Name: The Last Patriarch
ISBN: 9781846687174

Najat El Hachmi

A riveting debut novel of fathers and daughters and the conflict between duty and desire, set in Morocco and Barcelona.

The Last Patriarch

abby donaldson

I enjoyed the story but it was brutal and often hard to read (definitely needs a trigger warning!)

Jessica Smith

This book is brilliant, but not as compelling as I thought it might be when it started. The reason for this might be the structure – it's divided into two parts, each with around three dozen extremely short chapters, each of which tells a story that is, for the most part, self-contained. So, it's great for burning through a few chapters while on the bus or train to somewhere, but it's also too easy to get distracted from if you're trying to actually read a solid chunk.

As for the plot, the blurb summarises it pretty well, except that I don't think the family ever made it to Barcelona. It's hard to know though, because the book makes reference to so many "local capitals" and "regional capitals" and such that are never given names. Given Peter Bush's idiosyncratic translation of La plaça del diamant, I'm not sure if this vagueness was in the original text or if it was his idea of being "helpful". Either way, the city where the family lives sounds smaller and more rural than Barcelona.

The story follows Mimoun, possibly the most contemptuous man alive, and the "patriarch" of the title. Honestly, he's a caricature, the personification of the patriarchy. It's also interesting to note that the narrator, Mimoun's daughter, never reveals her name (at least that I can recall!), which I would think is to make her the personification of the patriarchy's counterweight – a woman, and a migrant woman of colour at that, in Europe. But rather than trying to tell the story of just one person, this novel tries to tell a story common to many people, and so the narrator goes nameless so as to represent all of them.

Representing the patriarchy, Mimoun is a terrible human being in pretty much every way. He has sex with every woman he can get his hands on, then denounces them all as "whores". He's incredibly controlling of his wife and daughter, telling them how they may dress, who they may meet, whether or not they may even leave the house in the first place, etc., with the slightest refusal clearly indicating she's a "whore". He's violent and abusive, with his (female-dominated) family making excuses for him, lying for him, covering up for him constantly, and he refuses to do any housework except in very unusual circumstances, which prove he's capable of it, he just won't. At one point, the novel explicitly states that Mimoun would fall apart if women weren't constantly looking after him.

And yet, while their labour is exploited for Mimoun's gain and still they get treated like shit, most of the women in this story just accept that this is their lot. His wife polices their daughter's behaviour almost as thoroughly as Mimoun himself. The narrator, however, is rebellious. In part, this is because her parents become so oppressive that trying to live a normal life becomes an act of rebellion. It also means that her rebellions aren't always good ideas. But it is satisfying to see a young woman determined to live her life the way she wants, and not be dominated by anyone.

The novel is very frank about sexuality – about men's womanising, of course, but also about young women's sexuality. The narrator describes her first orgasm; she describes how she enjoys 'touching' her female friends; she expresses all the insecurity and self-doubt that led her to persist with her disastrous first relationship. She talks about sex that's really bad because her partner can't be bothered turning her on or getting her off. It's the kind of openness about women's sexuality that I think Western culture needs more of.

The ending of the book is pretty fucking weird though, even though every Goodreads reviewer who commented on it loves it (?!). (view spoiler)[Basically, I cannot get over the fact that her big "fuck-you" to the patriarchy was FUCKING HER UNCLE. The fact that her rebellion leads to some powerful orgasms was symbolic and fine, but HER UNCLE?!? That just crossed a line of squick for me. (hide spoiler)]

Anyway… I have thus far only commented on the women's-oppression-related aspects of this book, but I find that easier to talk about than the cultural side. One of the Catalan-language reviews of this book here on Goodreads commented that, if this novel had been written by someone of another race, it would be condemned as racist (as it seems to contrast the oppression women face in Morocco to the liberty of Spain), and while this is something to consider, it's also a counterfactual. It wasn't written by a white person, but by Najat El Hachmi, based in part on her own experiences. And at any rate, it's not intrinsically racist for white people to discuss the way women experience oppression in other cultures, but it is racist to use this to demonstrate how Western culture is "superior" or justify imperialism. While the novel is light on criticisms of Catalan society, I don't think it justifies imperialism, as it makes this young Moroccan woman agent of her own destiny. No one "saves" her, much less any Westerner. And she doesn't abandon her roots, although she fuses her cultures in her own way.

And that's it, I think! All in all, this was a great book, and particularly well-structured for anyone who only has a little time to read at a time. Recommended.

The Last Patriarch

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