Najat El Hachmi: Amazigh Oral Memory and Catalan Literature

From the Rif to Vic

The Catalan language institution CPNL’s 2021 profile records Najat El Hachmi’s birth in Beni Sidel in 1979 and her arrival in Vic at eight. It also identifies Arab Studies at the University of Barcelona and work in cultural mediation and reception services. ¹

These details locate a life across places and institutions. They do not explain a novel by themselves. Begin with the distinction between the author, a fictional narrator and a character: a shared experience of migration does not make them the same person.

Amazigh storytelling in a Catalan literary practice

In her 2016 interview, El Hachmi describes Catalan as the language of her early reading and identifies women’s family storytelling, especially her mother’s, as formative. Her account of The Last Patriarch connects its narrative formulas with that oral inheritance even when Amazigh is not explicitly written into the text. ²

That relationship matters for an Amazigh literary history: a work can carry the memory and techniques of oral storytelling while being written in another language. The interview is the writer’s own account of her practice, mediated through a named English translator. It should not be enlarged into a rule for all migrant writing. ²

A short reading route through the books

CPNL dates the autobiographical Jo també soc catalana to 2004, L’últim patriarca to 2008 and La filla estrangera to 2015. Its profile also lists Mare de llet i mel (2018) and the essay Sempre han parlat per nosaltres (2019), and records the 2021 Nadal Prize for El lunes nos querrán. This is a dated selection, not a complete bibliography updated automatically with later publications. ¹

Choose one edition and keep the original title, publication language and translator’s name together. Similar English titles in a catalogue can refer to a translated edition rather than the date when a book first appeared. Comparing editions is easier when these fields are recorded separately.

What translation can reveal

Discussing La filla estrangera, El Hachmi links a daughter’s difficulty translating to her relationship with her mother and the different social roles of the languages she uses. The interview also resists the idea that a person simply becomes someone else whenever they change language. ²

Try the source-reading activity with that interview. Mark which claims are direct self-description and which belong to the interviewer’s framing. Then ask what changes when an interview about language is itself read in translation. No passages from the novels are reproduced here, and this introductory source check is not an independent review of her full literary work.

Sources and further reading

CNL d’Osona / Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística, “Personatges d’Osona: Najat el Hachmi”, 30 April 2021. Institutional profile consulted 29 October 2026 for early life and the dated publication and prize selection.
Jessie Chaffee, “An Interview with Najat El Hachmi”, Words Without Borders, 30 March 2016. El Hachmi’s responses translated from Catalan by Txell Torrent. Interview text consulted for her account of storytelling, writing and translation; the novels themselves were not reviewed for this introduction.

Community names, spellings and emphases vary. If you can point us to a better source or a preferred spelling, tell us — corrections are logged once made.