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.

Searching for Orgasms in the Dictionary: Language, Literature and Emotion inL’últim patriarcaby Najat El Hachmi

“…cultures to which she belongs cover a broad range of themes related to identity, including questions of hybridity, power, nationality, gender and sexuality (Crameri 2014;Elboubekri 2015;Everly 2011Everly , 2014Folkart 2013;Ricci 2010). The focus in this article, however, is on something that could be said to precede or underlie these themes, in the sense of being a precondition for their expression: the triangular relationship between language, literature and emotion explored in the novel.…”

Dislocated Temporalities: Immigration, Identity, and Sexuality in Najat El Hachmi’s «L’últim patriarca»

“…Thus critics like Martín-Márquez (2008) and Sanjuán-Pastor (2015) engage with the «border identity» that El Hachmi constructs in Jo també sóc catalana and the inner, subjective tensions that this identity brings about; others, such as Celaya-Carrillo (2011), relate this essay with the controversies over language and Spanish nationalism in Catalonia, while Ricci (2007Ricci ( , 2010Ricci ( , 2011 takes El Hachmi's work as an example of the construction of a mixed Amazigh-Catalan identity. On the other hand, a significant group of critics perform feminist readings of L'últim patriarca, analysing several aspects related to gender and immigration (Climent Raga 2010, Everly 2011 and2014), presenting the novel as a possible example of Islamic feminism (Elboubekri 2015) or engaging with the sexual politics of the novel (Folkart 2013).…”