no eyes. She explained this in an interview: she sees women in her society as statues and wants them to become free human beings. Another comic is based on her own experience of harassment on public transport; its title translates as “Buses are made to transport people, not to rape girls”. By her account, printers in Morocco are reluctant to print such work, and she has never felt free there herself.

The “Hshouma” project (“shame” in Moroccan Arabic) began in 2018 as a series of drawings: nude women in a comic-book style, a protest against double standards and sexual taboos. It was first shown in Madrid, at an exhibition following a workshop at the Matadero arts centre. It later came out as a book, “Hshouma: corps et sexualité au Maroc” (Massot Éditions, 2019), in French and Arabic, followed by translations into Spanish, Galician, Italian and other languages.

In October 2018 she worked with the UN Refugee Agency in Morocco to animate the story of four refugees from sub-Saharan Africa. In November of that year her work was shown at the Le Cube gallery in Rabat. In October 2019 Time magazine named her a “Next Generation Leader” for “Hshouma”. In 2020 she illustrated the French book “L’amour fait loi” (Éditions Le Sélénite) about sexual discrimination, with texts by Moroccan and French authors, among them Abdellah Taïa and Leïla Slimani.

She founded the collective Women Power, which paid for twenty women to take part in workshops on women’s rights. Among those who influenced her she names the Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi and Marjane Satrapi. She wants to counter the Western image of women in the Middle East and North Africa as “either hypersexual or repressed”.