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

Abstract

Recent Catalan criticism has focused on place and space, as well as immigration, but has overlooked temporality. Yet migrations are not only a matter of space (of demographic movements and geographical relocations), but also of time: immigration questions the idea of origins and the possibility of a shared future, and problematizes the rhythms of everyday life. Temporality, in fact, is a key axis in the formation of identities and in cultural conflicts, not just regarding the uses of the past and the projection of societies towards the future, but also in relation to the normative uses of the body. The coexistence of asynchronous temporalities provoked by immigration is a factor in both cultural and psychic conflict. Najat El Hachmi’s novel L’últim patriarca (2008) is an excellent example of these phenomena. Here the circular temporality, based on the repetition of cycles, of Morocco’s traditional society comes to a halt in the failure of the narrator’s father to reproduce patriarchal domination in Catalonia. The novel roots this experience in modern referents through a dialogue with the Catalan literary tradition, and questions the idea of temporality understood as succession of generations by problematizing biological reproduction and gender subordination and through the shattering effects of anal sexuality. This article offers an integrated analysis of these issues by reference to psychoanalysis.