Memories without objects, objects with memory: memory, its objects, and its architectures in Najat El Hachmi's Mother of Milk and Honey

Abstract

The article explores the narrative and symbolic architectures of memory in Madre de leche y miel (2018) by Najat El Hachmi, situating it within the framework of Afro-Iberian writing and the subaltern female and migrant condition. The aim is to analyze how the novel dismantles the conception of memory as a stable archive in order to represent it as a fragile, vulnerable, and contested process, shaped by the intersection of gender, migration, poverty, and displacement. Methodologically, the study adopts an eclectic approach –narratological, thematological, hermeneutical, and semiotic– in dialogue with cultural memory studies, subaltern and gender theory, and recent scholarship on migrant literature in Spanish. The analysis first identifies a “memory without objects”: a space marked by void, silence and the traumatic corporealization of remembrance, where fractured orality, precarious motherhood, and the wounded body function as ulcerated archives of dispossession. Secondly, it uncovers “objects with memory”: sourdough, bread, honey, a blanket, a qubbu, or voice recordings, all resignified as supports of subjectivity and as alternative archives against oblivion. The study concludes that the novel presents migrant and female memory as an errant and fragile process that transforms trauma into symbolic resistance and, at the same time, unsettles the Hispanic canon to inscribe itself in the critical dynamics of a global Hispanophone.