The deterritorialised self in Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

ABSTRACT

The most recurring image of the Mediterranean in recent years has been that of the overloaded migrant boat, an image often accompanied by the tragic story of shipwrecks and death tolls. Laila Lalami's novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, expands upon this tragic image, challenging narrow categorisations of Moroccan emigrant identity. Lalami creates a discursive space that disrupts the myth of the nation and subordinates considerations of Hispano-Moroccan relations to the individual narratives of four Moroccan emigrants. The novel – in three parts titled, ‘The Trip', ‘Before', and ‘After’ – opens with the Mediterranean crossing; it begins where the international discourse about North African immigrants generally ends. In the subsequent sections, Lalami redefines the emigrants, exploring their individual trajectories and the processes that lead them to their ultimate destinations. The end result – both for those characters who make it to Spain and those who must return to Morocco – is a liminal, deterritorialised self that challenges not only the immigrant narrative but also the cultures between which these people travel. Ultimately, Lalami's construction of diasporic and migrant identity reveals an untethered selfhood, one in constant movement, transit, and mutation. ‘Home’ is radically redefined, existing only in these individuals themselves, identifying with neither Morocco nor Spain, belonging instead to a liminal space caught somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• Hispano-Moroccan relations
• Laila Lalami
• gender
• diasporic identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The IOM reports that between January and July 2015, 101,900 migrants have made the trip from North Africa to Europe. In that same period, 1951 migrants are reported to have died. At the time of this writing, the death toll is reported to be closer to 2200. These are the recorded numbers, though; they represent the base minimum number of migrants killed in the crossing. One must note, also, that the 2014 and 2015 numbers need to account for refugee populations and asylum seekers making the trip across the Mediterranean as a result of the ongoing civil war in Syria.

2. According to Ricard Zapata-Barrero, ‘Moroccan migrants still represent 16.31% of the total foreign population of Spain, followed by Romanians (15.18%), and Ecuadorians (9.95%)’ (385).

3. Kassar and Dourgnon estimate that ‘tens of thousands of sub-Saharan migrants annually transit via Morocco to reach Spain’ (14).

4. The UNODC notes that, in the case of Morocco, the better educated ‘have a greater propensity to migrate', despite dominant representations of boat migrants (2011, 48).

5. It is important to point out that human smuggling may indeed lead to human trafficking. The unavailability of reliable migrant data, though, ensures the invisibility of such migrants, particularly since academic literature and expert reports continued to use the two concepts (human trafficking and human smuggling) interchangeably until well into the 2000s.

6. Ma'alim fi Ttariq (1964), by Egyptian Islamist author Sayyid Qutb, is a call to recreate the Muslim world on Quranic grounds – through revolution if necessary – as a means of casting off a modern era of Jahiliyya. The text, for which he was later executed, is considered to have greatly influenced the resurgence of Islamist movements in the twentieth century.

7. Morocco's Family Code, Mudawwanat al-Ousra, underwent significant reform in the early 2000s. The new code, adopted in 2004, introduced new judicial procedures for divorce. Under the new code, women victims of domestic abuse could more easily seek and be awarded divorces – a change from the previous code under which women victims might have to wait several years for a divorce, if they were to get one at all. The events leading up to the attempted migration to Spain occur before this legal reform occurred – Faten, for example, criticises King Hassan, who died in 1999.

8. The characters’ names reflect aspects of their respective narratives and/or personalities. Halima means patient, generous, and mild; Faten means charming, seductive, beautiful. This is true of the men as well. Murad means desired or wished for; Aziz means respected and beloved.

9. The new code, coming in 2004 after decades of women's activism in Morocco, removed many of these restrictions and ended men's exclusive divorce rights.

10. According to Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index there is:

a consistent and substantial level of perceived public sector corruption [in modern Morocco], with the country scoring 3,4 on a 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (highly clean) society. This finding is supported by public opinion survey data that shows 77 per cent of Moroccans feel that there has been no change in the level of corruption in the country over the last three years. (Johnson 2012, 11)

11. Qalaq is the Arabic term for anxiety or angst. Berque (1965) uses this word to indicate what he believes to be an outstanding feature of modern Arabic literature.

12. Barzakh literally translates to ‘veil’ or ‘barrier'. In Islamic eschatology, it generally refers to the liminal space between the physical and spiritual worlds. Similar to the concept of limbo, barzakh is where the soul must wait between death and resurrection. While here, the soul can neither go back to the physical realm nor forward to the afterlife. Prominent Sufi philosopher Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240) compares barzakh to ‘the time the embryo spends in its mother's womb'. Matthew Sharpe describes it as a ‘liminal fissure’ where Maghrebi authors discuss the various transferals of identity characteristic of migration and movement (Sharpe 2005, 398, 401). 

13. The International Monetary Fund notes that youth unemployment in Morocco increases exponentially with education:

At the national level, the unemployment ranges from 4.5 percent for workers with no degree to 16 percent for those with a diploma below the secondary level (niveau moyen), and to 18.1 percent for those of diploma for secondary studies or higher (niveau supérieur). (Furceri, Mazraani, and Versailles 2013, 10)

14. ’Abath, an Arabic word with multiple translations, refers in this context to the insurmountable absurdity of the characters’ contemporary realities.

15. The Nahda (Renaissance) period in Arabic literature and culture began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Egypt before it moved through other Arabic-speaking nations. Pan-Arabism also originates in the early twentieth century, reaching its height during the presidency of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and declining after the Six Day War.

16. Criticism of Pan-Arabism often focused on its resistance to heterogeneous representation. Ethnic minorities across North Africa and the Middle East, such as the Berber, suffered prejudice and the continued threat of cultural erasure

17. The stranger; the other.