Biopolitics and the emergent self-reflexive Maghribi subjectivity in Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

ABSTRACT

Commonsense discussions about illegal immigration in the Maghreb point the finger in the direction of authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean. The EU is reproached for closing its borders and North African governments for exploiting the problem by diverting attention elsewhere and downplaying its gravity. The Moroccan writer, Laila Lalami, through her collection of short stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), prefers to focus more on the harraga populations themselves; it is their unthinking proclivities that exacerbate the problem and allow the ruling machinery to become biopolitical entities, working less for the interest of the impoverished populations and more for staying in power, no matter how.

Through characters and narrative situations, Lalami shows that illegal immigration is a trap. For, even when the harrag makes it to the host country and starts sending remittances, as Aziz does, to family back at home, he remains a loser. The middle-class ideal of a steady income and improved living standards lifts the Maghrebi's spontaneity and turns him or her into a superfluous commodity, seeking always to behave, not to think. Unlike Aziz or Larbi then, Murad failed to make it to Spain. His prolonged joblessness becomes an extension of his romantic character. Shaking that romanticism off allows him eventually to reverse the biopolitical reality by embracing the art of ‘story telling’. Readers find him expertly selling artworks in souvenir shops in Tangier. Success in this context is not capitalistically driven; it involves organically connecting self-important American tourists with the artwork. The tourism industry becomes less of a recognition of already ordered reality, and more of an encounter with a new one: money matters but does not determine or control the encounter. The self-reflexive Murad assumes now a constructive engagement with the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• self-reflexive
• Ha’rrga
• Maghrib

Acknowledgment

I would like to humbly thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. More than the constructive engagement, I am obliged to them for their time investment on my manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. At Al Akhawayn University in Irfan under the title: “Crossing Boundaries: Youth, Migration and Development” between 2 March 2017 and 4 March 2017.

2. Kristen Schuettler, “A Second Campaign for Irregular Immigrants in Morocco: When Emigration Countries Become Immigration Countries” The World Bank Blog: January 13th, 2017. http://blogs.worldbank.org/peoplemove/second-regularization-campaign-irregular-immigrants-morocco-when-emigration-countries-become. Similarly, Natter cautions researchers from taking Maghrebian states' narratives at their face value. She notes “…that in order to comprehensively assess the role of the state in migration processes, research should move beyond a ‘destination country’ bias and pay sufficient attention to the crucial role of origin states and their policies. The findings show that Maghreb states’ policies towards emigration are as important as destination country policies in shaping emigration over time; and that Maghreb migrants continue to react to state-created migration opportunities on both sides of the Mediterranean today.” (2014: 20).

3. Human Rights Watch: Algeria: New Wave of Deportations, February 2018 https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/27/algeria-new-wave-deportations

4. The New York Times estimated that “ … in the case of Algerian harragas, the term is suggestive of a metaphorical burning of one's bridges.” November 19th, 2008. https://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/harraga/?_r=0 (Emphasis in the original)

5. Al-Seddik Hadj Ahmed's Kmarad (Faddat for Publication and Distribution) traces the path of illegal immigrants from places like Bamako, N’Djamena and other desert locales in West Africa as they trek to the Algerian border town of Tamanrasset, later to Adrar, all the way to the Moroccan borders till the barbed wire of Ceuta, the Spanish town. I read Kmarad as an epitome to a north African culture that prefers self-denial, exonerates the powers that be from responsibility, since the illegal immigrants in the novel are black West Africans, strangely presuming that North African youth do not embark on such perilous and devastating journeys.

6. Lamia in Sensal's Harraga, Edition Gallimard (2005) has to deal with the consequences of the birth of an illegitimate girl by an anonymous and dying single mother, herself just 16 years old. In the large house that she has inherited on the heights of Kasbah, and since the legitimate inheritors have either died or emigrated, no one seems destined to inherit the house (a metaphor for Algeria) except this anonymous girl born to an, as yet, anonymous girl. Since Lamia is a spinster herself, the baby girl's double innocence is supposed to outdo the strict cultural ban on illegitimate children as they are born out of wedlock. I read Sensal's novel and despite its promising title, it has less to do with illegal immigration per se but is more preoccupied with a cultural setting that values ‘approved decedents’, that is lineage, and shies away from blood impurity.

7. There is a consistent line in Maghribi politics to bring forth illegal immigration for gaining political points. During the last phase of the coalition campaign against his troops, Colonel Gadhafi threatened the coalition that he would flood Europe with immigrants http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gaddafi-planned-to-flood-europe-with-migrants-as-final-revenge-2354322.html remains an interesting illustration. Far from being the exception, the provisional Libyan government too recently wanted to bargain for its legitimacy by sending ‘veiled threats’ to flood Europe with illegals in case the EU keeps ignoring such a government: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/11970313/Libya-warns-it-could-flood-Europe-with-migrants-if-EU-does-not-recognise-new-Islamist-government.html

8. Although Butler acknowledged that, on the occasion of 9/11, “the United States was missing on the opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community … ” (Butler 2004, xi)

9. Arendt observes that the withdrawal of the public and private in favour of the social gives birth to alienated social classes, mass people where each naively thinks he or she can navigate his or her own way through the world: “The docility of this type [the family man] was already manifest in the very early period of Nazi ‘Gleinschaltung’. It became clear that for the sake of his pension, his life insurance, the security of his wife and children, such a man was ready to sacrifice his beliefs, his honour, and his human dignity.” (Baehr 2000, 152)

10. Still Arendt specifies that “As we know from the most social form of government, that is, from bureaucracy (the last stage of government in the nation-state just as one-man rule in benevolent despotism and absolutism was its first), the rule by nobody is not essentially no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruellest and most tyrannical versions” (Baehr 2000, 193)

11. Immigration could be identified as a tool for political agency “ … new generations of well-integrated Moroccans abroad have become more assertive in exercising their active political rights, no longer positioning themselves exclusively as political subjects, but also as political actors.” (Berriane, de Haas, and Natter 2015, 511)

12. Larbi's case is reminiscent of Alaa Al Aswany's short stories collection, Friendly Fire (2004), where Mr. Gouda, a head of department in the Egyptian Ministry of Planning … “no distinguishable characteristics between the masses and the elite” speaks beyond materials reduction.

13. I hold that it is the biopolitical proclivities displayed through the literal, not figurative, superfluity of the people in states of the Maghreb that are the signs of Modernity, not the shock from introducing nudity on the screen as Hakim Abderrezak proffers: “ … the exposed body in cinema deployed as signs of the eruption of modernity, all point to an existential question about the reduction of modernity to these signs”. (Abderrezak 2008, 67) The superfluous condition of ordinary people takes its toll on their thinking to the extent that they imagine they can escape such a fate by literally ‘evaporating’ to Europe; that is, illegally immigrating. Goucem at the end of the film reaches the conclusion that in order to not to meet Fifi's fate (abducted and later killed by the senior police officer who used to be her client) herself, she has to exchange prostitution with harr’ga, the lesser evil of the two in the biopolitical arrangement. Her new boyfriend, Samir, is ever determined to leave too.