Left Behind: Cultural Assimilation and the Mother/Daughter Relationship in Najat EL Hachmi's La hija extranjera (2015)

Abstract

Left Behind:Cultural Assimilation and the Mother/Daughter Relationship in Najat EL Hachmi's La hija extranjera (2015) Catherine Bourland Ross On August 17, 2017, a group of Moroccan immigrants to Spain, led by Abdelbaki Es Satty, killed 15 people on Barcelona's Las Ramblas and injured 130 more ("Catalan questions" 46). The attack generated discussions about Catalan nationalism and Moroccan immigration to Spain. According to The Economist, "[u]nlike Britain or France, Spain has no ministers or political leaders and scarcely any national-team footballers of immigrant extraction. For Muslim and other immigrants to feel they belong, that will have to change" ("Catalan questions" 46). The magazine article points to the social and political changes in the area of immigration in Spain in recent decades. This increase in immigration has caused significant political and social reforms that have transformed Spain into a "new nation," bringing about a new sense of national identity by fundamentally altering, in Benedict Anderson's terms, collective modes of imagining citizenship. Despite progress at the level of national politics, Spain has not witnessed the same degree of progress at the level of cultural representation. Popular representations, including film, books and music, continue to reinforce gender oppression and, more specifically, scapegoat immigrants–especially female immigrants–as sources of disruption and threat to national identity.1 As I will show through my analysis of La hija extranjera by najat El Hachmi, this representational system is both resilient and pervasive. The Moroccan-Spanish writer najat El Hachmi has garnered fame for her works written in Catalan. El Hachmi, born in Beni Sidel, Morocco in 1979, moved to Vic, Catalonia when she was eight years old. In 2004, she published her first book, Jo també sóc catalana, a non-fiction piece that questions the place of an immigrant in Catalonia. Her second book, a novel entitled L'últim patriarca (2008), received multiple [End Page 351] prizes, including the Ramon Llull, the Prix Ulysse and the Prix Méditerranée étranger. She published her second novel, La caçadora de cossos, in 2011. Najat El Hachmi's third novel, La hija extranjera (originally published in Catalan under the title La filla estrangera in 2015), tells the story of an unnamed narrator who, as a child, immigrated with her mother to Catalonia, Spain. The daughter struggles to please her mother, caught between her mother's Moroccan background and Muslim religious beliefs and her own desire to define herself. In order to assimilate into the culture of her adopted country, the narrator of La hija extranjera must negotiate the complicated bonds with her mother and their experiences of discrimination at the hand of Spanish/Catalan compatriots. The central storyline revolves around the daughter's choices to stay with her mother and prove herself to be a good daughter, to the detriment of her own mental wellbeing. This paper analyzes the protagonist's relationship with her mother, her use of language, and the sacrifice of her body in order to illustrate the difficulties the narrator experiences while attempting to define herself outside of the strictures of the mother and her cultural values. By narrating this intercultural and intergenerational struggle, El Hachmi gives voice to Moroccan immigrant women, highlighting the amount of sacrifice inherent to cultural integration, especially for women. I argue here that this novel foregrounds the difficulties of overcoming the stereotypes of (especially Moroccan) Muslims in Spain while also examining the oppressive mother/daughter relationship that influences the narrator's actions. Until recently, Spain has been a country more prone to emigration than immigration (Solé and Parella 121). Isabel Santaolalla explains that the earlier lack of attention given to ethnicity and race in Spain is because "Spain has seen itself . . . as an ethnically homogeneous country" during Franco's dictatorship (55). Before Spain's entrance into the European Union, threats to this urge toward national purity were seen most frequently in the figure of the Spanish gypsy.2 However, since the 1990s, due not only to the influx of immigrants but also due to the unique sociopolitical situation of Spain, the figure of the immigrant is most frequently portrayed by native Spanish authors and directors as other and as a menace...