Figures of Exclusion and Embodied Life-Narratives in Najat El Hachmi’s El lunes nos querrán

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the inscription of the embodied and political “I” in El lunes nos querrán (2021), Najat El Hachmi’s most recent novel. The study starts from the premises developed by Martine Leibovici in order to focus on the narrator’s particular social position as an “insider-outsider” as a powerful means of (self)knowledge about the mechanisms of social exclusion and estrangement. Consequently, the literary text, when analyzed as the life-narrative of a defector (transfuge), to employ Leibovici’s term, reveals the “psychic life of power” (Butler) that oppresses women. Gender, as codified in the novel, is a regulatory ideal, materialized in a performative way through the imposed and internalized reiteration of transcultural practices.

Keywords:

• Najat El Hachmi
• El lunes nos querrán
• Judith Butler
• Martine Leibovici
• gender norms
• life-narratives
• embodied subjectivity

Notes

1 According to Sara Ahmed, “The very promise that happiness is what you get for having the right associations might be how we are directed toward certain things. Happiness shapes what coheres as a world” (Ahmed, The Promise 2). The aim of her research is to analyse the ways in which happiness is associated with certain lifestyles, or even with certain ways of seeing and living in the world that function as “scripts” of normative behavior. In this sense, according to Ahmed, when we pursue happiness, we desire everything that relates to the scripts of the “good” (Berlant), “liveable” (Butler) life, desirable and desired by the majority of society just in the name of happiness and life itself. Based on these observations, Ahmed shows the performative character and ideological value of “the promise of happiness” rooted in the current social imaginary.

2 “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 1).

3 Pomar-Amer argues that one should bear in mind the political implications derived from the double meaning of the word “too” included in the title Jo també sóc catalana: “the word ‘també’ (‘too’) is ambiguous since it may refer to either the subject of the sentence, inferring that the ‘I’ intends to be included in the Catalan collective or to ‘being Catalan’ which implies that the subject has more adscriptions besides being Catalan and that these are not mutually exclusive” (“Play of Mirrors” 294).

4 Ricci observes that the novels from the cycle can be defined as “autobiographical fiction” (Ricci, “African Voices” 213) or “fictional autobiographies” (Ricci, L’últim patriarca 72). However, after taking into account the deliberate ambivalence inserted into those literary life-narratives and their conscious ascription to the “ambiguous pact” (Alberca) achieved by blurring the limits and codes of representation, my argument is that the term autofiction as theorised by Alberca and Casas is more accurate when describing El Hachmi’s narrative.

5 The German philologist Georg Misch, author of History of Autobiography in Antiquity, is considered the father of “Autobiography Studies,” which he considered as the research on life-narratives of historic figures that shaped Western civilisation. In line with this tradition, the canon of Autobiography Studies established in the mid-20^th century continued to perceive autobiography as “the life-stories of great men,” with a focus on bios. However, the premise of a timeless, untroubled narration of the self was soon destabilized by critics such as Marx, Freud, Saussure, and the Russian formalists. Thus, the second wave of Autobiography Studies focused on autos, i.e., self-narrating, representational strategies applied by the author. The research focused on narrating mechanisms, stressing the fact that an autobiography is a product of creation rather than a mere transcription of neutral events, thereby providing the autobiography with the status of a literary text. Even so, Autobiographical Studies continued to prioritize individuality and prestigious lives. The third wave, which focused on graphia, shifted from the universal “self” to constructed “subjectivity.” The third wave started in the 1970s and was indebted, among others, to the Lacanian re-elaboration of Freudian psychoanalysis and the Derridean notion of différence, as well as to the input of many other post-structural and postmodern critics, including Lyotard, Althusser, Foucault, and Paul de Man (See: Smith; Watson; Amaro; Anderson, among others). Since the 1980s, feminist and postcolonial critics have contributed to the changes, suggesting a paradigm shift in the understanding of the subject and a radical impossibility of an apolitical auto-narration.

6 Leonor Arfuch coined the term “biographical space” to designate diverse forms of life-writing: memoirs, auto/biographies, diaries, autofictions, academic essays of an autobiographical style, but also reality shows and docudramas, among others. For Arfuch, “biographical space” is a concept that includes a non-conflictive coexistence of expressions and multifaceted subjectivities which, for all their differences, share certain common traits and which are the result of the “autobiographical turn” (Arfuch El espacio, La vida narrada).

7 This digital corpus analysis tool was used to count the words used in the text in order to verify which terms and concepts were the most frequent in El Hachmi’s novel.

8 The list of 45 non-functional words most frequently used in the novel is as follows: (236) madre, (138) mujer(es), (136) casa, (135) padre, (111) hombre(s), (98) barrio, (90) vida, (86) mundo, (64) cabeza, (64) cuerpo, (64) niño, (62) años, (56) forma, (56) lunes, (55) padres, (48) ojos, (47) único, (45) amor, (44) mano, (44) miedo, (43) parar, (42) chico, (42) noche, (42) realidad, (42) salir, (40) pueblo, (68) chica(s), (39) cosa, (39) hijo, (39) piso, (37) familia, (37) vivir, (36) volver, (35) dinero, (34) pelo, (32) hija, (32) piel, (31) comer, (31) voz, (30) instituto, (29) cara, (29) libertad, (29) normal, (29) ropa, (28) lengua.

9 The demystification of the figure of the protagonist’s husband, who under the mask of “a new man” conceals the values and attitudes forged by toxic masculinity, is codified as a parody of the Cuban revolution with its ideals of purity, moral integrity, and austerity embodied in the utopian figure of the “hombre nuevo.”

10 Here it is worth mentioning several studies in this context which prove that the gap between the average weight of women and the parameters of fashion models and mass media celebrities has been increasing drastically since the sixties, generating a social demand for unnatural thinness in all Western societies. As a result, in the name of “distinction” (Bourdieu, La distinction) and for the sake of social recognition, an increasing number of teenagers and young women strive to emulate the beauty prototypes, putting their health at risk and exposing themselves to growing dissatisfaction with their own self-image (Carillo Durán, Jiménez Morales, and Sánchez Hernández).

11 Taking into account the silencing and repression of lesbian desire, the tragic ending and the epistolary nature of the novel, one might see El lunes nos querrán as a tribute to Carme Riera’s Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora (1975). Riera’s characters have renounced their lesbian love, their freedom, and their happiness as a result of social pressure and “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katarzyna Moszczyńska-Dürst

Katarzyna Moszczyńska-Dürst is a professor of Spanish at the Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies and co-director of the GENIA research group. She is the principal investigator of the grant “Embodied life-and memory-narratives: vulnerable subjectivity and social movements in 21st-century Argentine auto/bio/graphical literature” (2020/39/B/HS2/02332).