la mente es un sistema elaborador de modelos

del Diamant

In this section, I will illustrate how El Hachmi uses her vision of “border thinking” to break down the oppositional dichotomy between “Catalans” and

“Moroccans” in her first novel, L’últim patriarca. I argue that this novel, while initially seeming to reinforce notions of essential difference between Catalan and Moroccan cultures, actually undermines that other-ing in a profound way. The central tool El Hachmi uses to accomplish this is her reconfiguration of Mercè Rodoreda’s classic novel, La plcaça del diamant. El Hachmi’s novelistic tribute to Rodoreda confounds the reader’s desire to view Catalan and Moroccan societies as dramatically different, instead

showing these two cultures to look like mirror images of each other. Gender, in

particular, becomes the axis around which El Hachmi’s transnational critique revolves: although Muslims in Europe are too often imagined as inassimilable because of

perceptions of their cultures as excessively patriarchal, El Hachmi’s novel forces her Catalan (and Spanish, and European) readers to acknowledge the other of patriarchy within their own societies, and within themselves.

L’últim patriarca, published in 2008, narrates the story of the Driouch family’s migration from northern Morocco to a small city in Catalonia. The plot revolves around two main characters: Mimoun, the extremely oppressive, overbearing family patriarch, and his unnamed daughter, the novel’s first person narrator, who gradually liberates

herself from his tyrannical grasp. Beginning at Mimoun’s birth, the novel portrays Mimoun as unrelentingly obsessed with masculine power. Although harshly treated by his father as a youth, he is spoiled by his mother and sisters. As a toddler, he kills his baby brother, and considers his other younger brother to be his “rival número u” (“rival number one”) throughout his whole life (19/11).7 _{His female relatives attribute his}

outrageous behavior to childhood experiences: some say a particularly hard slap from his father marked him forever; others suspect it was the trauma of being sexually abused by his maternal uncle as a boy that made him such a volatile, aggressive adult. As an adolescent, Mimoun becomes promiscuous with women, despite strict traditional norms about gender segregation in public spaces. Once he marries, he is determined to control the behavior of his wife and daughter at all costs. He even becomes irrationally

convinced that his wife was unfaithful to him and that his daughter might have been conceived by another man, despite no evidence of this whatsoever. The hypocrisy of his accusations is stunning, given that he has multiple extramarital affairs and makes no attempt to hide them.

The novel’s second half, which begins when Mimoun’s wife and children (including the narrator) join him in Catalonia, narrates the exacerbation of his physical and psychological abusiveness, as well as his family’s growing resistance to it. Upon

moving to Catalonia, the child narrator immerses herself in the task of learning the Catalan language and in reading, in large part to escape the difficult reality of a father who constantly beats and torments her mother (and, eventually, the narrator herself as well). As a young adult, the narrator propels herself into an unhealthy relationship with a young man, also of Moroccan origin. This relationship evolves into a marriage, despite her parents’ objections. However, her ultimate act of resistance against both her husband and father is not only to leave her husband, but also to have an incestuous sexual

encounter with her father’s brother—that is, his “rival number one.” This extreme act of defiance constitutes a final, devastating blow to Mimoun’s attempts to control her. Her rebellion is further intensified by her discovery of literary writing toward the novel’s end and her consequent decision to write a novel—which, we may imagine, is the very novel we have just finished reading.

On a first reading, the centrality of the female narrator’s resistance to Mimoun’s glaring misogyny might lead readers to conclude that this novel’s primary goal is to critique the patriarchal social order which, presumably, is deeply embedded into traditional Berber and Moroccan societies, and to constrast this apparently archaic, primitive culture with the “modern” world of Catalonia (and Europe). Such a reading would suggest that the novel glorifies Catalonia for its ability to “integrate” migrants while “liberating” oppressed migrant women. In fact, even the term “misogyny” does not seem to fully capture the extent of Mimoun’s violent treatment of women, given the

extreme degree of physical, psychological and sexual abuse he inflicts on numerous female characters (which not only includes beatings, jealousy, and infidelity, but also rape) over the course of the novel. As Dieter Ingenschay points out, even though Mimoun suffers terrible abuse as a child and is therefore “a victim of his society” along with the women he abuses, El Hachmi does not present his behavior as morally

justifiable (67). On the contrary, the clear resistance the female narrator demonstrates to her father’s tyranny, which is especially manifest in her “symbolic killing” of the

patriarch at the novel’s end, articulates a definitive rejection of his patriarchal obsessions (67).

Although Mimoun is perhaps somewhat humanized by his personal suffering, especially during his youth, it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to divorce his egregious misogyny from larger discourses and cultural perceptions of Moroccan and Muslim masculinity in contemporary Europe. Specifically, Mimoun’s hypermasculinity invites us to reflect about how “gender equality” is often used as a justification for

differentiating Europe from the Islamic world. Recalling Flesler’s argument that Spaniards (and Catalans) have responded to Moroccan immigration by “trac[ing] clear frontiers between the ‘Moors’ and themselves” (9), we must also consider Deniz Kandiyoti’s observation that “Gender appears as the ultimate frontier, the impermeable boundary” that is used to distinguish the Muslim world from the European (32). Specifically, as Rikke Andreassen and Doutje Lettinga note,

European cultural and media discourses have represented Muslim immigration as dangerous by stirring fears of “a fundamentalist and patriarchal Islam encroaching upon a Europe marked by values of gender equality” (21). Such discourse, they write, uses perceptions of gender liberation in Europe in order to “counterpos[e] a backward and dangerous Islam vis-à-vis an enlightened, egalitarian and modern Europe” (22). In her autobiography, El Hachmi demonstrates herself to be fully aware of how accusations of “patriarchy” are used to other Moroccans: at one point, she criticizes the “paternalism” of some European feminists, who, she writes, feel motivated to “alliberar tota dona musulmana que li passa per davant” (“liberate every Muslim woman who passes by them”) because of the common perception that all Muslim women are horribly oppressed by Muslim men (162).

Yet, if it is true that Europeans other Muslims by painting them as incorrigibly sexist, what sense do we make of El Hachmi’s incorrigibly sexist protagonist? After all, his pathologically violent behavior seems to reinforce, rather than deconstruct,

dominant Spanish and European stereotypes about Muslim male migrants as

fundamentally inassimilable in European societies because of their perceived sexism. If this is the case, her novel would seem to be strongly out of sync with her larger goal of dismantling the other-ing imposed on migrants in general, and Moroccans in particular. Her assertion in her autobiography that “she, too, is Catalan” might potentially make this representation even more problematic: if El Hachmi is read as wanting to be

“Catalan” while portraying Moroccan men as irreparably patriarchal others, does her novel do little more than reify the notion of European societies being generally “better” for women than Arab or Muslim ones, even though in her autobiography she purports to be critical of this “paternalistic” attitude?

I argue that the answers to these questions lie in an aspect of this novel that, however essential, has thus far been insufficiently addressed in criticism. Before we dismiss Mimoun as the a re-enactment of the stereotype of the inassimilable Muslim other, we must pay attention to the fact that Mimoun’s character—like the “Moors” of contemporary Spain, who, as Flesler argues, must be constantly represented as different because, in reality, they are “not different enough”—is not quite as other as he might initially appear (9). A closer look at the novel reveals Mimoun to bear a striking resemblance to Quimet, a similarly rough-handed, short-tempered, highly possessive male character from La plaça del diamant, a classic novel by Mercè Rodoreda, a pre- eminent 20th _{century Catalan novelist. As I will show, the parallelisms between these}

two characters are numerous and are clearly not coincidental. The uncanny similarities between a supposedly inassimilable Muslim other and a Catalan character from a Catalan novel disrupt the ability of Catalan, Spanish and Western readers more

generally to other Mimoun. Instead, through her careful re-writing of La plaça del diamant, El Hachmi invites her readers to abandon their “stranger fetishism,” that is, their desire to construct their identity around an inassimilable other—even when this other is

ostensibly “welcomed” in public discourse, as is the case with Catalan integrationist rhetoric. Instead, El Hachmi’s novel articulates a critique of patriarchy that resists being leveraged as a justification of ethnic and religious prejudice.

However, any discussion of El Hachmi’s rewriting of La plaça del diamant must also acknowledge the abundance of other intertextual references with which L’últim patriarca is laced. These other references occur primarily in the novel’s second half, once the narrator and her family have joined Mimoun in Catalonia. Throughout this part of the novel, the narrator repeatedly refers to writers, works, characters, films and other media from a variety of cultural origins. The sheer frequency of these references—which feature a preponderance of women characters and authors—demonstrates the narrator’s voracious consumption of fiction, whether literary, filmic, or televised, upon settling in Catalonia. Significantly, some of the most prominent allusions include works by Catalan women writers (including Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat and Víctor Català’s Solitud), works by minority women writers from other countries (such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, or the film version of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple), as well as popular visual media (such as the character Superman and the horror film Poltergeist). Even “Colometa,” the protagonist of La plaça del diamant, is mentioned by name three times in the novel’s second half. I argue that these numerous intertextual references, some of which have been discussed by Ricci and Ingenschay, demonstrate how the narrator uses fiction as a visceral, incipient form of resistance to

both ethnic prejudice and gender oppression. In particular, I argue that her passion for fiction is the seed that gives rise to her later forms of rebellion, namely, literary writing and her dramatic incestuous encounter with her uncle.

Yet, while the web of intertextual references in the novel’s second half allows us to trace the narrator’s path toward adulthood and independence, I contend that La plaça del diamant nonetheless plays a lead role throughout the whole novel. Specifically, El Hachmi places Rodoreda’s novel at the head of her intertextual table, so to speak, by thoroughly interweaving the leitmotif of pigeon-keeping—a distinctive feature of Diamant—throughout her novel, from beginning to end. While it is clear that the narrator reads this novel in her youth along with many of the other texts and films already mentioned, the impact of Diamant, in particular, on the recounting of the Driouch’s narrative is significantly more pronounced than these other works. From a young age, Mimoun demonstrates an obsession with pigeons that will last throughout his lifetime. This obsession leads him to raise pigeons in his house, just as Quimet does in Diamant. Furthermore, both Quimet and Mimoun force their wives to bear the brunt of the responsibility of caring and cleaning for the birds. As I will show, pigeons in Rodoreda’s novel symbolize the female protagonist’s struggle against her socially prescribed gender role. I argue that El Hachmi re-adapts this image to articulate a transnational critique of patriarchy while simultaneously forbidding readers from remaining complacent with the all-too-common discursive opposition between a

“gender-equal” Europe and a “strongly patriarchal” Muslim world. Instead, by writing a novel that “converses” with Rodoreda’s, El Hachmi calls attention to women’s (and men’s) shared suffering under patriarchal cultural systems on both sides of the

Mediterranean. In doing so, she challenges the “stranger fetishism” normally imposed on migrants, thus inviting her readers to discover and confront their desire to exempt their own societies from the accusation of patriarchy, while vigorously invoking it against others.

The remaining sections of this chapter will thus: (1) examine the special

intertextual relationship between L’últim patriarca and La plaça del diamant, and then (2) discuss this novel’s other intertextual references, specifically in terms of the narrator’s use of fiction as a tool for empowerment and resistance.