When Najat El Hachmi published her magnificent essay They have always spoken for us (2019, Ed 62) and I invited her to present it at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), that autumn, a part of the faculty in the field of migrations wanted to stand out, So we were only two research groups who took our students to an auditorium where half the seats were empty.
It's not that they disagreed with the content; They knew, precisely because they know the terrain, that only very well-founded truths were being told, and questions full of reason were raised about political responsibility, especially among progressive forces, towards the violation of the rights of women in Muslim contexts and the contradictions of a fictitious democratic coexistence.
The spurious argument of hatred that has hijacked the rational debate of ideas had not yet fully invaded us, but in 2019 hypocritical arguments such as "they could brand us Islamophobia" and "we would be playing the game of the extreme right" were already used. . Or, on the more cynical side, "there are more voices within Islam itself, such as Islamic feminism", an oxymoron that would make people laugh in other circumstances.
That was said by some who had liked the reflection and denunciation of Jo també sóc catalana (2004, La Butxaca) more than the harshness and firmness of El último patriarca (2008, Planeta), without having read anything about feminism in any type, assuming there is more than one, given the possibility of giving voice to Najat El Hachmi. Frightened and bothered at the same time by what they will say, given the possibility of a one-hour session on an essay on a topic on the program with its author and discuss it later in class!
Because? Because she does not fit the role of "integrated immigrant" who repeats the song satisfied with the welcoming capacity of Catalonia, nor with that of the daughter of a Muslim family who points out the racism of the receiving society. It turns out that we are talking about an adult female human being who thinks for her and passes everything through his privileged sieve. A writer who does not shy away from the critical commitment of a secular and progressive intellectual. Unlimited.
Najat El Hachmi speaks, and speaks clearly. Against institutionalized and institutionalized racism that puts up material and symbolic barriers to the possibility of accessing a dignified life and respect for the rights that all people have, wherever they come from. But also against what she rightly calls "the misogynistic international", positioned against all kinds of patriarchy, whatever the ideology or religion that imposes it.
From a feminist conscience, neither does she spare criticism of the traps of a false liberation that condemns us to the search for an impossible perfection, and that traps us women again when we thought that we almost had equality within reach... I don't even know it saves them, of course, against the bizarre idea that men can be women just by saying so, even though a law now protects them, and with the tragic consequences that this has for girls and boys.
Najat El Hachmi is a public voice, she brilliantly writes in Catalan and Spanish stories that move us in today's complex, diverse and unequal society, and she has not been seen communing with any identity millstone. A milestone that we, the citizens of Catalonia, will never appreciate enough, still exhausted with the hangover of the process, scarce as we are of balms that allow us to think and dialogue to restore coexistence.
An adolescent Najat was already writing in the mid-nineties, in an essay that she gave me permission to quote in a little book I made for the European Year Against Racism: "I don't understand why my brothers have to accompany me to the library if they don't I like to read". But the winner of the 2021 Nadal Prize, and of many others, confessed: "They wouldn't let me go out, but they didn't realize that I was locked in with books, the most dangerous tool for learning to think". What a joy to have it, and I hope Catalonia understands what it has to do to unleash all the talents of the Najats!
For feminists, the fact that the new government of the Barcelona City Council has appointed Najat El Hachmi to announce the Fiestas de la Mercè 2023 gives us the first joy of the last three and a half years, after so much desolation, while we see how the alliance between neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy, now to submit us infiltrated in the left. A bit of hope that we will know how to take advantage of, thanking her for agreeing to speak, because surely she does it for all of us, censored and persecuted in this nightmare legislature that has ended, in which we have regressed in rights for the first time since the dictatorship.
Those who do not want Najat to speak are those who do not want to speak freely, as Joan Fuster would say. They are old voices of universal misogyny: only the clothes and accessories change. And those who give in and remain silent are the ones who have always allowed barbarism to take hold in the history of humanity. In the university, institutions and society.
S. Carrasco. Professor of Anthropology at the UAB and president of Feministes de Catalunya
