Vantage Point

Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami’s latest, The Other Americans, is equal parts family saga, love story and crime novel. Here’s why you should be reading this tour de force.

- Shahnaz Siganporia

Styled as a 16th-century travelogue, Laila Lalami’s Pulitzer finalist, The Moor’s Account, comprises the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America, a Moroccan slave whose story had fallen through canonical annals. Her first collection of short stories, Hope And Other Dangerous Pursuits, follows the gruelling tale of four Moroccan immigrants seeking a promised land on European shores. In a note in her debut novel she recalls being inspired by a report she read: “...there was even a slang term in Moroccan Arabic for these migrants— harragas, meaning ‘those who burn’… I was immediately drawn to these stories, even though they were seemingly so different from my own.”

Lalami has been giving a voice, frame of context and legacy to the lost, forgotten and almost unseen for a while now. “Being a Moroccan immigrant in America has played a big part in shaping who I am as a person and, therefore, what I write. I often look at things from two perspectives, as an insider and as outsider,” she explains. She is also part of the contemporary feminist writer universe inhabited by the likes of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Zadie Smith, Fatima Bhutto and Elif Shafak, in which Lalami has individualised the immigrant tale into a more refined and specific world of words, especially timely in the era of walls and immigrant internment camps. Her latest novel, The Other Americans, carries on the tradition and yet seems her most personal yet.

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