The 3 best books by Najat El Hachmi

In different interviews in which I have been able to listen to the person behind the author Najat El Hashmi (Nadal Novel Prize 2021) I have discovered the restless spirit that expands towards demanding areas such as feminism or the social integration of different ethnic groups, cultures and religions. Always with that quiet point of reflection, contrast of ideas, critical positioning capable, for example, of inserting it into the full Catalan ideology to get away when the matter returned to the blind adhesion of the procés since 2017.

But the political (with its undeniable sociological aspect on which every intellectual embarks by the fact of being) is in a writer like Najat another vertex, more in a necessarily angular physiognomy to discover new edges and aspects.

And then comes the Literature with capital letters in its case, endowed with that same notion of the vindictive as a line parallel to the own job of narrating. And so their stories appear loaded with that realism at street level, of contexts that sink to the ground. existentialist and they emerge towards the realism most attached to our days, loaded with criticism and conscience, driving the reader towards the empathy of situations necessary to visualize in their entire scenario beyond the easy characterization of our days.

All of this with ethnic aromas that charge their stories with aromas that are increasingly distant and perhaps therefore more longing for that authenticity devastated by globalization that is as uniform as it is exterminating. A necessary voice in a literature necessarily oriented towards humanistic tones.

Top 3 best books by Najat el Hachmi

Mother of milk and honey

Any departure from home is an exile when the path begins from discrepancy or fear. Every look back full of melancholy when the new does not resemble the desired freedom is an existential conflict that points to uprooting, to the completely stateless spirit as desolate as it is brilliant in its possible creative aspect.

Mother of milk and honey It tells in the first person the story of a Muslim woman from the Rif, Fatima, who, now an adult, married and a mother, leaves her family and the town where she has always lived behind, and emigrates with her daughter to Catalonia, where she struggles to move forward. This story narrates the difficulties of this immigrant, as well as the mismatch between everything she has lived through so far, and what she believed in, and this new world. His struggle to move forward and give his daughter a future is also narrated.

Articulated as an oral story in which Fatima returns after years of visiting the family home and tells her seven sisters everything she has experienced,
Mother of milk and honey offers us a deep and compelling insight into the immigration experience from the point of view of a Muslim woman, mother, living alone, without the support of her husband. And at the same time it offers us a complete fresco of what it means to be a woman in the rural Muslim world today.

Mother of milk and honey

The foreign daughter

That something like the term ghetto has survived naturally until today to mark ethnic groups says little about this supposed "alliance of civilizations" or whatever you want to call it. But the fault may not be only of some, the fault is the inability to inhabit other people's skins, on either side of a possible religion, culture or custom.

A girl born in Morocco and raised in a city in the interior of Catalonia reaches the gates of adult life. To the personal rebellion that any young person goes through, she must add a dilemma: leave or stay in the world of immigration.

Something closely linked to the harsh internal conflict that the possibility of breaking the bond with his mother implies. The protagonist of this novel is a brilliant young woman who, upon finishing high school, is torn between accepting an arranged marriage with her cousin and going to Barcelona to develop her talent.

The mother tongue, a variant of Berber, symbolizes the communication difficulties and the identity conflict that the protagonist experiences throughout the story, while reflecting on freedom, roots, generational differences and the complex personal, social and social reality. culture imposed by their immigrant status. Added to this is the difficult access to the world of work faced by today's youth.

A narrative voice full of strength that faces the contradictions that mark his life with honesty, determination and courage; a monologue about the family and the intensity of the emotional ties that bind us to the land, language and culture.

The foreign daughter

The last patriarch

Rooting is not always easy when one's own culture attacks one's essence. On the one hand there is childhood, that paradise that always demands us with aromas of identity, belonging and, above all, love. On the other hand, the vital horizon is always a dawn of intense protest light that sometimes clashes harshly with depending on what cultural conceptions determined to mark with fire the destiny of each one.

Mimoun and his daughter are born to fulfill the roles that the patriarch has assigned them, roles established thousands of years ago. But circumstances lead them to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and come into contact with Western customs. The unnamed protagonist will try to understand why her father has become a despotic figure, while starting a path of no return towards her own identity and freedom.

The last patriarch
5/5 - (16 votes)

2 comments on “The 3 best books by Najat El Hachmi”

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.