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ABSTRACT
This paper situates the work of Najat El Hachmi within the context of Spanish-Moroccan literature and seeks to highlight the complex variety of texts and ideas of belonging that result from Moroccan migration to Spain. In contrast to other Moroccan writers residing in Spain, El Hachmi does not write in Spanish, but in Catalan. Her texts do not focus on the nostalgia for the home country or the problems of living between two cultures that characterize the works of some other Spanish-Moroccan and Amazigh-Catalan writers, but instead convey a new sense of belonging by describing the emotional estrangement from Morocco and reconfiguring of a Catalan identity. Moreover, her work cannot be confined exclusively to an autobiographical account of the migration experience. Rather, in L'últim patriarca [The Last Patriarch] and La filla estrangera [The Foreign Daughter] she uses that experience to emphasize broader issues of human existence, and in La caçadora de cossos [The Body Hunter] she goes even beyond this topic.
Since the publication of her first novel, L'últim patriarca [The Last Patriarch], Najat El Hachmi has captured the attention of the media and of literary scholars. She is one of the best-known examples of what can be labeled generally as Spanish-Moroccan literature, a body of work written in Spanish and Catalan by authors of Moroccan origin who share the experience of migration, "reject the idea of monolithic identities" (Ricci, "African Voices" 203), and question national borders. As Campoy-Cubillo observes, there is so far no definite term to designate this corpus, in contrast to "the Littérature Beur in the case of France, or the Commonwealth Literature in the case of England" ("Review" 201). Ana Rueda locates El Hachmi's work within the context of what she calls "literatura sobre la migración hispano-marroquí" 'Hispano-Moroccan literature about migration' (10), a genre that contributes to the "apreciación de la diferencia" 'appraisal of difference' (10) and is characterized by a set of recurring motifs and tropes (the travel journey as a structural element of the narration; the sea, the ghost, and the border as common metaphors; the bridge between cultures and the idea of the homeland as a lost paradise as important motifs, among others).1 Within Hispano-Moroccan literature, Rueda emphasizes the role of immigrants in Catalonia, who, like...