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“Mother of Milk and Honey”
September 19, 20187:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
7:00 p.m.
Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.
Writer Najat El Hachmi will be presenting her latest work, published by
Ediciones Destino, on September 19. She will be accompanied by fellow
novelist Lorenzo Silva.
The event will be presented by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s International Politics Coordinator.
Madre de leche y miel (Mother of Milk and Honey) is a first-person narrative telling the story of a Muslim woman from the Rif region, Fatima. Now grown up, married and a mother, she leaves behind her family and the village where she has always lived to emigrate with her daughter to Catalonia, where she fights to make a living. The book recounts the difficulties this immigrant experiences, as well as the disconnect between everything she has lived back in her country and the new world where she arrives. It also tells the story of her struggle to overcome barriers and provide her daughter with a future. Designed as a tale passed on orally, in which Fatima returns home for a visit to the family house after several years and tells the story of everything she has lived through to her seven sisters, Mother of Milk and Honey provides us with a close-up look at the experience of immigration from the perspective of a mother who lives alone and has no support from her husband. Similarly, the novel paints a refreshing new picture of what it means to be a woman in the rural Muslim world today.
Najat El Hachmi was born in Morocco after her father had already emigrated to Catalonia. At the age of eight, she moved to the town of Vic. She earned her undergraduate degree in Arabic Philology from the University of Barcelona. She has been writing since she was eleven years old, in the beginning as a form of entertainment, but little by little writing grew into a way for her to channel her thoughts about feeling like she was from two places at once, and a way to bring these two worlds to which she belongs closer together. In 2004, her book Yo también soy catalana (I Am Catalan, Too) was published. She appears as a guest speaker on the radio and has articles published in the written press. Her work El último patriarca (The Last Patriarch) was given the Ramon Llull Award of 2008 and the Ulysse Award for a first novel in 2009, and she was a finalist for the Prix Meditérranée Étranger in 2009. Her books have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Romanian and Arabic.
Madre de leche y miel (Mother of Milk and Honey) is a first-person narrative telling the story of a Muslim woman from the Rif region, Fatima. Now grown up, married and a mother, she leaves behind her family and the village where she has always lived to emigrate with her daughter to Catalonia, where she fights to make a living. The book recounts the difficulties this immigrant experiences, as well as the disconnect between everything she has lived back in her country and the new world where she arrives. It also tells the story of her struggle to overcome barriers and provide her daughter with a future. Designed as a tale passed on orally, in which Fatima returns home for a visit to the family house after several years and tells the story of everything she has lived through to her seven sisters, Mother of Milk and Honey provides us with a close-up look at the experience of immigration from the perspective of a mother who lives alone and has no support from her husband. Similarly, the novel paints a refreshing new picture of what it means to be a woman in the rural Muslim world today.
Najat El Hachmi was born in Morocco after her father had already emigrated to Catalonia. At the age of eight, she moved to the town of Vic. She earned her undergraduate degree in Arabic Philology from the University of Barcelona. She has been writing since she was eleven years old, in the beginning as a form of entertainment, but little by little writing grew into a way for her to channel her thoughts about feeling like she was from two places at once, and a way to bring these two worlds to which she belongs closer together. In 2004, her book Yo también soy catalana (I Am Catalan, Too) was published. She appears as a guest speaker on the radio and has articles published in the written press. Her work El último patriarca (The Last Patriarch) was given the Ramon Llull Award of 2008 and the Ulysse Award for a first novel in 2009, and she was a finalist for the Prix Meditérranée Étranger in 2009. Her books have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Romanian and Arabic.
