Treachery.

Treachery is not always born of ambition or greed. Sometimes it is the result of displacement, of living between worlds, identities, and loyalties. In The Ogress of Fez, Oum El Hassen’s collaboration with the French colonial authorities is a betrayal shaped by her own position as an outsider. As an Algerian in 1930s Morocco, she occupied a liminal space, never fully belonging. Her betrayal was of the very sense of home and identity she could never quite claim.

What makes her actions more unsettling is not merely that she turned informant but whom she turned against. The women she murdered. Many were Algerian like herself, part of the same displaced world. They shared her language, history, and struggle, yet she exercised over them the same brutality that the colonial regime imposed on their people. In wielding power, she mirrored the violence of those she served, severing the very bonds that might have anchored her.

Oum’s collaboration with the French was a means of survival but also an assertion of control in a system designed to deny her any. To be an outsider in a colonised land is to live in constant negotiation, choosing between complicity and resistance, between safety and solidarity. Her position was, in my view, not one of clear-cut loyalty or betrayal but of adaptation, shaped by the pressures of a world where power belonged to those who aligned with it.

Frantz Fanon wrote of how colonialism fractures identity, forcing the colonised into an impossible space of alienation. Oum, as an Algerian in Morocco, already existed within that fracture. Her collaboration was both a betrayal to her North African brethren but it deepened her own displacement, pulling her further from any sense of belonging. The irony is that in seeking to survive, she aligned herself with a force that could never truly accept her. Her power over the women in her brothel was a distorted reflection of the very oppression she sought to escape.

Her story is not just one of complicity but of moral erosion. She did not merely act as an agent of colonial rule; she internalised its structures, becoming both enforcer and victim. The women she should have seen as kin became casualties of her pursuit of power. The murders she committed were acts of self-erasure, severing her from the shared history and identity that bound them together.

In the end, Oum’s treachery is both deeply personal and profoundly tragic. She did not just betray others, she betrayed herself. And her story highlights to me the corrosive effects of colonialism, where survival can come at the cost of identity, and where power, once seized, can consume those who hold it.