For the writer Najat El Hachmi (Morocco, 1979) and winner of the 2021 Nadal Prize, any train journey is a kind of story. “I love how the landscape changes, the fact that events unfold.” It was on a specific journey, from Barcelona to Vic, at the age of 8, when she began her own life narrative. She came from very far away, from Beni Sidel (Morocco).
“It shocked me a lot, I had never gotten on a train before. We had spent the night on a ferry, traveled by bus from Malaga to Barcelona and the last journey was the train. It was like arriving at a destination, a completely new life,” recalls the writer of Moroccan origin.
Before that moment, in her child’s eyes, the train had taken on a very particular meaning: that of freedom. “It was one of the few ways to get out of the small town where I grew up, to be in other places where no one knew you. Furthermore, I don’t drive, so the train has always been a bit of that hope in a different world, in a different life, the possibility of going out to anonymity and that freedom in which no one controls what you do or what you don’t. do”, she shares with the journalist Joana Bonet in the series of 12 interviews Women and Travelers of Renfe, boarding a train for which, if we imagine, she only wants one destination: “wherever there is sea”.
Very soon Najat discovered what it was like to feel foreign, “when you are not recognized as an equal, as close, as your own, and when the place you are in and the ways of life of the people are completely foreign to you. You can be in many places that you don’t know, but not feel like a foreigner,” he explains.
A feeling that the writer no longer harbors today. “I think we have that feeling of belonging and roots, above all, with specific people. When we talk about being from a place, we actually mean being from people who are or were in that place. Today, I am very clear that I belong to the people I love and the people who love me.”
The road has not been easy. Throughout her life, there have been many times that she has been uttered the unfortunate phrase “you shitty mora, go to your country.” “It’s the first thing that comes out when they want to reject you. There comes a time when you have to turn a deaf ear to those types of expressions. If you are constantly waiting for rejection, you don’t do what you have to do, you are very conditioned by that discourse.” Her testimony puts a reflection on the table: whether multiculturalism or cultural diversity is better tolerated in Europe than the poverty of immigrants. Najat has a clear answer: “no one tolerates poverty. “It is the thing that is most stigmatized,” she says.
In addition to racism, Najat El Hachmi believes that society has many battles pending. Among them, the one that must end the imposition of aesthetic canons on women. “We have to conquer the right to be as we are, with all our diversity and forms. And to re-appropriate aesthetic enjoyment, of eating, of drinking… We have a pending sexual revolution that dismantles a little the trap of the previous one in which some were freed to enjoy life while the other half of the population was became sexual objects,” warns the writer.
His is a critical voice with the sexist and portraitist culture of two worlds (West and East) that end up forming one. Her stories start from a strong, vibrant core: women seeking independence and liberation. Like her.
Being a writer was her childhood wish. As an adult, she values ??having achieved a goal that was not easy: “for me, writing was liberating, because it was the way in which I put order to what was happening to me. I think it is also a way to understand and comprehend things, something that is not so easy and for which we need instruments.” After making the effort, she received the reward in the form of the 2011 Nadal Prize.
Before there were many others. The first was Ramón Llull in 2008. “It was very difficult for me to accept it, because there are many factors that make you doubt your own ability. In my case, the impostor syndrome that women have was: imposter for a woman, for an immigrant, because no one like you has managed to achieve this… “
But the warrior woman that is Najat El Hachmi did it. Not before throwing away all the veils that, in her own words, “annulled my own identity as an individual being.” And she explains: “I felt humiliated for having ended up in that situation of submission, because you are complying with a patriarchal norm that says that women have to dress in a certain way because they are women, while it does not matter how they dress or let to dress men.” For this reason, Najat El Hachmi emancipated herself. She broke free.
Before, he knew fear at its highest degree. A problem and also the solution itself. “My father scared me more than the imam at the mosque, because the imam could influence what the parents thought, but they were the ones who exercised power within the families. I have become so afraid that it is as if I have saturated all the possibilities of being afraid, so I can’t be afraid anymore.
He also makes a very profound confession: “There comes a time, especially when you get older, when fear no longer serves to curb your desire for freedom, because you realize that the consequences of giving up your own life are “Much worse than the consequences of violating those rules that they are transmitting to you. There came a time when I was more afraid of not living than my father,” he “undresses.”
The novels The Last Patriarch, The Body Hunter, The Foreign Daughter and Mother of Milk and Honey. Her manifesto They have always spoken for us, and her latest book, On Monday They Will Want Us, Nadal Prize 2021… The Moroccan writer enjoys literary prestige, which for her is something very concrete. “My readers are the ones who have helped me the most to heal the wounds of racism. I don’t know if that is prestige or not, but the fact that my readers are interested in the protagonists of my novels, that they access them, that they feel close to them, means breaking down many walls for me. “It has been very therapeutic.”
