El último patriarca
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
3.
How is political conflict directly represented in novels?
Najat
el Hachmi. El
último patriarca.
(2008, Morrocco)
Supporting References:
- Blog: http://downunder-literatura.blogspot.com/2012/02/resena-lultim-patriarca-de-najat-el.html
Serpent’s Tail; Paperback; 306 pages; ISBN 9781846687174; RRP £9.99
Published April 29th 2010
Najat El-Hachmi’s debut novel, The
Last Patriarch (L’últim patriarca in Catalan), is
effectively three stories in one: simultaneously a trauma narrative
of abuse, an immigration narrative and a female bildungsroman. As a
bestseller in Spain and the worthy winner of the prestigious Ramon
Llull Prize in 2008 – which, at ninety thousand Euros last year, is
the most renumerative prize in Catalan letters –its UK publishers,
Serpent’s Tail, are keen to repeat that success over here. The
Moroccan born El-Hachmi emigrated as a child with her family to
Catalonia, and her previous work, the autobiographical I Too Am
Catalan (Jo també sóc catalana, 2004) shares similar
concerns to The Last Patriarch: questions of assimilation
and integration; hybridity and border transgressions; and the
construction of diasporic identities.
Narrated entirely from the perspective
of Mimoun Driouch’s unnamed daughter, who will eventually escape
the violence and sexual abuse of her despotic father (the last
patriach of the title), the text is also concerned with cultural and
imagined histories, and the importance of origin stories. El-Hachmi
satirises and plays with these modes as much as she imitates them:
the opening chapter, entitled ‘A long-awaited son’, charts the
birth of Mimoun and comically begins ‘On that day, after three
daughters, a first son was born to Driouch of Allal of Mohammed of
Mohand of Bouziane, etc.’.
Split into two halves, totalling
thirty-nine vignette-like chapters, the first half tells the story of
Mimoun’s birth, childhood including his fratricide and sexual abuse
by his uncle, his marriage, and his emigration to Catalonia,
detailing throughout the violence, sexual abuse and rape he inflicts
on the women around him. His daughter makes explicit her unreliable
narration and her imagined reconstruction of his past in her desire
for a cultural history: the events are frequently prefaced with
‘probably’; ‘We expect…’; ‘it isn’t beyond the realm of
probability that…’; and ‘He must have felt like…’. This
deliberate fictionalisation later becomes a mode of repressing
trauma: ‘As my memories seemed so unreal I have no choice but to
turn it all into fiction’. The text is unstinting in its depiction
of domestic and sexual abuse: Mimoun’s cousin ‘felt him
lacerating her flesh with the chains they used to tie the dog up in
the outside yard’ and he plagues his daughter with ‘those
tennis-ball-thud kisses’. At times these unrelenting descriptions
feel a little over-done and Mimoun risks becoming a caricature,
detracting from the clear, concise narration and characterisation
elsewhere.
The narrative details the problems
Mimoun faces as a Moroccan in what he calls ‘Barciluna’. His
patriarchal authority is considerably diminished by his estrangement
in a different culture, where he ‘understood very little of what
people said’, resulting in alcoholism and more adultery. After his
boss can’t pronounce his name, he becomes ‘Manel’ and
eventually starts a business in a culture he doesn’t understand:
‘Construcciones Manel SA. I don’t know what the S and the A stand
for, but it’s what you have to put if you want to look like a real
company’.
It is these questions of assimilation
and the enaction of the cultural script that El-Hachmi is able to
insightfully explore in the second half, when the narrator and her
family join their father in Catalonia. Interweaving these two
narratives of sexual and domestic abuse, and the oppression of the
immigrant, along with the growing self-awareness of the protagonist
herself, generates a rich hybrid text, replete with a litany of daily
prejudices.
The issue of homelessness and
displacement is a common trope in immigrant narratives but the
narrator’s solution to this is unusual: she ‘started to read the
dictionary’, and Catalan words and their definitions soon come to
punctuate the narrative and conclude chapters, such as ‘Daci,
dàcia, an adjective, dació, an action and dacita,
a rock’. Her progress through the dictionary becomes a means of
delineating and learning to read her experiences:
I was probably at C in the dictionary
when Father took us to meet Isabel. Ca is a dog. Or ca,
the letter K. Or ca short for house, a ca l’Albert,
for example, to Albert’s house, or a ca la ciutat,
to the city.
As the protagonist is learning that ‘it
wasn’t normal for your father to bite your knees when you’re
growing up’, she is simultaneously becoming acculturated
to her new home. References to Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth, The Simpsons, and Whoopy
Goldberg (purposefully spelt wrong?) in The Colour Purple
start to appear, as well as references to the writers Víctor Català
and Mercè Rodoreda, which root the text in the Catalan literary
tradition. This voluntary hybridisation is entirely opposed to the
discourse her father enforces on her and her brothers, making them
‘repeat what [he] forced us to say’, recording false testimonies
of their mother’s alleged infidelity on tapes to send to their
Moroccan grandparents. This acculturation increases throughout the
second half of the novel, with chapters titled ‘Nocilla,
Super Mario and sex’, and culminates in the daughter’s break away
from her family. The well-written, shocking conclusion didn’t
however convince this reader of the ‘revenge’ of the chapter’s
title, but rather suggests the legacy of trauma that childhood abuse
leaves behind.
The questioning of dominant discourses
may well account for the book’s popularity in Catalunya. The
resurgence of Catalan literature and the reclamation of Catalan,
after years of repression under Franco, has marked Catalan as culture
of resistance. El-Hachmi here forces Catalans to hold a mirror up to
themselves, writing in Catalan and challenging them to imagine those
subdominant, often immigrant discourses within Catalunya.
The story itself, of triumph over a
domineering father figure and the difficulties of immigrant life, is
not particularly innovative, but its resonances within a culture
defined by its own cultural and linguistic oppression make this a
particularly interesting immigrant narrative. The subnarrative of the
story – the legacy of Franco, known as the Patriarch – will not
have passed Catalan readers by. Equally they will be aware of the
colonial history of Spain’s claims over Morocco. The history of
oppression of Moroccan migrants in Spain here becomes a type of
‘writing back’, as Moroccan-Spanish authors claim a cultural
inheritance.
The British publishers of this text,
however, seem keen to reduce this complex text to simple polarities,
as the back cover blurb of the proof copy tells us this ‘powerful
saga of a Moroccan family’ is about ‘the conflict between duty
and desire, set in rural Morocco and urban Catalunya’. This,
combined with the faux-Arabic letters of the English chapter headings
– a touch that will no doubt annoy postcolonialist critics –
means the book is more likely to be read as a popular text of
self-discovery and liberation, rather than as a nuanced postcolonial
narrative of the impacts of domestic and sexual abuse, and of
migration, both for migrants and host communities, and an example of
how immigrants in Catalunya insert themselves into the dominant
discourse, albeit it in what is considered a minority language.
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