True friendship, like good wine, needs no introduction. But this year Najat el Hachmi is in charge of inaugurating the Festes de la Mercè, and this gives me the excuse and the opportunity to refer to her work, which is a reflection and container of her critical solidity and his free spirit. So, as in a game of mirrors, I allow myself to dedicate this kind of proclamation or commendation to him, before his speech tomorrow marks the beginning of the festivities in honor of the patron saint of Barcelona.
This city has been a driving force and pillar in his narrative since he reserved an essential role for it in the plot of the title with which he made his debut in fiction, The Last Patriarch, and thus expanded the symbolic and emotional topography of its streets, collecting and interpellating the literary legacy of writers like Rodoreda or Laforet, referents of letters just like her today. Could there be better credentials of Barcelona, ??if such a thing exists?
A city that recognizes itself as tolerant and open to the world must be enriched by disagreement by dialoguing even when reaching a consensus is not always possible, and this is a trait that is part of El Hachmi’s DNA. In other words, it’s better to read first than cancel and mute.
Her first book Jo tambo sóc Catalana (about to turn two decades old), an autobiographical essay in which she addressed her process of cultural and linguistic construction as a migrant girl in a town in Catalonia, coming from another village in a thousand kilometers away, in the Rife region of Nador, he already collected as a manifesto themes that he later developed in novels, columns or interviews: border identity, life as (and in) translation, gender issues or value of the past and legacy, understanding memory as a form of love.
In this inaugural text, subjective and intimate, he pulled the thread of his son’s question: “Am I Catalan, mama?”, and I reproduce this phrase that summarizes El Hachmi’s wide view well: “before you were born, very before you were even conceived, we had decided that we should speak to you in Amazigh…, not out of any patriotic fervor, rather so that you could have one more tool at your disposal to be able to interpret the world”.
In The Last Patriarch he continued to explore the cultural conflict that originates when the traditional expectations of a migrant family of Moroccan origin collide with the influence of the European society in which the daughter grows up, immersed in a process of discovering the his sexuality as opposed to the restrictions imposed on the women around him. Two years later he further defied taboos, and any categorization, with his raw depiction of sexuality in La caçadora de cossos, a novel that deserves a closer reading for its audacity and originality.
Through the voice of the narrator, she demonstrated as an author her will not to satisfy the expectations regarding her literary production and questioned the supposed freedom of women in the West. If he had already shown his discomfort with the biographical interpretation of his first novel, in the reception of this story of female liberation he encountered no little misunderstanding.
In the next two novels, The Foreign Daughter and Mother of Milk and Honey, she again explored the construction of identity in a multicultural context, as well as belonging or corporeality. It is with her manifesto They have always spoken for us when her voice becomes indispensable, and more uncomfortable for some sectors, when rebutting Islamic feminism supported by the left. Her feminism, which has no adjectives, defends equality without conditions and her latest novel, Dilluns en estimaran, is dedicated to “the brave women who left the straight path to be free, even if it hurt”.
The creative thinking of El Hachmi is and will be vital to combat messianic essentialisms and ideologies, own or imported, and embodies this reflection of Montserrat Roig: “The truth, if it exists, is a kaleidoscope that must be recomposed every morning”. Everything is mixed, there is no such thing as purity, we are all strangers, even to ourselves. Robert Lafont expressed it this way in We, the European people: “We are heirs of the Semites and perhaps even of those Nubians of black race who built Egypt. We are Greek for the architectural landscape, Romans for the language and laws, we are Arabs and Jews without a promised land”.
