We all wonder at some point who we are, and the answer, at best, comes with a combination of answers that have to do with family and their memory, the ground on which our feet stand, our outlook, our studies, our work, our community, and so many other interactions that shape us. The art of lifeMontaigne's, the struggle for I am the same She was the most essential part of our spiritual world.
In our country, there is a new generation of young women who construct their identity in tension between family tradition and the values of the society where they were born, which are often contradictory to the memory and ways of their parents.
These girls are the newest Catalans. They are young people who study in our schools and institutes and who often disappear from the public sphere in adolescence. Before our very eyes and as if it were an imponderable, many young Catalan women of Muslim family origin disappear from the streets, the squares, sports, activities, and friendships with their classmates.
Silenced Situations
We wanted to listen to them, and our reporter Mònica Bernabé has dedicated weeks to it. We know these are not isolated cases but part of a fairly numerous situation that is rarely discussed. A strict religious morality understands that the new society they live in is fraught with dangers for girls' virtue. Psychologist and singer Imane Raissali (Miss Raisa) explains it very clearly: the family's goal is for you to get married, and that requires an immaculate reputation. Restrictions on girls' freedom are interpreted as an obligation. In fact, there are many symbols: "If you wear the veil, you are a good girl, you are respected, and you have value," and if you question it, you question the entire community, tradition, and religion.
ARA spoke with a 20-year-old girl who has to go out on the street in Barcelona accompanied by her 9-year-old brother, a 16-year-old girl who is not allowed to socialize with boys and cannot make music. We've also spoken with many other girls and education professionals who explain that even in some mixed-sex classrooms, there are complications in seating students together. In some cases, after puberty, they disappear from sports activities, music, dance, field trips, summer activities, and celebrations with their classmates.
High schools manage this as best they can, and the Municipal School Board of the Ciutat Vella district has recorded it, as in so many places across the country.
Catalan writer Najat El Hachmi has often explored the world of these young women, which has been her own. She has explained the anxieties, desires, and hopes of a young North African woman raised in Catalonia who, as she grows older, finds herself torn between two worlds—that of her community, traditionalist, sexist, and fundamentalist, and that of Western society, freer but with a racism that pushes her aside or expels her—and feels she belongs to neither. El Hachmi has beautifully explained the struggle of these girls to live, despite all the taboos and traumas instilled in them as children, in a way that is different from what God and the community expect of them and what tradition—the family, the imam—imposes on them.
El Hachmi has explained to us the irresolvable contradictions with mothers, whom one loves and at the same time despises for what they represent: resignation, submission, illiteracy, dependency. She has also put words to the subsequent discovery that Western women are not as free as she had idealized.
Guaranteeing rights
These girls are just like any other Catalan women and have the same rights as all women in our society. Not talking about their difficulties, which are sometimes the first step toward forced marriages, doesn't make the problem go away. We know that if we talk about it, we could be accused of being racist or Islamophobic. We could also be exploited by the far right. And as Raissali says, "If I do it, my community will say I'm a traitor, so everything ends up silencing you: it's not talked about to avoid conflict." Since the job of journalism is to address issues without preconceptions and despite the difficulties, today you can read an interesting report in ARA about the identity problem of these new Catalan women. We owe them and their daughters the guarantee that, in addition to the duties they have as citizens, they also have the right to be free women in our society, and that they can be themselves, without coercion or imposition, and choose their own path.
