“I will say it for you, my sisters, I will say what you ask of me. This voice, my voice, will tell you the facts experienced by the one who came out of the same womb as you. Give me some tea to warm my tongue, close the door so my words don’t get out of here. They are only for you, you who can understand them and keep them. It is a proven but upright and strong woman who speaks at the start of Mother of Milk and Honey, a magnificent novel recently translated in France by the Spanish-Moroccan writer Najat El Hachmi.
Returning to her native village in the Rif after long years of exile, Fatima tells her sisters about her experience abroad: a life of pain and tears, but also of courage and daring when, faced with the negligence of her husband, she had to take her destiny and that of her daughter in hand.
In an uninterrupted stream of words whose modulations from whispering to shouting can be heard, Fatima retraces her itinerary from her departure from Morocco by boat in search of the emigrant husband who abandoned her to her in-laws, until the city of Spain where, a foreign peasant and illiterate, she manages despite everything to survive alone and to adapt. “She didn’t want to think about where she came from, she didn’t want to remember her missing mother, her missing sisters, or the landscape. The nostalgia she had anticipated, for the moment she wanted to shelter it, double-locked. »
In the shadow of men
Of the adventures of this life invented blind, Fatima becomes the reciter, describing events and places, narrating her astonishment, even her mistrust, with regard to a culture and socio-religious practices different from all that she had known until then.
Alongside this story, the novelist depicts the journey of a Moroccan child from the rural world, showing how, from an early age, she learned from the women of her family the gestures of daily life as well as the uses and obligations related to his kind. Because, in this micro-society with deeply rooted customs, women have no other horizon than the management – ??albeit essential – of the family home.
In the shadow of men, assigned to multiple and often grueling tasks, they have no right to speak and must content themselves with a secondary role, moreover governed by an arsenal of moral rules and taboos. “Sometimes when she met with her grandmother Ichata, she was tempted to ask her what exactly being damaged was, but the shame and fear of being discovered did not allow her to remove this doubt and to put an end to his anguish. »
As the novel progresses to the rhythm of these intersecting plots, the connection of which we soon understand, Fatima’s life appears as a parable: that of the conquest of her independence by a woman whose path delivers her from the patriarchy in spite of herself, finally pushing her to assume her freedom. That of a sort of revenge on fate.
Join the tea circle
Thanks to the intensity that she manages to give to the smallest moment of her heroine’s life, Najat El Hachmi makes Fatima’s journey a real odyssey, symbolically inscribing it in the long litany of departures and intimate distances that punctuate the lives of women – from the natural expulsion of childbirth to the weaning of the baby, from the silence surrounding the pubescent young girl to that overwhelming of virginity, and up to the farewells to filial complicity when marriage forces the young girl to leave for a new home.
We let ourselves be caught up in the beauty of the author’s writing, musical, rich in poetic images, covered with enigmas and wisdom, like an invitation to join the warm tea circle of the Sisters of Fatima in order to drink with they the words of the heroine. “You were all together, like a strip of brightly colored fabric amidst a dusty landscape, amidst a variety of ocher tones, all together you were a very pretty patch of color. »
Born in 1979 in Nador, Morocco, then raised in Catalonia from the age of 8, Najat El Hachimi built a work distinguished by several prizes but still little translated in France. She continues, from book to book, to build bridges between the two cultures from which she comes. Mother of milk and honey begins with a dedication to her mother and echoes the destiny that the writer reserves in the novel for Sara, Fatima’s daughter: “To my mother who, without knowing how to read, taught me to to write. »
