Between Najat El Hachmi and Said El Kadaoui Moussaoui: from belongingness as a scar to identity as transgression

Abstract

One of the spaces of expression where the question of identity arises with greater acuity is literature. In the case of the Mediterranean, literature or literatures are born from the encounter of texts and worlds, that is, the production of texts, their dissemination and their reading contribute to the creation of a world. As an imaginative and symbolic space, literature, and novel in particular, offers the possibility of a fruitful dialogue with identity in all its components. Literature, through its own procedures, articulates and discusses, under the most diverse forms, the real, emphasizing in man, his experiences, his hopes, his ambitions, his phantasms, his fears and his visions. And this is precisely the context that we are going to locate ourselves in for the study of the sketched representation of identity in two novels: La hija extranjera (2015) by Najat El Hachmi (Nador,1979), translated from Catalan La filla estrangera and NO (2016), also translated from Catalan, by Said El Kadaoui Moussaoui (Nador, 1975). Both authors are part of a batch of writers from the Moroccan Rif, that as a sample of its adaptation to Western / Spanish symbolic canvas, Catalan in this case, have been laying, over the past few years, the basis for an archetypal scriptural project, focused on reflection on belonging and identity. We propose to contribute, here, a reflection on how this identity singularity is modeled, located between two topographies and two chronographies, paying special attention to the particularity that the discourse here uttered about the identity is carried out not from the vernacular but from the adoption language.