In 1833 in Paris, Eugène Delacroix painted Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, based on drawings he had sketched while in Algiers during a trip to Morocco a year earlier. The painting is part of the painter’s Orientalist period and reflects the 19th-century European Romantic itinerary, which viewed the “Orient” − understood as a monolithic unit − as a source of inspiration for the formal renewal of its artistic languages. In the canvas, Delacroix portrays four female bodies, only one of which is in motion: that of a woman, interpreted by critics as a servant, who is leaving the room. In the room, a gynaecium to which Delacroix had no access during his trip to the Maghreb, three women remain wrapped in colourful fabrics, resting in a posture of relaxation and in silence.
Delacroix’s painting inspired the pictorial series Femmes d’Alger, which Picasso painted in 1955, also in France. Twenty-five years later, the writer Assia Djebar, who had been living in France for some time, wanted to engage in dialogue with Picasso and Delacroix to transform the representation that both painters had projected of their native country, especially in relation to women. Djebar chose French-language literature to breathe life into complex female characters who use their bodies and their memories to name an Algeria that is far removed from the one that still survives in much of the European imaginary, permeated by odalisques and exotic landscapes. In one of the stories that make up Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Anissa tells her mother-in-law Fatima: “I see only one way for Arab women to unblock everything: to talk, to talk incessantly about yesterday and today, to talk among ourselves […]. Talk to each other and look. Look outside, look outside the walls and the prisons.”
Djebar’s protagonists leave the gynaecium to look at the world around them, to tell stories of resistance, led by women, which are not normally part of the hegemonic historiographical narratives on either side of the Mediterranean. The artist uses French, the language of the coloniser in the Algeria where she grew up, to name colonial silences; to nourish a silenced oral memory, to overflow history and write it in a different way. Today, literature remains a fertile ground for countering the European Mediterranean’s essentialist and hermetic view of its southern shore; a view described in these terms by Edward W. Said in his canonical Orientalism. Attentive to detail, literature allows us to focus on the individual in order to build inclusive and diverse groups that incorporate the many folds of history. Literature pluralises. In what follows, this article seeks to foreground contemporary writings by women who multiply, strain and twist words to question stereotypes and narrate bodies in motion.
The sessions “Narratives blaves i liles” − jointly organised by the European Institute of the Mediterranean, the Institut français in Barcelona, and the Ateneu Barcelonès − will serve as a guide. It was launched in 2024 to explore young women writers whose literature is rooted in both sides of the Mediterranean. Since April 2024, three sessions have been held, featuring the works of Salma El Moumni, Karima Ziali, Òmnia l’Bakkali, Sara Touri el Mansouri, Zineb Mekouar, and Kaoutar Harchi. This group of writers produce a literature that embraces diverse styles and genres, a literature connected to the literary genealogy of which Assia Djebar is part. All these voices − which, in this article, echo many others − recount a plural Mediterranean and multiply the reading angles from which we can approach this space.
Narrating Otherness to Narrate Another “Us”
In 2004, Najat El Hachmi published Jo també sóc catalana, an essay in which she mapped her hybrid subjectivity − comprising elements from her native Rif and the Catalonia where she grew up and from where she began writing − and in which she also urged Catalan society to rethink the boundaries of Catalan identity. In this respect, the text can be read in dialogue with Els altres catalans by Francesc Candel, a book published in 1964 and which, in the writer’s own words, “managed to give a dignified name to an immense number of inhabitants of Catalonia who until then had suffered from basic discrimination, aside from social and racial discrimination.” In 2008, El Hachmi wrote the introduction to a special uncensored edition of Candel’s influential work. In her text, the writer underlines the similarities between Catalonia in the 1960s and that of the early 21st century; both fabricated the figure of an Other from which to distance themselves in order to support their identity construction: the “charnegos” that Candel portrayed would come first, the “moros” (and especially the “moras“), later.
El Hachmi sees herself as belonging to what she calls a “border generation” because they use codes that are meaningful on both shores of the Mediterranean Sea, a sea that acts as a limit, a frontier. In her literature, El Hachmi names otherness through life stories featuring women who, in Catalonia, are connected to the Maghreb. She narrates her travels in a Catalan that incorporates Rif terms and Arabic expressions; a Catalan, then, that hybridises languages. A language that embraces difference, that names a Catalonia that is also Maghrebi. Since the writer’s call to action in 2004, many and very diverse voices have continued to shed light on the multiple links between the Maghreb and Catalonia. These voices allow us to consider the Mediterranean border through complex lenses.
In 2022, Safia El Aaddam published Hija de inmigrantes. Its protagonist is Lunja, born into an Amazigh family living in Catalonia. Lunja tells of the economic hardships her family faced in Catalonia, and in that respect, the text is a window into the difficulties that migration entails. Furthermore, Lunja explains the racism she suffered in various settings, especially at school, due to her Amazigh roots. Now a social worker, the protagonist observes how racism continues to affect bodies and lives like hers, which cannot be easily defined because they transit through different cultural spaces as a result of inherited migratory experiences. Lunja finds in writing a way to counteract the simplification on which racism is built, and, like El Aaddam herself, she decides to share her reflections online.
Reading the novel, we understand the extent to which Lunja’s gesture and the gesture of her creator are important. When Lunja shares snippets of her life online, she reflects: “The text has gone viral. […] Suddenly, I begin to connect with all those children and I begin to imagine that we had each other at a distance […] We didn’t know that the taboo of childhood poverty would unite us and heal us.” Healing comes when awareness of a shared experience (of suffering) is created. And such awareness is facilitated by writing. In El Aaddam’s text, “immigrant” becomes a label by which we recognise ourselves and through which we dignify certain existences, as Candel did with his book.
Hence, literature becomes a creator of community. And also a tool for denunciation. Noor is the protagonist of Un far a tres minuts de casa, by Òmnia l’Bakkali. She is a young woman studying law in Barcelona who will work as an intern for a few months in a law firm in the city. Noor quits her job after having to get involved in the defence of a man who has committed a hate crime. Like Lunja’s, Noor’s daily life is also marked by racist looks and gestures because her body and her name bear the mark of her parents’ migration from Morocco to settle in Catalonia. She understands herself as a “daughter of migrants” and finds in writing a means to mitigate the frustrations she has to face in her present, to respond to the hatred that goes unpunished in the courts. To do so, she proposes a revision of the words “we” and “they”, of the “here” and “there” on which it is based. She also unpicks the linguistic trappings of racism. Of her parents, she writes that “they emigrated to immigrate, they left to arrive.” And she, who was born in Catalonia, asks herself: “What is the place of return, if I have never left?”
L’Etern retorn is the title of Asmaa Aouattah’s first book, a collection of stories populated by Imazighen women living in Catalonia who are the bearers of ancestral tales. The short story is also the genre chosen by Sara Touri El Mansouri to reflect on identity, migratory grief, and racism, the universes that subtitle her book Desenllaços. Touri El Mansouri, a social educator by profession, chooses to narrate life stories to unravel the various oppressions to which people in Catalonia who share identity ties with Morocco are subjected. Through the writer’s pen, literature becomes a means of reparation and a means of blurring stereotypes − and Míriam Hatibi uses writing in the same way. Hatibi urges anyone who would caricature her to transform their reading: Mira’m als ulls, no és tan difícil entendre’ns is the title of her first book. The key to deactivating the stereotypes that fuel hatred and racism is the willingness to understand the realities and experiences that have been labelled alien. And because literature allows for the unfolding of diverse subjectivities, it also creates empathy.
Narrating the Links between the Mediterranean and the World
In her collection of poems, Madres migrantes, published simultaneously in Spanish and Catalan, Fatima Saheb acknowledges the existence of and names women who migrated to an unknown territory to recount the many experiences that the label “migrant mother” embraces. Literary practice is the enemy of uniformising narratives, hermetic categorisations, and static representations. Saheb presents us with mothers who, above all, are women in motion, women who could be part of Assia Djebar’s universe but who, therefore, would have no place in Delacroix’s Algeria. In the prologue to the collection of poems, Desirée Bela-Lobedde describes the book as “a door to the reparation that they couldn’t afford amidst so much struggle.” The collection of poems has been published by Jaŋde, a cooperative publishing house founded in Catalonia in 2024 with the aim of promoting “racialised voices or those of migrant descent who have difficulty accessing the publishing sector due to discrimination based on their origin, race, or ethnicity.” Jaŋde was born to open a space for expression.
The place of enunciation that Karima Ziali proposes in her first novel does not correspond to the authorial self. The protagonist of Una oración sin dios is Morad, a young man whom we closely accompany throughout a whole day. One of the novel’s settings is Barcelona airport, where Morad works and where he encounters characters who trigger thoughts about his place in the world, a world that speaks Catalan and Spanish, as well as Rifian. The airport, a place of transit, conveys the vital crossroads Morad finds himself at: he must choose what he wants to study now that he is leaving school behind. His passion is philosophy, but this option is not even part of his mother’s vocabulary, a woman with “iron hands” and “jasmine skin” who would like her son to pursue something more “tangible”. Beyond the Catalan-Moroccan landscape in which the novel is set, Ziali’s book eschews exoticisms and depicts the complexity of family ties, criss-crossed by contradictions that unfold the many nuances of love and identity.
Family ties are also central to Zineb Mekouar’s second novel, Souviens-toi des abeilles. Through the portrait of a family, Mekouar’s book reveals the present of Inzerki, a village in the Moroccan High Atlas whose pace is marked by the buzzing of the bees that live in the village apiary, the largest in the world. The land of Inzerki is drying up, and, as a result, silence gradually replaces the bees’ voices. Thus, Inzerki is also the world: fragile, grieving. Anir, the ten-year-old boy at the centre of the novel, suffers for the land where he lives, for the bees he cares for thanks to the knowledge passed on to him by his grandfather Jeddi, and for his mother, who is incapable of mothering. The maternal silence and the silence of the land intertwine in this poetic text that also narrates the wounds inflicted by rural exodus. Mekouar eschews exoticising representations to show us a multilingual and diverse Morocco; and through the figure of Aïcha, Anir’s mother, he also encourages us to add layers to motherhood.
During the day, Aïcha’s body is sedentary. However, at dawn, Aïcha walks the paths of Inzerki, and her knowledge of these trails will be key to the village’s survival. The body is the foundation on which Salma El Moumni’s first novel, Adieu Tanger, is built, which beyond its Moroccan reference also allows us to think about the world. Alia is a young woman who narrates in the second person an experience of multiple violence: she must leave Morocco because intimate photos of her are being shared without her consent. In the “you” that El Moumni has chosen, there is room for a “we”, in the feminine, and also a masculine “we”, because with this choice, the writer seeks to address her entire audience.
Adieu Tanger also reflects a collective anger towards patriarchal violence, which is not only present in Morocco but also underpins French society and permeates both shores of the Mediterranean. The text explores other wounds, especially those created by exile, and proposes a multifaceted approach to the notion of the gaze. The novel is permeated by the male gaze on Alia’s body, and by the way Alia looks at and (re)cognises her own body. It is also influenced by Alia’s gaze toward her native Tangier, which she revisits through childhood memories, and by how she is perceived in the French city where she decides to settle.
The “you” is the grammatical universe chosen by Mireia Estrada Gelabert − moderator of the first session of “Narratives blaves i liles” − for her novel Sense sucre, translated into Spanish as Sin azúcar and with a prologue by Kalima Ziali in this language. Sense sucre reflects frankly and without dogmatic intentions on bodies, otherness, stereotypes, and crossed gazes, based on the experience of a “Western woman” whose knowledge of Morocco is mediated by the fact that she is married to a Moroccan. The narrator’s back-and-forth between Morocco and Catalonia allows her to “experience more lightly the tyranny of a single model imposed on the infinite diversity of women’s bodies” and to become aware of “the cultural and destructive arbitrariness of the corporeal paradigm.” Just as the bodies we encounter in the novel are plural, so too is the protagonist’s portrayal of Islam. In a play of multiple echoes, the narrator recovers an idea of Malcolm X that her husband conveyed to her: in the hajj, one can feel “the heartbeat of the working classes,” and the diversity of cultural traditions that make up the community of believers, the umma.
In Comme nous existons, Kaoutar Harchi embraces autobiography to recount what it was like to grow up in France surrounded by a father and mother who only felt “at home” when they visited their native Morocco. The book has been published in Spanish by Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo − whose editor, Ourdia Sylvia Oussedik, moderated the discussion with Harchi in the “Narratives blaves i liles” sessions − which also seeks to expand the Mediterranean imagery available in Spanish. Based on her family history, Harchi, a sociologist and writer, examines the lives of other “postcolonial families” in France in the 2000s. A France that, contrary to Malcolm X’s description, deploys a monolithic vision of Islam and equates it with immigration.
Those who like the Harchis live on the outskirts are immigrants, are Muslims, and are a public danger − police violence against their bodies is, therefore, justified. At the dawn of adulthood, the writer becomes involved in collective social movements that seek to undo these equations, and discovers the political value that literature can have. In college, she read Abdelmalek Sayad and recognises the gift that great authors bestow: “the possibility of presence […], the certainty of representation.” The possibility, also, of reparation.
Harchi and the other voices that breathe words and reflections into this book are “great writers.” As with the books of Sayad and Candel, the works of those featured here give life to a Mediterranean that refuses to be constrained; they multiply the representations of the bodies that inhabit it, and the contradictions, doubts and promises that shape them. They shake up stereotypes. The writers at the centre of this story, which is one of many that could be written, express themselves through essays, poems, novels and tales aimed at a young audience. They express themselves in Catalan, Spanish and French, languages nourished by Tamazight, Moroccan Darija, and Classical Arabic. Their multilingual writings urge us to look beyond the boundaries of essentialising representations. They invite us to speak, to “speak among ourselves” like the Djebarian women, so that we can tell the story of the Mediterranean in an other way.
Books cited
AOUATTAH, A., L’Etern retorn, Argentona, Voliana Edicions, 2018.
CANDEL, F., Els altres catalans, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1964.
DJEBAR, A., Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Paris, Éditions des femmes, 1980.
EL AADDAM, S., Hija de inmigrantes, Barcelona, Nube de Tinta, 2022.
EL HACHMI, N., Jo també sóc catalana, Barcelona, Columna, 2004.
EL MOUMNI, S., Adieu Tanger, Paris, Grasset, 2023.
ESTRADA GELABERT, M. Sense sucre, Barcelona, Ara Llibres, 2022.
HARCHI, K., Comme nous existons, Paris, Actes Sud, 2021.
HATIBI, M., Mira’m als ulls. No és tan difícil entendre’ns, Barcelona, Rosa dels Vents, 2018.
L’BAKKALI, Ò., Un far a tres minuts de casa, Barcelona, Columna, 2023.
MEKOUAR, Z., Souviens-toi des abeilles, Paris, Gallimard, 2024.
SAHEB, F., Madres migrantes, Barcelona, Jaŋde Editorial, 2025
SAID, E. W., Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.
TOURIEl Mansouri, S., Desenllaços. Identitat, dol migratori i racisme, El Masnou, Neret Edicions, 2022.
ZIALI, K., Una oración sin dios, Granada: Esdrújula Ediciones, 2023.