Racialized, emigrant (she was born in Nador, Morocco, in 1979), feminist and with several big literature prizes. Some round credentials to offer you the proclamation of La Mercè 2023, thought the new mayor Jaume Collboni. But not. The Observatory against Homophobia, followed by the lgtbi entity ACATHI, the Unit Against Fascism and Racism and the Trans Platform, requested their cancellation for ‘terf’ (trans-exclusionary feminist) and Islamophobe. And she, faced with the passage of the front that has lasted all summer, has limited herself to opening the umbrella of silence.
Not having a bit of controversy before the ‘speach’ at the Saló de Cent almost takes away from the crier’s cachet. Manuela Carmena, former mayor of Madrid, had a fight for her opinion on the prisoners of the ‘procés’. Javier Pérez Andujar, critical of the “Catalan political drift”, was ‘counterprogrammed’ by Toni Albà (he accused him of “insulting” the independentists); already Elvira Lindo 90 associations and ERC rebelled against him for using Spanish.
El Hachmi, who always thought that “self-censorship for fear of accusations of intolerance is never a good idea” and has not avoided getting into gardens, was not going to be any less. He did not hesitate to point out the “absurdity” of seeking equality between mothers and fathers during maternity leave – he has two children -, he has shown discomfort with “the excesses of political correctness” and, yes, he has questioned in his trans law articles (“I find the possibility of a 14-year-old boy or girl being abandoned to their fate in everything related to their sexual identity terrifying.”wrote).
Embodied knowledge
As for his “Islamophobia”, we have to look in ‘They have always spoken for us’ (2019), her denunciation of patriarchy in Islam and her criticism of those who see white feminism as a form of colonialism. El Hachmi distances himself from “entrenched identities” and, most importantly, speaks from experience.
It was a amazig girl transplanted in Vic, where the first thing she saw on TV were Sabrina Salerno’s breasts. With that rare initiation to freedom, she wrote about her desire in high school and her people withdrew her word. He did not want to belong to an immigrant association, but rather “to one of neighbors” (without success) and, when he had already been in Catalonia for 17 years, when looking for a rental apartment, he kept running into owners who told him: “It’s just that you you put 10 in a flat”. A handful of violent hierarchies to deal with.
He told part of this about his literary debut, ‘Jo també soc catalana’ (2004) –a work aimed “at those who fill their mouths with immigration and have only seen one immigrant from afar”–. Had 25 years old, she was a cultural mediator for the Vic city council and did not condemn the use of jihab. “Focusing on what people have or don’t have in their heads is pissing out of order.” -said-. “You cannot expect to save, in a paternalistic way, the poor Moritas from the yoke of their husbands.” It was a question of labor rights, truly emancipatory ones. But, later, she realized the growing re-Islamization process, fueled by countries like Saudi Arabiaand defined the veil as “a traveling prison”.
From the gap
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This is not the case of the climber who lowers the arms of intersectionality as soon as her checking account goes up. Nor a model of integration, which involves crying out loud for blurring who he was. Hachmi thinks from the interstice, the outside, permanent relocation. And in that somewhat ‘schizophrenic’ place the concepts of race, gender and sex – which are the ones that populate his literature since ‘L’últim patriarch’ (2008) – tend to collide, twist, not fit into the matrix.
El Hachmi will be the herald of a Barcelona that, at the beginning, for her was only the city where I was going to stand in line to get papers, which he later built through reading Mercè Rodoreda, Montserrat Roig and Josep Pla, and in which he ended up registering. “Those who, when fighting for a noble cause, arm themselves with the same artillery as lifelong intolerant people to destroy those who think differently are not defending real freedom with deep and robust roots because freedom is either for everyone or “It’s not for anyone,” he shot from the parapet of his ‘El País’ column in August.