From Driss, the victim of a hit and run and a Moroccan immigrant, to his American-born daughter, Nora, who dedicates years of her life to finding the guilty party. The Other Americans sees Lalami expand beyond the Moroccan experience, giving the reader a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Her previous, The Moor’s Account, garnered wide acclaim, including the American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award, while being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Laskar, Mohsin Hamid, and Valeria Luiselli. The Other Americans thrusts her fiction into a league of necessary literature, along with Luis Alberto Urrea, Devi S. In her writing of immigration and its impact on families, Lalami is more concerned with truth than with metaphor, avoiding flowery prose. She challenges the exclusive nature of American communities by showing people as people first - their desires and flaws - and the complexities of a multicultural, multigenerational nation that is still wrestling with its own identity. Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Other Americans, explores this tension between our notions of what it means to be American and what it means to be Other. Yet both produce anxiety and lead down distinct paths of either building walls or mending fences. The latter requires true engagement with a person. It’s easier to demonize (and consume) than to sympathize from physical proximity. It protects from difference: of skin color, culture, and opinion. In this sense, community functions as a collective imagination that guards nation, neighborhood, and personal space.
On the other hand, when traced back to its Latin roots in communitas, Esposito finds it defined by indebtedness and reciprocity, race and citizenship notwithstanding.Īpproaching immigration from these definitions helps contextualize how mass media has easily constructed otherness out of immigrants, seen as outsiders who “invade” borders.
He concludes that, in today’s body politic, community has come to mean “property,” belonging to subjects joined together, delimited by borders. IN HIS BOOK Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito analyzes the sociopolitical and etymological constructs of community.
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