Just before the Mercè has returned to Barcelona to impose four days of celebrations, its preacher has settled accounts with her past, that of a young woman who broke with the family to escape the corset of the religion and the patriarchy. Najat el Hachmi has not been afraid to climb up to the doorway of the party, with everything ready for merriment, to warn that the freedom of other young women muslim As she was, she remains alibied and questioned in the capital today. The writer has delivered, perhaps, the most unorthodox, stark and intimate speech in recent years to open the celebrations, called to shake the debate.
Avoiding unanimous applause and with the express intention of causing discomfort, El Hachmi has raised an accusing finger against the sexism and the repression of women in the Islam. “I, who now live a comfortable and free life, cannot act as if I did not know that there is women and girls In this city that suffers, I cannot look away and say nice words to you, not enter into what is often labeled as controversial. It is very surprising that, today, defending fundamental rights, in Barcelona and not in Tehranbe considered controversial”, he has revealed.
“To this day and right here, there are many girls who are forced to make the most painful choice that can be faced by a human being: choosing between freedom or belonging, between being who you are and assuming the price that is imposed on you.” They will make you pay or submit to continue being part of your familyyour group of origin”, he stated. The Hachmi hated the ‘hijab’“a very powerful and clear symbol of submission,” he claimed.
“We have been educated in the idea that if a single hair escaped from the cloth that covers our heads, everything would go to hell and the most terrible storms would be unleashed,” she said. Part of the public has applauded the reproach to the Islamic veil; the rest have remained impassive, perhaps bewildered.
Under the weight of the centuries of the Saló de Cent, the voice of the novelist, born in Morocco -“I grew up in a remote village, in a whitewashed adobe house, built by the rough hands of my grandparents, and this fact fills me with pride like a deep and robust root”-, settled with her parents in Vic being a girl She has declared herself one of “the Moors of the periphery”, one of those who felt that Barcelona was “El Dorado of the independence“, individual emancipation and freedom.” “A place where no one knows us, where no one tells us how long the life is. tunica that cover our pants and if we have put on more or less mascara or have talked to a Christian boy”, he charged.
The Hachmi has thrown himself earnestly into a diatribe without palliatives, a scourge against all temporization. “Women’s freedom is so scary that they often prohibit us from things that do not seem important, things that do not in themselves pose a challenge to the established order,” she postulated in the speech, her response to the controversy that has accompanied her. in recent months, since she was chosen to be the first speaker of the Jaume Collboni era in the Town hall.
Reflecting the conflicting passions that it has aroused, two small groups of supporters and detractors have gathered in the Plaza de Sant Jaume: while a platoon feminist He chanted that the novelist represents him, members of the trans collective called the preacher “transphobic.” Incisive against the Trans Law, El Hachmi has skirted that garden this time; On the other hand, he has immersed himself fully in the orchard of faith, stripping away a discourse for which, in other interventions, he was labeled as Islamophobic.
“Annoying” voices
Without a doubt, El Hachmi has not been content to simply welcome the celebrations, although he has praised the macerated Barcelona with “the thick sediment” of literature, that of Mercè Rodoreda and Carmen Laforet, the one from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Montserrat Roig and Maruja Torres, also that of Joan Salvat-Papasseit. “He often reminds me to let him kiss me and kiss me too,” he commented on the poet, still reverberating with the global echo of the ‘Rubiales case’. Later, El Hachmi has discussed that he be associated with the voice choir “uncomfortable” and “conflicting, even annoying.”
“Does it bother you that I explain that there are girls in this city who can’t learn to swim or go on hikes? -has been torn off- Who grow up believing that they will only be valuable if they are covered? Does it bother you that I tell you that there are teenagers worried about your virginityyoung women who love forbidden people with guilt and paying the price of exile familiar? Don’t you like it when I tell you that there are women who make an effort to present the certificate of good conduct by dressing decent (what they now call “modest fashion”) to have the right to leave the house? What are there girls terribly scared faced with the possibility of being taken to Morocco or Pakistan and marry them to that cousin who needs papers? Does all that bother you? Well, imagine how uncomfortable it makes them.”
El Hachmi, neighbor of Eixample -“no, I do not live nor have I ever lived in the Raval”-, has testified that, when he discovered it as a university student, Barcelona symbolized his “modest aspirations of freedom”. “They even ended up prohibiting me because a woman alone in the world was an unusual event in my life.” family and, in the end, I had no choice but to breaking off”, he recalled. Torrential, has refused to “look the other way.” “Enough of sacrificing lives of girls and women in the name of I don’t know what understanding of civilizations and cultures“, in the name of an idea of inclusion that once again expels us, women, from the condition of full-fledged human beings,” she snapped, raising her voice. The author has attracted more unanimity when she has gone out of the script that she had written to condemn “sexual exploitation.” “It’s not a job, it’s a nightmare,” she concluded.
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The invective has reached the “self-proclaimed spokespersons of the invented communities” of immigrants, just as the writer has labeled them: “We want to live with the same rights that the rest of the citizens, have guaranteed dignity minimum to feel part of the human species and at home we will see if we make couscous or Paella, ‘tall rolled’ or ‘tajine’. Because we aspire to be citizens and not town or tribe or community or believers or identity”.
To conclude, El Hachmi has appealed to the young women to go through the plight that he has reported that he experienced. He has called on them not to be “deceived”; nor give in to a “blackmail unfair”. “You have the right to be who you are and aspire to live free because none of us were born to submit. We are not traitors nor do we renounce our origin for wanting independence,” the crier proclaimed, before announcing that Barcelona “will be the city of freedom.” if it “protects, promotes, disseminates and guarantees the rights of girls and women.” “As it has been for me,” she concluded.