Morocco's Image in the "New" Catalan Literature, or the Power of Identity Thoughts on The Last Patriarch of Najat El Hachmi

Abstract

The relationship between Morocco and Spain has a long historical, political and cultural history. This North-African country, which had a great influence on 20th-century Spanish foreign and domestic politics, frequently appears in Spanish literature as well. In the romantic depictions of the Spanish orientalist literature, Moroccan characters are stereotypical representations of the other, an enemy or a colonized, inferior person. The Moor has no individual features, it is rather a literary topos portrayed from a Spanish point of view, and in Spanish literature even nowadays, words representing different Morrocan ethnic groups appear without any specification as synonyms of the Moorish. Topoi can only be outweighed by new topoi of otherness, which can be created by a new generation of writers from the former colonies. The country and its inhabitants represented by these writers is an auto-representation capable of conveying a more truthful picture of reality than the topoi deeply rooted in European literary tradition. Besides being one of these new auto-representations, Najat El Hachmi’s novel is a very special "identity document" too, because it was written in Catalan by an Amazigh-Catalan mixed-identity author. The last patriarch and the rest of Hachmi’s literary oeuvre traces the contours of a group of people that emigrated from an Arab country to Spain, but it is neither Arab nor trying to become Spanish. It is a literary mirror of the biggest immigration minority in Catalonia, the Amazigh community. It is also a reflection on changing identities that represents the realities of Morocco and Catalonia in Catalan, the language of identification chosen by the author.