The Mercè festival began yesterday with a brilliant, brave, risky, committed, controversial, tongue-in-cheek proclamation… Najat el Hachni gave us a song to the fight for freedom, to the hard sacrifices it entails this fight, regarding the rights of all individuals.
Her vindication of the rights of Muslim migrant women is a glorification of coexistence in a society in which we must all be able to develop as individuals. There is no way to be against this proclamation. No cultural tradition can justify discrimination. Even if they disguise it as atavistic, discrimination is nothing more than a form of exploitation and domination. And excuse the militant tone of these paragraphs. But sometimes, and this is one of them, washing your hands is cowardly.
The appointment of the writer of Moroccan origin and also from Vigata as the announcer of these saraus already unleashed waves of boos and applause a few weeks ago. Some accused her of being Islamophobic, transphobic and also of other very ugly things. Yes, El Hachmi’s considerations on the veil and attention to minors who intend to change sex already attracted a great deal of dust. Others, on the other hand, responded that El Hachmi is nothing more than a brave woman who dares to say what many others remain silent for fear of being censured by the guardians of the essence that lately move so well on the networks social. Woke culture feeds on the virtual cry. And the writer, for her part, what she did was keep quiet, until she went up to the municipal stage.
The expectation yesterday in the Saló de Cent of the council building in Plaça Sant Jaume was maximum. The applause with which the renowned author was received seemed unusually enthusiastic. The Hachmi did not disappoint the eager public. This woman doesn’t move like a fish in water on stage, but the truth is that speaking truths is overwhelming. Excerpts in quotes can never do it justice. I recommend that you watch the broadcast of the speech. You can definitely find it on YouTube.
A proclamation, a good proclamation, must be based on the personal experience of the herald. And he gets to be brilliant when he gets his vicissitudes to help explain those of others. A proclamation aims to portray shared realities, those of a city. Some will feel it more intensely than others, of course, but…
And El Hachmi draws us Barcelona as a scene of freedom, of the freedom he always longed for: who didn’t dream in their youth of leaving the place where they grew up and being told what they were and what they had to do? who hasn’t fantasized about running away to a place where no one knows you and really building yourself up? Barcelona was always the city of second chances, the place to get rid of so many corsets that were put on us and tightened us for so many years.
And this conquest of freedom is sometimes, many times, more than hard, it is traumatic, it hurts, a lot, because it forces you to do much more than just unfasten your corset. Sometimes, many times, the conquest of freedom forces you to break with your origins, to ignore your past, to make a choice, to take a path that, in the end, turns out to be very rocky and thorny. The new world doesn’t exactly make it easy for you either.
“It is very surprising that nowadays defending fundamental rights in Barcelona and not in Tehran is considered controversial”. “Does it bother you that I explain to you that in this city there are girls who cannot learn to swim or go on excursions?”. “What surprises me is that some people are more bothered that we refer to these realities than the realities themselves.” “We are not traitors nor do we deny our origin to desire independence. I will tell you a very hard reality that I have had to learn, if they want us tied, kneeled, cut, modified and fit into a narrow and suffocating mold, then they don’t really love us”. “If the misogynist preachers spend so many hours on the way we dress, it is because it is a very powerful and clear symbol of submission.” “Women’s freedom is so scary that we are often forbidden from things that don’t seem important, things that do not in themselves pose a challenge to the established order.” Actually we are not talking only about migrant women of Muslim tradition. Disagreeing with an injustice makes us complicit in it all.
Yes, the proclamations of the Mercè are usually pronounced surrounded by controversy, but rarely is the response of the crier so forceful. No other, at least in recent years, was dismissed with such emotional and heartfelt applause. For sure, the mayor Jaume Collboni, in his debut in these battles, saw it coming, and in no way wanted to overshadow his proclamation, and in his presentation he limited himself to accompanying her.
“I want to recognize the courage of the women who open doors – stressed the socialist in his speech -, like the soccer players of the Spanish national team”. “We all have the challenge of making Barcelona a fairer city – he said afterwards – and we will all do it together”. “I also want to express my solidarity with all the victims of the war in Ukraine, the migration drama of Lampedusa, the disasters in Morocco and Libya.”
And the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, also took the floor and showed his gratitude. Wars are not won solely on the battlefield.
