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Join on Telegram Rabat – Internationally acclaimed Moroccan author Laila Lalami presented her latest novel, “The Other Americans,” at a literary event in Rabat, on Monday.
Laila Lalami is a novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
The Hassan II Foundation for Moroccans Living Abroad hosted the event, to “introduce the Moroccan-American author to the francophone audience,” as her novel’s translated edition was recently published.
After graduating with a BA in English literature from the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Lalami moved to University College London to pursue an MA in linguistics. In 1992, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Southern California.
Laila Lalami’s cross-border trajectory is unmistakably apparent in her work. The author herself says as much when discussing her writing and the muse behind it all. As she presented her latest novel to the new but growing base of Lalami readers in Morocco, the author spoke at length about her lifelong fascination with the migratory experience.
Morocco World News had the opportunity to interview the writer about her work, her experience as an immigrant, and her literary inspirations.
Her latest book, “The Other Americans,” specifically deals with the dizzying variety of experiences migrants go through, both on the individual and collective level.
The novel opens with a murder scene, a hit-and-run kills involving Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant and restaurant owner.
The novel explores the consequences of the murder from different character perspectives, from the victim’s US born daughter, to the african-american detective investigating the case, and the undocumented Mexican witness struggling with the implication of his testimony.
Using a small California town as a microcosmic location for her fictional tragedy, the author sought to offer a comprehensive look into the many, tangled lives of immigrants in the United States.
Lalami told Morocco World News of her interest in the idea of identity when juxtaposed to the realities of nationality. To her, “identity is not fixed as most are led to believe; it moves and changes as the person lives and experiences different events and circumstances.”
She elaborated that she chose to write a novel from multiple perspectives because of her fervent interest in the wide variety of factors that affect how we perceive, experience, and make sense of the world.
Laila Lalami’s writing is also known for its strong underlying political themes. And the author does not shy away from the observation. She claims it instead, unrepentantly making a case for the significance of politics for an author interested in writing relatable – and perhaps believable – stories narrating the struggles and triumphs of the migrant experience.
“The political dimension of fiction is just as important to me as the storytelling part,” she said.
The chaos of identity and belonging pervades “The Other Americans,” making the novel an unpacking of the multiple layers of the political salience of otherness in the US.
From racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, war trauma, and sexism, Lalami’s novel sets out to explore a litany of adjacent political ideas. But the main thread running through the multilayered narratives is the question of what it means to be American today.
Loosely put, “The Other Americans” goes beyond interrogating the meaning of being American to pointing to how Americanness is lived and expressed depending on one’s socio-economic status. The book, then, is a deft, intricate exploration of conflicting ways of being American, or of being in America. No wonder it was met with praise for its magisterially nuanced recounting of such heavy political themes.
Of writers whose writing distinctly speaks to her and nourishes her own writerly imagination, Lalami spoke effusively of Toni Morisson and James Bladwin as her biggest influences. “Those are writers that I consider of the highest caliber, and that I look up to. Everytime you read their work, you find something new to enjoy and new to discover,” she said.
The two writers, she added, are among the ones she goes back to the most because of their “highly nuanced and perceptive writing,” making for “unafraid writing.”
As a parting note to our interview, we asked the author to recommend a book to MWN readers.
And, in that oh-my-god moment of indecision and uncertainty that is the inescapably customary reaction from avid readers when asked to single out one in a forest of books, she struggled to settle on one.
Laila Lalami ended up recommending “Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time” by Ben Ehrenreich, saying it was a recent read of hers she greatly appreciated.
