Scoring the National Hym(e)n: Sexuality, Immigration, and Identity in Najat El Hachmi's L'últim patriarca

Abstract

This essay examines how L'últim patriarca rewrites the story of Peninsular territory and identity, long rendered as a gendered space violated by African invaders. Drawing on Derrida's images of the hymn/ hymen as liminal sites, it explores the complexities of immigrant identity through a focus on language and the body in Amazigh and Catalan cultures in Morocco and Spain. El Hachmi's text undermines the binary structure of identity/difference in Spain/Africa, and problematizes the duality of the border itself by showing the border to multiply in many directions. The latter part of the analysis demonstrates how El Hachmi moves beyond the hymen as the fetish of cultural, gendered, and racial conquest to seek out the further taboo of the anus, the ultimate site of scoring. L'últim patriarca thus maps the back side of Spain as a way of rewriting the anthem of identity and its scoring of and on the female body.