Laila Lalami
Author of The Moor's Account
About the Author
Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and the novels Secret Son and The Moor's Account. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in several publications including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, show more The Nation, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Author Laila Lalami at the 2015 Texas Book Festival. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44626510
Works by Laila Lalami
Associated Works
The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic (2020) — Contributor — 117 copies, 4 reviews
Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (2004) — Contributor, some editions — 26 copies
Jungfrau and other short stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 7th Annual Collection (2007) — Contributor — 20 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1968
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Morocco
USA - Birthplace
- Rabat, Morocco
- Places of residence
- Portland, Oregon, USA
- Education
- Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco
University College London
University of Southern California - Occupations
- essayist
author
Associate Professor of Creative Writing - Organizations
- University of California, Riverside
- Awards and honors
- Fulbright Fellowship
British Council fellowship
Members
Reviews
This brutal yet beguiling novel falls into that delightful genre of historical gap-filling. It is the story of Mustafa, an enslaved Moroccan who ended up on Spanish expedition to what would become Florida. The three hundred strong expedition arrived in 1527, but only four members of it ever returned to Spanish-controlled lands. Three were Spanish and their official accounts are documented. Mustafa, renamed Estebanico when enslaved, was the fourth and nothing is known of him except the city he came from. Lalami fills this lacuna with a viscerally convincing work of fiction. Mustafa’s story is fascinating and distinctive, in large part because of his changing dynamics with the Spanish expedition and Native Americans. His perspectives on his own enslavement and Spanish aim to enslave the native Floridan population are treated very thoughtfully, yet this is also an exciting against-the-odds survival story. Of course, the whole thing is suffused with great sadness, given the reader’s knowledge of how brutally subsequent history would treat the Native Americans. Nonetheless, there are some extremely powerful moments which nearly drive that from your mind as you read, notably one scene when a starving Spanish survivor desperately tries to barter a gold earring for food. That moment is all the more shocking given that this earring, and the promise of gold it carried, impelled the man trading it away to join the expedition. He only resorts to such an expedient after many disasters, having already lost absolutely everything else. Mustafa recounts this and the rest of his tale in a measured fashion that is both sympathetic and cynical. The whole thing is neatly structured and very well written, in addition to having that rare and precious feature: a really satisfactory ending.… (more)
Youssef El Mekk comes of age in the slums of Casablanca where he attends university but harbors no hopes for the future. He learns that his father whom his mother had said was dead is actually the prosperous businessman Nabil Amrani. Nabil had a fling with Youseff's mother when she worked for his company. Youseff finds his father and they begin spending time together, Nabil enjoying having a son, and Youseff the advantages of wealth. But Youseff also resents how Nabil hides him away from the rest of his life, including his half-sister Amal who is studying at UCLA. As Youseff grows more in despair at the inequality of Morocco he is drawn towards a group of Islamist extremists.
Favorite Passages:
Favorite Passages:
It was the worst thing in the world, Youssef thought, to lose everything and, at the same time, to have everyone see that you did not own anything worth saving. - p. 13
At the university, the students had demonstrated, endured the punches and batons, but they had never stood a chance. This was about business, about making as much money as possible; it had nothing to do with what was fair, much less what was right. - p. 123
Mothers were mothers: they cared for children, sacrificed for them, worried about them. It was in the order of things, as old as the world itself. Yet the way he had treated his mother was not in the order of things. He had met her love with denial, and her pleas with contempt. He had gone searching for a father instead. A crushing feeling of guilt descended upon him. He promised himself he would not let her down any longer. - p. 211… (more)
Don’t Play it again Sam
Read by: Mozhan Marnò, P.J. Ochlan, Adenrele Ojo, Ozzie Rodriguez, Susan Nezami, Ali Nasser, Mark Bramhall, Max Adler, Meera Simhan
Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
I had such high hopes for this book, having read some earlier novels by Laila Lalami that had shown promise. I have had good experiences with writers from Morocco and neighboring Algeria, as well as with Western writers’s books set in those countries. I’ve been to both and left a little bit of my heart in Morocco, a country I’ve always been drawn to since I read A Sheltering Sky in my youth.
Drinking mint tea, sitting around cafés French style, exploring medinas, waking to the call for prayer, meeting eccentric Westerners, Morocco has a certain je ne sais pas magic.
Sadly I was disappointed when I read The Other Americans. There’s not much of Morocco in the book, whose central characters come from Casablanca but live permanently in America. The prose too often reaches clichéd and banal lows. Take the Iraquí vet character Jeremy, musing over his Marine buddy Efraín, who he’s recently fallen out with and beaten to a pulp. I’m just looking after you, baby, he’d called to the horrified Nora as he stood over Efrain with his knuckles bloodied.
“The Marines had brought us together, two dumb kids from the desert. And although we’d fought side by side for years, in the end we’d come out just as we’d gone in, two different people. Now it was time for us to go our separate ways.”
But it’s not the patchy quality of the writing that’s the problem. Although there’s a central incident that the novel resolves around, the cast of characters is huge - just look above at the number of narrators - each one representing a different fully-fleshed-out character, each with their own story. Each chapter is devoted to a different character, and the novels cycles through the list on repeat until a conclusion is reached.
Jeremy, Anderson, Nora, Driss, Coleman, Maryam, Efrain, A.J., Selma and Anderson. They are all directly or indirectly linked to the “incident “ and each had their own story taking one or three dedicated chapters. Plus most of them had wives, mistresses and/or children who also tell their stories, most of which have little or no relation to the “incident” or to each other.
It was all a bit much. I’d be following Nora and her affairs and problems and then A.J would make a chapter appearance Then Maryam. And then back to Nora and so on and on and on. Many of the characters didn’t know each other though some did.
Then there were the multiple themes. Illegal immigration, the Iraq War, the fall of King Hassan II of Morocco and subsequent reforms there, Blacks in America. Muslims in America. Adultery, school bullying, the recession, police conduct and drug addiction.
Still I feel Lalami is a promising writer. I read the book through to the end; it managed to hold my interest. So it had something though I can’t quite work out what that something was.
I gave The Other Americans a 3.5 rating. I feel the writer took on too much for one novel. If she cut out the clichéd parts and a couple of the characters, and tightened the plot up a little, I’m sure it would have made a better read.… (more)
Read by: Mozhan Marnò, P.J. Ochlan, Adenrele Ojo, Ozzie Rodriguez, Susan Nezami, Ali Nasser, Mark Bramhall, Max Adler, Meera Simhan
Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
I had such high hopes for this book, having read some earlier novels by Laila Lalami that had shown promise. I have had good experiences with writers from Morocco and neighboring Algeria, as well as with Western writers’s books set in those countries. I’ve been to both and left a little bit of my heart in Morocco, a country I’ve always been drawn to since I read A Sheltering Sky in my youth.
Drinking mint tea, sitting around cafés French style, exploring medinas, waking to the call for prayer, meeting eccentric Westerners, Morocco has a certain je ne sais pas magic.
Sadly I was disappointed when I read The Other Americans. There’s not much of Morocco in the book, whose central characters come from Casablanca but live permanently in America. The prose too often reaches clichéd and banal lows. Take the Iraquí vet character Jeremy, musing over his Marine buddy Efraín, who he’s recently fallen out with and beaten to a pulp. I’m just looking after you, baby, he’d called to the horrified Nora as he stood over Efrain with his knuckles bloodied.
“The Marines had brought us together, two dumb kids from the desert. And although we’d fought side by side for years, in the end we’d come out just as we’d gone in, two different people. Now it was time for us to go our separate ways.”
But it’s not the patchy quality of the writing that’s the problem. Although there’s a central incident that the novel resolves around, the cast of characters is huge - just look above at the number of narrators - each one representing a different fully-fleshed-out character, each with their own story. Each chapter is devoted to a different character, and the novels cycles through the list on repeat until a conclusion is reached.
Jeremy, Anderson, Nora, Driss, Coleman, Maryam, Efrain, A.J., Selma and Anderson. They are all directly or indirectly linked to the “incident “ and each had their own story taking one or three dedicated chapters. Plus most of them had wives, mistresses and/or children who also tell their stories, most of which have little or no relation to the “incident” or to each other.
It was all a bit much. I’d be following Nora and her affairs and problems and then A.J would make a chapter appearance Then Maryam. And then back to Nora and so on and on and on. Many of the characters didn’t know each other though some did.
Then there were the multiple themes. Illegal immigration, the Iraq War, the fall of King Hassan II of Morocco and subsequent reforms there, Blacks in America. Muslims in America. Adultery, school bullying, the recession, police conduct and drug addiction.
Still I feel Lalami is a promising writer. I read the book through to the end; it managed to hold my interest. So it had something though I can’t quite work out what that something was.
I gave The Other Americans a 3.5 rating. I feel the writer took on too much for one novel. If she cut out the clichéd parts and a couple of the characters, and tightened the plot up a little, I’m sure it would have made a better read.… (more)
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Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant to a California town in the Mojave Desert, is struck and killed by a vehicle while crossing the street one night. The vehicle leaves the scene without stopping. The family cannot accept it as simply an accident, and the main character, Nora, goes about trying to find the killer. The family has been in town for 20 years, but they have all experienced being outsiders, "rag heads," especially after 9/11.
And they are not the only "other" Americans. There is Efraim, a Mexican in the country illegally, who witnesses the hit-and-run but is afraid to come forward lest the spotlight be turned on him. And Coleman the detective, who we find out late in the novel is African American. And the Chinese woman in Irvine who accuses A.J. Baker of killing her dog while he is in Baker's doggie daycare, causing him to lose his business. Jeremy, a Polish American Iraqi war vet and policeman, falls for Nora, who he knew in high school and liked even then. But even his friend Fierro cannot resist labeling Nora out of jealousy for Jeremy's good fortune in finding her, while he, Fierro, is going through a divorce.
Phew! There's a lot going on here! At one point I thought there were too many extraneous characters, but they all played their role in the story, even if they disappeared before the end. I'm thinking of Efraim and Fierro.
Although the focus is on racism, Lalami imbues all the characters with depth and humanity. Whether they are on the giving or receiving end of racial epithets, we are shown both their good and bad sides, the explanations for what made them the way they are, which is a very good thing, which, I think, is a very good thing, especially in our divisive times.… (more)