Just as Zadie Smith returns to the streets of Kilburn in north London, the scenarios of her childhood and adolescence, with a sense of identification and separation and the importance of class and color, Najat El Hachmi’s fiction revisits the town in the Rif valley where she was born and the backstreets of the Catalan provincial town Vic where she went to live at the age of eight with at once profound attachment and distance. Najat El Hachmi’s breakthrough came with her first novel, The Last Patriarch, that won the national Catalan Ramon Llull Prize for literature, which, when I read it, reminded me of the success of another first novel, White Teeth. They don’t live cheek by jowl with Las Ramblas or refer to Gaudí or Miró at the drop of a hat, rather they are rebellious young women, hypersensitive and self-conscious, fighting to create paths for their lives in a society that expects them to acquiesce to the rule of the male and never question the limited lives tradition (Catholic, Muslim, or secular) prescribes for those born outside the white urban elite. Najat El Hachmi’s narrators speak intensely of their cultural, linguistic, or sexual dislocations and in a Catalan rooted firmly in the traditions of twentieth-century Catalan fiction.
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The Catalan protagonist of The Body Hunter (2011) mentions no bookish points of reference and seems to put all her energies into her work-whether cleaning floors or pizza factories-and her serial one-night stands and affairs, but her quest for tenderness recalls Anaïs Nin’s Diaries and the heroine of Mercè Rodoreda’s In Diamond Square housecleaning to keep her family while her husband is fighting in the Spanish civil war. The young woman in The Foreign Daughter compares herself to Evelyn in Joyce’s Dubliners and later sits in the bathroom reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, reflecting ironically: “Your predicament is headline stuff: ‘Moroccan (?) girl reads Nietzsche shut in the lavatory: does nothing to decide her own life.’” Earlier, she asserts: “I don’t need to reread The Fear of Freedom, I don’t need to analyse my behavior.” The young Moroccan girl in The Last Patriarch (2008) dips into a Catalan dictionary every night-it’s her bedside reading while she ruminates on her father’s rascally behavior. I can think of no other writer in Spain who so delicately and uncomfortably explores the tissues of consciousness-the intricate layers of sensibility and intellect, of cultures and languages-Najat El Hachmi coalesces in the narratives of her female protagonists.
From the cover of the Spanish edition of “The Foreign Daughter” (Destino, 2015).Īn excerpt of Peter Bush’s translation of Najat El Hachmi’s The Foreign Daughter appears in the April 2017 issue: You Will Not Be Born Again: Catalan Literature Now.
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