Fàtima Saheb: "At school they told me they had seen my father killed on television: it was Saddam Hussein"

BarcelonaMigrant mothers It is not only Fátima Saheb's debut collection of poems, but also the beginning of a cooperative publishing project, Jande, with which the young editors Aissata M'ballo Diao and Diana Rahmouni Audenis aim to discover new voices from here who are racialized or of migrant descent and also to incorporate translations of authors such as the climate activist Mikaela Loach.

Fátima Saheb has been sharing her poems in English, Catalan and Spanish for seven years, and she does so especially on stage, in recitals where she talks about her migrant experience, a story that she had not heard in our country. Her references range from Maya Angelou to Morad, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mahmud Darwish, Rupi Kaur, Safia El Aaddam, Lucía Mbomio and Desirée Bela-Lobedde. In her first book, the poet, activist, advertising graduate and coordinator of an intercultural service in Barcelona recounts the violent experience of mothers who, like hers, abandoned their families with the promise of a better future. And she does so in a language that her mother does not speak, Catalan: "They have allowed themselves to be exploited / treated as naive / migrants / in need / so that the day would come / when I and so many others / begged for the time / to set the rules / to read / to question and shape / the trajectory of our lives."

I see that in the biography of the book you do not specify where you were born.

— Because I cannot say a single word. I am against the simplicity of human experiences. I was born in Larache, in the north of Morocco, three years after my mother began her migration, during the holidays, because it was her first maternity and I did not want to be alone, but I have never lived in it. From two months to 17 years old I grew up in Benicarló and at 18 I came to university in Barcelona, ​​​​where I have been for 12 years, with a break in Sweden.

So if I tell you where you are from…

— I like to start with the word “citizen of the world” because human movements have shaped us in all civilizations. Years ago, I was given a DNA test and it turned out that 60% of my DNA is identified with northern Morocco, but I also have DNA from Cuba and Nigeria. This answered something that my family had not been able to understand, which is that my grandfather on my mother’s side had black skin. For all these reasons, I define myself as a citizen of the world connected to the Catalan territory and connected to the Mediterranean way of life.

Is being the daughter of a Moroccan what leaves the biggest mark on your life?

— What leaves the biggest mark on me is the constant questioning of who you are, where you belong, and what your limits are because of this narrative. This has marked my childhood, my adolescence, and even today, and even as an author and activist.

Migrants always end up defining themselves by their status as migrants over other identities such as being a mother, a poet, a student, being fun, having studies, ambitions, etc.

— Yes, my ID says Spanish, originating in Morocco, like an imported product. I am proud to be the daughter of migrants, but I don't want to be understood only as that. That chronification that limits you is what I try to work on through much more extensive and rich narratives.

In the book you describe the suffering of a mother who emigrates: the loneliness, the renunciations, the longing, the administrative silence, the infantilisation, the legal insecurity, the difficulties in finding work and an apartment, the constant worry. You write that as an adult you have understood that your mother sacrificed her life for yours.

— It has taken years to process things that I carried in my backpack but that I had not understood and had not filtered. When the children of immigrants read my collection of poems, I want them to question which thoughts are really intrinsic to them and have been evaluated critically and objectively and which have come from that very human, but also desperate, need to fit into what society wants in order to accept you. For example, we have sometimes taken for granted that our mothers will not overcome language or job barriers because our teachers, our neighbors, and our neighbors have told us so. We have reproduced very violent situations and very limiting imaginaries. One of the reasons I wrote this collection of poems is because I was terrified of thinking how my children would get to know the generation of their grandmothers and grandfathers, if it would only be through social networks, through headlines like "challenge," "immigration problem." I wanted there to be literature from migrant voices or from voices that admire migration, not fear it.

"A migrant girl is less of a girl," you write. Does she grow up earlier?

— Part of it is because of the pressure that, since mothers have sacrificed so much, we must succeed and exceed all expectations, both theirs and those of society, which often wants us to fall short of this imaginary. I have been recommended to go to vocational training courses and not to university, and not because of my academic results, which have been excellent since the fourth year of compulsory secondary education. I want there to be no limitations in the minds of migrant children, for them to define their own potential. But we are also less innocent, because we witness very violent situations very often. We are not talking about situations with the police, but when you go into a municipal swimming pool and your mother is wearing a hijab and you receive all the looks, as if you were an animal in the zoo. Going on public transport and being treated badly because you have not asked a question quite right and the driver tells you: "Learn the language." The situations that cause me trauma are the shouting, the violence and the humiliation in spaces of protection, such as public administrations or hospitals, and we cannot do anything and we do not understand this rejection.

Until the end of primary school you considered yourself a girl like any other.

— Until the comments or mockery began. The first traumatic memory was with the attack in the United States [in 2001]. A few years later it was more serious because, as I was a girl without a father figure, at school they told me that they had seen my father killed on television, and it was Saddam Hussein. In other words, they had seen an Arab man and he was automatically Fatima's father. This was a big wound for me, not only because I understood that I would be seen as different, but as different, bad, different, terrorist. My mother made a great effort to give me the best education, and I went to Catholic schools even though she was a practicing Muslim, which made me the only Moroccan or Muslim, many times. That is why I demand the protection of all children, because there are teachers who downplay it and say that they are children's jokes, when this hurts a lot.

Have you chosen to present yourself as Western so as not to have to explain where you come from?

— It is a very current issue for me. My mother wore the hijab until she was 40 and it changed a lot of her interaction with her environment. Today I declare myself Muslim by conviction, not by tradition, but there are things that I am not doing because I am not yet prepared to deal with all the hostility that will come, including the hijab. How would this book be understood and what opportunities would it be given if I were wearing the hijab in the photo? Would what I am defending have the same reputation or criteria? And why not? I am very proud of who I am, but it is difficult to understand that a very personal decision will have consequences, perhaps even in the workplace, in opportunities, in how you move around the city, in how you are treated in a shopping centre. Therefore, we try to build a kinder world, so that the decisions are really ours.

You wrote the book in Spanish and translated it yourself into Catalan. What is your mother tongue and which languages do you use?

— I have spoken, in order, Spanish, Valencian, Darija (which is the Arabic we speak in Morocco), English and Catalan, and then I have studied many languages that I have not continued, Russian, French, Swedish. I use English, Arabic, Spanish and Catalan on a daily basis. How can I say that my mother tongue is only Spanish when it is my mother's third language? Or how can I say that Darija is not my mother tongue because it is the third language that came into my life? In the first eight years we spoke only in Spanish. I learned Darija because my aunt came to live with us and my mother spoke to her, so we spoke darijol.

A mix.

— I don't know how to write in Arabic and she doesn't write in Spanish. I didn't speak Valencian to her because I didn't get into Valencian-speaking environments, there were few subjects in class and the teachers told me that I would never speak to her properly. Until Pompeu Fabra I didn't have the opportunity to speak Catalan, because I was surrounded by Catalan and also because I worked at Barcelona City Hall, I understood that it would be the language that would connect me with everyone. I love this language very much and it has given me a lot. But the truth is that I started writing in English, which is a subject that I was obsessed with improving, and English gave me wings. When I started to combine writing and activism I decided to write more in Spanish and Catalan, to reach the public that I am living with here.

So you have four languages.

— I don't know what languages I'm thinking of. Right now I'm thinking of Catalan. But maybe if I take a notebook and start writing or if I put on some instrumental music, I'll think of English. If I'm having a conversation with my mother about a Moroccan film, I'm thinking of Darija. The brain just makes the selection.

If I may ask you, where do you feel you are from? Can we call you Catalan?

— Yes, absolutely. Apart from poetry, my other great passion is the mountains and I am a member of the Club Excursionista de Catalunya. I am a representative of diverse participation because we have a 30% of Catalan population with diverse cultural backgrounds that do not reach all the spaces of participation, neither the public administration, nor politics.

What has linked you to Catalan identity?

— One of the roots of Catalanism has been the appreciation for nature and treading on land. But there are details every day. I feel Catalan spending an afternoon making panadillos and I get excited looking at the castellers. But afterwards I will go to Raval to have a Moroccan tea.

What does integration mean to you?

— I like the concept of reciprocal integration, of interculturality. Diverse cultures that are not isolated in ghettos, but that contribute and feed off each other. When you arrive in a new territory, the first thing you must have is curiosity, an open mind to learn the language, to understand the social codes... but that does not mean that you have to assume absolutely all of these forms. Even people who have eight Catalan surnames will not fit into all the social codes of this territory, why is this expected of migrants? It is a colonialist narrative to accept that you are superior and that what they contribute to you will not be positive, or to consider ungrateful the migrant who complains that the system is not perfect for him. Obviously, there are minimum standards of coexistence, but this is not the property of a single culture, but rather more universal values. If there are castelleras who wear the hijab, this is reciprocal integration.

Now there are many different migrations, such as the figure of theexpanded, who are immigrants with purchasing power. Can that be beneficial in reducing racism?

— I don't know. If there is an extractivist migration that only comes to take advantage of the good parts of the system but does not contribute, does not live here, has second homes, this should be the focus. If migrants come to contribute and make their home here, which is the migration I know, I don't see the challenge or the conflict. For example, there is the fallacy that they take our jobs, but Europe does not want to accept and investigate the extractivism in the countries of origin that forces these people to flee. If they come with this desperation, perhaps it is because their resources have been seized at ridiculous prices by this Europe. If people knew how the Global South is still serving the Global North with terrible consequences for those territories, they would understand that migration should be welcomed with open arms; because the disease is not in the migrants who come, but in how the world works and how they are forced to do so. Another example. For a long time, migrant women have been referred to as human beings without their own agency, who are reunited with their husbands, who do not participate in social life, who stay at home only to look after the children, but it has not been explained that for many years the State gave them a residence permit without work. So, who forces them into this situation? And the consequences are that if the family unit only has one worker, they will have less income and will go to live in the outskirts, and perhaps their children will not participate as much in culture, the arts and the colonies.

In the book you talk about seeing the other from a position of opportunity and not fear. How do you experience the rise of the extreme right?

— With more desire to write, with more desire to create alliances, with more desire to make our mothers visible as we know them, to make a lot of noise. And hoping that compassion and shared humanity will end up winning the balance. If I cannot change the world, I will change person by person in my environment trying to make it kinder for everyone.

Does writing reconcile you with your origins and your layers of identity?

— What is not written does not exist. Chimamanda Ngozi speaks of the danger of a single story, that is, a story told only from one perspective. There is a saying in Africa that says: the warrior will always be the hero of the story until the lion writes it.