The 'Reflections' section of the Digital Bulletin of the Tres Culturas Foundation was created with the aim of offering our users tools that allow for a more leisurely meditation on the topics dealt with in the various activities organised by the Foundation, whether they be seminars, workshops, book presentations, exhibitions, etc. Tres Culturas' 'Reflections' also aims to be a place to find analysis and specialised opinions on current affairs or relevant issues in the Euro-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern context.
During the months of April and May, the Fundación Tres Culturas dedicates its space 'Reflections' to show the wide literary panorama of the Near East and the Mediterranean, both through specialised articles and by giving voice to the most outstanding authors of this panorama, some of whom we have had the opportunity to meet personally at Tres Culturas.
This third instalment of 'Reflections' brings us closer, among other issues, to the latest work by the Moroccan author Najat El Hachmi, La hija extranjera (The Foreign Daughter). This writer, who emigrated to Spain at the age of eight and who uses Catalan as her language of literary creation, will take part in the 'Tres Festival, voces del Mediterráneo' (Three Festival, voices of the Mediterranean), organised by Tres Culturas. This meeting, which will take place in Granada from 28 to 30 April, will bring together more than 30 authors and intellectuals from Mediterranean countries, from established figures to emerging authors, coinciding with the city's Book Fair. Almudena Grandes, Mahi Binebine, Rachid Boudjedra, Nawal el-Saadawi, Abraham B. Yehoshua, Mircea Cartarescu and Hubert Haddad will take part in this forum.
El Hachmi will debate on 'Migrations and returns', together with the Turkish writer Buket Uzuner and the journalist and writer Javier Valenzuela, in a meeting that will take place on 28 April. For more information on the 'Tres Festival', please consult the following link:
http://www.tresculturas.org/noticia/tres-festival-voces-del-mediterraneo-la-gran-cita-literaria-esta-primavera/
The first instalment of the 'Reflections' of Tres Culturas dedicated to literature can be consulted at:
Video: Najat El Hachmi in conversation with Eva Díaz
The Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo, in collaboration with the publishing house Destino and the Fundación José Manuel Lara, organised a literary meeting between the Moroccan writer Najat El Hachmi and the journalist and writer Eva Díaz on 15 March as part of the activities to commemorate International Women's Day.
The meeting served to present El Hachmi's novel, La hija extranjera, originally written in Catalan, which narrates the contradictions in the life of a young woman who moves between two universes, that of immigration and that of the culture of the country in which she lives. Thus, the protagonist 'is torn between accepting an arranged marriage with her cousin and going to Barcelona to develop her talent. The mother tongue, a variant of Berber, symbolises the difficulties of communication and the conflict of identity that the protagonist experiences throughout the story, while reflecting on freedom, roots, generational differences and the complex personal, social and cultural reality that her condition as an immigrant imposes on her. To this is added the complicated access to the world of work faced by today's youth" (Editorial Destino).
After the talk between the authors, Najat El Hachmi herself read an excerpt from her book, accompanied on the harp by Mar Gabarre de Müsgo. The video of this poetic encounter can be accessed via the following link. Click here.
Najat El Hachmi (Nador, Morocco, 1971).
She holds a degree in Arabic Philology from the University of Barcelona and is a regular contributor to the press and various radio stations.
The strangeness of feeling part of two places and her desire to bring together the two worlds to which she felt she belonged led her to write her first book Yo también soy catalana (Columna, 2004). Her first novel, El último patriarca (Planeta, 2008), received the 2008 Ramón Llull Prize, the Prix Ulysse and was a finalist for the Prix Méditerranée Étranger 2009. This work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Romanian and Arabic. Her second novel, La cazadora de cuerpos, was published simultaneously in 2011 by Columna and Planeta in Catalan and Spanish respectively. His previous work was the edition and translation of the anthology Cuentos libertinos del Magreb (Planeta, 2012).
Eva Díaz Pérez (Seville, 1971).
She is the author of the novels El Club de la Memoria (Finalist for the 2008 Nadal Prize), Adriático (Malaga Novel Prize and Andalusia Critics' Prize), El sonámbulo de Verdún, Memoria de cenizas and Hijos del Mediodía. His essays include La Andalucía del exilio, El polvo del camino and Sevilla, un retrato literario. He works as a columnist and head of the Culture section in El Mundo de Andalucía. He has won the Unicaja, Ciudad de Málaga, Universidad de Sevilla, Ciudad de Huelva and Francisco Valdés Journalistic Article Prizes. He also won the Seville Book Fair Award in 2013 for his literary career.
Article: 'My other cultures'. By Laila Karrouch. Cultures magazine, issue 10, 'Creation and emigration'.
Moroccan writer Laila Karrouch also talks about 'Migrations and returns' in this article, in which she describes the circumstances and emotions triggered by her family's emigration to Spain: 'The first months were grim. The land of glory was a mirage (...) I remember feeling strange, wanting to scream and run away to infinity, anywhere on the planet except where I was'. From the origins of immigration and its motives, to the period of adaptation and subsequent refusal to leave the country after her father's proposal "My mother was the first. She didn't want to feel like a failure. She said she would go to work. If it was hard enough to immigrate full of illusions, doing it without them could be depressing".
Like Najat El Hachmi in her work The Foreign Daughter, Laila Karrouch also focuses on the conflict with her parents, a conflict that goes beyond the generational to become a clash of understandings, aspirations and ways of life: "My way of fitting into reality and the changes in my way of thinking, influenced by the new society, did not please my mother, who wanted me to be like her, and being like her meant not studying and having to depend on my husband. My father, on the other hand, wanted us to be like the local girls: to study and work (...) It was very difficult for me to make changes without my father and mother putting up barriers".
Through literary creation, both authors reach the same conclusion: "Combining two cultures and finding a middle ground that everyone likes was not easy until, one day, I realised that no one had to like me but myself".
Laila Karrouch is a Moroccan writer based in Spain. She won the 2004 Columna Jove Prize for her novel De Nador a Vic. She is also an author of youth literature with publications such as Laila.
The full article can be found at the following link: http://revistaculturas.org/mis-otras-culturas/
Promoting reading through the lending of book bundles
Tres Culturas offers other institutions, libraries or entities the possibility of accessing the catalogue of works that have passed through its 'Tres con Libros' Reading Club.
The Fundación Tres Culturas Reading Club was set up at the beginning of 2009 with the aim of promoting reading, disseminating Mediterranean authors and developing initiatives that stimulate intercultural dialogue as a means of enrichment between cultures. The members of the Reading Club meet throughout the year to read, analyse and debate these works by organising meetings and round tables in which the authors themselves sometimes participate.
The Tres Culturas catalogue includes works by writers such as Mohamed Chukri, Carlos Zanón, Elif Shafak, David Grossman, Angel Wagenstein, Igor Stiks, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Yasmina Khadra, Alaa Al-Aswany and Buket Uzuner.
Guidelines for requesting a Tres Culturas book loan can be found at the following link: http://www.tresculturas.org/club/PAUTAS.pdf
Para consultar los libros disponibles: http://www.tresculturas.org/club/lote%20libros.pdf
Spanish 
English 
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Portuguese