When Míriam Hatibi (Barcelona, 1993) was studying at school, she took advantage of the free-theme assignments that were sent to her in class to start researching those issues that interested her in Islam and the Arab world. They were not subjects of study at the religious school in which her parents had enrolled her and for her, the daughter of Moroccans who arrived in Catalonia in the eighties – already a couple of decades earlier many people who had arrived well had begun to settle in this region. from France and with roots in Morocco, or from Morocco directly-, it was important to learn more about the other half of their world: one was Catalan, Spanish, and the other Moroccan. They coexisted perfectly in it, as she explains in her book ‘Look into my eyes. It is not so difficult to understand each other’ (Plaza & Janés) but she lacked information.
As he also lacked literary references with surnames like his. They weren’t in his textbooks. So she would go to the library and look at ‘AL’ and ‘H’ “because she knew that there would be Arabic surnames and she was crazy to find any good ones.” In this way she found ‘Comets in the sky’ by Khaled Hosseini. Today, a couple of decades after what he recounts in his book, it would cost him much less to find literary references and some much closer would come out: only in Catalonia are there a good handful of authors in Catalan and Spanish, they win prizes and they attract readers and it is not that they narrate the lives of ‘others’, but rather those of a large part of the Catalan population. Najat El Hachmi, Laila Karrouch, Safia El Aaddam, Nadia Hafid, Saïd El Kadaoui, Youssef El Maimouni. The explanation is simple: these citizens of Moroccan descent have been in Catalonia for a long time and are the largest community among those who have their family origins abroad.
Survive
“It’s a matter of time,” say Youssef El Maimouni, a writer, and Blanca Rosa Roca, his editor. «And it is a matter of chance and causality at the same time. You see that the neighbor has dared and it has turned out well and that motivates you to write and contact a publishing house for you too”, continues the author of ‘When the mountains walk’, about “Franco’s Moors”, and “No one save the roses’, or how to survive on the street as a young transgender woman recently arrived from Casablanca; both novels are published by Roca Editorial and are the first two installments of what she calls her discrimination trilogy. The next one, if all goes well, will be a “dystopia that dialogues with what Houellebecq does but with a more left-wing, non-conservative and Islamophobic component. What would happen if a very dandruff ultra-right with a significant racist component were to govern here and once again impose limitations on freedoms and rights? He doesn’t know yet. “I’m on it. I have to do a lot of research.”
What he does know is what often happens when a young Moroccan arrives in Catalonia to look for a life: that if he doesn’t have a network of contacts, he ends up sleeping on the asphalt. “In Barcelona we have a beach, so he’s lucky it’s on the sand,” he jokes. El Maimouni is a social educator and has worked with this group, the one that stars in ‘Nobody saves the roses’. There is indeed a crime novel, of social denunciation; If, as they say, the genre has to focus on the shadow areas of our reality, it more than complies with that maxim. «If you are a minor, and the police stop you, you enter the circuit for the protection of minors. The big problem we see is when they are older and the Administration is no longer obliged to protect people. It is a population for which there are hardly any resources. Or they turn 18 and go to the streets »
Rihanna, the transgender girl who suffered discrimination in her country and came to Barcelona to live free, begins the novel being tortured. Her roommate and a social educator will take it upon themselves to discover what has happened. Is everything real? «There is a component of autofiction and autofiction has a commitment to verisimilitude, to narrating what is credible, and in my case with the truth. The fictionalized parts start from a truth, they are stories that have been explained to me, that have reached me, that I have read. Almost everything is real. A book is a kind of political artifact, hence that obligation and that need. This man is pessimistic and even self-destructive and criticizes society, also towards upbringing, the fact that there are so many orphans all over the world and so many young people without adult accompaniment, there is a ‘baby-boom’. He is someone who has just become a father and has lost hope in the social world and altruism.
“They have been trained here and their culture is Catalan or Spanish, but they also have their roots,” says editor Blanca Rosa Roca
There is another theme that sneaks into ‘Nobody saves the roses’ -and that has already been dealt with, although more from the autobiographical essay than from fiction, by other of his colleagues- with which the narrator is very critical: that of “second generation immigrants”, which is an impossible thing. «I came with two weeks, nobody asked me if I wanted to immigrate or not. I have grown up here, I have not gone through any immigration process. But we are considered children of immigrants. It’s a component that you keep dragging around. Society places you in a place that will always be foreign, strange. That alterity, being the other, and the other in a lower link », he explains.
They are not the other, remember. They are part of a society that is much more diverse than what is still conveyed in most fictions, be they books, movies, or series. «Day after day television fiction and the media show us a normality that does not exist. A normality in which everyone responds to the pattern of Spanish or white Spanish”, writes Hatibi. The reality is different, it has other names, in all fields because “these people were either born or raised here from a very young age, they have been trained here, their culture is Catalan or Spanish and they also take their roots into account,” he says. the editor of Roca, which has also published the illustrator Nadia Hafid (Terrassa, 1990), the one behind the comics ‘El buen padre’ and ‘Jackales’.
Ivan Mata
In Catalan and Spanish
The best-known name for the Spanish reader continues to be, without a doubt, Najat El Hachmi. She was born in Nador at the end of the seventies, she arrived in Catalonia at the age of eight, graduated in Arabic Philology and in 2004 she became known with a book that reinforces what the editor says: ‘I am also Catalan’. Written in Catalan, like much of her work. In this autobiographical text, she spoke about her experience as an immigrant, about identity, language, religion, women, the feeling of loss towards Morocco… something that appears in other of her proposals. Just four years later, she won the Ramon Llull prize, with ‘The Last Patriarch’. And after ‘The body hunter’, ‘The foreign daughter’, ‘Mother of milk and honey’ and the essay ‘They have always spoken for us’, she won the Nadal with ‘They will love us on Monday’.
In the Catalan language, with much less repercussion in Spanish, there is Laila Karrouch, who in addition to writing is a nurse. In the same year that El Hachmi debuted, she published ‘De Nador a Vic’ and then came ‘Petjades de Nador’ and ‘Que Al·là em perdoni’. The psychologist Saïd El Kadaoui Moussaoui, for his part, has lived in Catalonia since he was 7 years old and apart from having specialized in mental health in immigrants, refugees and minorities, he is the author of ‘No’, the portrait of these children of immigrants from the Maghreb who They have lived in a world very different from that of their parents… and have encountered the same problems as any inhabitant of this society.
There are more names and not all of them come from Catalonia. Now you can also read, for example, the professional misadventures of ‘Supersaur’, by the Canarian author Meryem El Mehdati, and works such as ‘Un solar abandonado’ and ‘El invierno de los jilgueros’ (Málaga Essay Award), by Mohamed El Morabet , who was born in Al Hoceima but lives in Madrid.
“More is translated from Danish than Arabic literature,” laments Youssef El Maimouni
So yes, it seems that it is a matter of time before there will be more voices to portray a more diverse society and proposing different topics, and that the Spanish still prefer to look outside than listen to those inside. “We are light years from neighboring countries,” says El Maimouni, who gives the French case as an example, where there are many authors whose origins are on the other side of the Mediterranean, and works by Arab creators are also translated. That is why Meryem El Mehdati, growing up, decided to “look at France. I looked at Abdelá Taia and Mohamed Mrabet, although Mrabet has not come to write as such but rather orally transmitted his stories to Paul Bowles. Also in Leila Slimani, already at the university ». Translations into French by Zakirat el Jassad, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Fatima El Mernissi, Mohammed Chukri or Tahar Ben Jelloun, these are some of his references.
“There is a lack of interest, starting with the fact that more is translated from Danish than from the entire Arab world when the difference in readership is huge,” he says. «And you see it when you send a manuscript or want to deal with certain topics. My first novel, the one about Franco’s Moors, was rejected by a publisher because he told me, and I thank him, that it was a thorny issue for both the left and the right. That I was not going to have literary space and means. That made me open my eyes: I was doing what I wanted, dealing with uncomfortable topics and opening debates. El Mehdati wonders “why this editor or publishing house believes that he is not interested, especially if we take into account that what apparently ‘does not interest’ has won prizes such as the Goncourt on several occasions.” She admits herself lucky: “I found a publisher and a publisher who did not limit me to the place where my parents were born or the religion I profess, but they took me seriously and respected me a lot from the beginning” to end up publishing a story about «the problems of the world of work derived from tourism, those suffered by the working class, either in their jobs or in their neighborhoods».