Many Moroccans do not know the writer Naima El Bezaz and may have only heard of her after the announcement of her death on social networks and websites. However, she is very famous among Moroccans living in the Netherlands and also among the Dutch, mainly because of her audacious writings on them. Her novels have caused her death threats and fierce moral attacks, pushing her into severe depression, especially after she stopped writing out of fear for her life and that of her family.
Naima was born on 3 March 1974 in the Tighassaline region near Khenifra. Her parents emigrated to the Netherlands when she was only 4 years old, to settle in Amsterdam in miserable conditions. These beginnings caused her interest in the subjects of emigration, integration, racism and discrimination.
She started writing at a very young age and was still under 21 when she published her first novel in Dutch “The Road to the North”, in which she narrates the miserable story of a Moroccan immigrant attempting to integrate a community different from her own in terms of religion, culture and civilization. She then published her second novel “Satan’s Beloved”, then ” The Listed One”, then “The Joy Syndrome” and finally “The Women of Vinex”, the neighborhood where she grew up in Amsterdam. She talked about the racism and hatred she suffered from her Dutch neighbors and all these novels are about religion, sex, drugs and depression, which caused the fury of her family and her entourage, until she decided last week to end her life.
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