Laila Lalami: “We have to think about citizenship as a relationship.”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses images, videos, and other fragments from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
Laila Lalami’s oeuvre reveals a commitment to plumbing history’s margins and footnotes, and discovering in its shadowy depths people forgotten—and often erased. In imagining them anew, she gives back what was snatched away by force: their personhood, with all its richness and complexity. In her debut novel Hopes and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Lalami tells the stories of four harragas, Moroccan immigrants crossing to Spain. “The news was relegated to the bottom of Le Monde’s online page,” she writes, “—fifteen Moroccan immigrants had drowned while crossing the Straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat.” Her Pulitzer-finalist historical memoir, The Moor’s Account, is based on the true story of a formerly enslaved man. Its narrator, Estebanico, is a Moroccan slave, one of only four survivors on the calamitous and once six hundred-person-strong Narváez expedition from Spain to Florida in the early sixteenth century. Estebanico was one the first outsiders to travel across America along with the three other Spanish survivors, only to have his eight-year experience reduced to a single line in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s celebrated account, published when he returned to Spain. In reframing the narrative through Estebanico, Lalami assumes the role of truth-teller and fact-finder, chronicling the role of African and Arab explorers in shaping the New World, and questioning the whitewashed narrative that has endured for five hundred years.
In Conditional Citizens, her first book-length nonfiction work, she distills a long and storied career as a political and cultural commentator into eight essays that clarify and challenge our notions of belonging in America. In true Lalami style, the essays work as magnifying glasses trained on the fine print of citizenship, dismantling the asterisks that qualify people’s full enjoyment of Americanness—race, religion, gender, national origin. “Conditional Citizens,” she writes, “are people whose rights the state finds expendable in the pursuit of white supremacy.” They are policed and punished more harshly than others, they are not guaranteed the same electoral representation, are more likely than others to be expatriated or denaturalized. This curtailment—and even the outright violation—of their rights results in the maintenance of a racialized caste system, with the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top.
I spoke to Lalami—she in California, I in New York—a few days after the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, just as the summer was winding
