December 2005
Joey Rubin
fiction
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
Immigration is a fundamental component of the Great American Story.
How we got here, how our parents got here, how the founders got here;
these are the celebrated tales of American becoming, the first step in
the coveted process of grasping the American Dream. But leaving one's
homeland in pursuit of a better life -- especially in today's "global,"
and economically divided, world -- is not a uniquely American
phenomenon. In the first novel of literary blogger Laila Lalami
(moorishgirl.com), Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, it is an
unfamiliar immigrant experience she has chosen to recount: the tale of
Moroccans heading toward Spain. But to American readers, it should
still be a familiar story.
Moroccan-born and British-educated, Lalami has made the US her home
since coming to study linguistics at USC in 1992. Her focus in Hope, however, is not her own experience, but those of characters
without the opportunities of emigration she had. Hope begins on a
boat as it pushes away from the Moroccan coast, illegally crossing the
Strait of Gibraltar, toward Spain, the nearest chunk of the West.
Aboard, a diverse assemblage of Moroccan characters is embarking on
that single journey for a range of different reasons. Hope is about
these reasons, and the effect these reasons have on those trying to
leave their homeland.
The eight chapters that follow the opening -- a short descriptive
chapter entitled "The Trip" -- flash back and forth in time, to the
months leading up to the boat trip and to the months and years after
the attempted, and for some successful, immigration. Each chapter
tells the story of a different Moroccan: Faten, the determinedly
religious teenage girl, Halima, the abused wife, Murad, the
over-educated, chronically unemployed university graduate, and Aziz,
the dedicated husband with unexpressed potential. The
overly-convenient representation of so many Moroccan social types
(unmarried, married; uneducated, educated; secular, devout; male,
female) exposes what seems to be a clear social/political "lesson:" be
sympathetic toward the plight of the immigrant. However, the novelty
of this faraway world being depicted in English language literature
makes the book interesting regardless of this weakness.
Lalami's book is most convincing when it animates Morocco with
tenderness and lucidity, as a complex post-colonial culture equally
unsure of the value of its own traditions as it is of Western
influence. While Lalami fails to hide the strings, she has no trouble
placing her puppets in front of a forceful backdrop. They inhabit a
realistic and modern world -- one Arab, African and Western. And in
this world, she depicts their trials as part of a universal plight.
Hope is not a tale of desperate immigration, nor of destructive
encroachment. It is a tale of human potential; a story about the
desire for improvement, and the difficulties inherent in the pursuit
of such a dream -- whether that dream be American, Moroccan, or just
plain human. However, we are lucky in this case it is Moroccan; it is
a landscape Lalami knows quite well.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565124936
208 Pages
