Edinburgh Companion To The Arab Novel in English T... - (Part I Constellations Modernity, Empire and Postcoloniality)

la i la la la m i ’ s h o p e a n d ot h e r da n g e ro u s p u r s u i t s 149
Chapter 6
B u r n i n g, M e m o r y a n d Po s t c o l o n i a l
A ge n c y i n L a i l a L a l a m i ’ s H o p e a n d O t h e r
D a n g e ro u s P u r s u i t s 1
Ahmed Idrissi Alami
c o n s t e l lat i o n s
la i la la la m i ’ s h o p e an d oth er dan gero us pu rs ui t s
The relationship between Spain and Morocco has, over the centuries,
been marked by waves and ebbs of colonial power, physical migration,
and cultural and religious intermingling. The flow of emigrants from
North Africa moving northwards towards Spain, after a century of Spain
sending its own emigrants outward, has led to anxiety over what Daniela
Flesler calls the “return of the Moor.” As she argues in her book of the
same name, “Spain is not only experiencing the return of the colonized
but also that of its medieval colonizers.”2 At the geographical epicenter of
this tide, as it was in previous centuries, lies the city of Tangier, poised at
the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar and to the Mediterranean beyond.
It is this city, more than other minor points of migration along the north
coast, which serves as the launching point for waves of would-be emigrants
who pound, again and again, against the increasingly closed gate to a now
more fluid group of nations organized under the banner of the European
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
Union. Tangier, a space where various cultures and religions intersect,

serves as the opening location in Laila Lalami’s 2005 novel Hope and Other
Dangerous Pursuits.3
In Lalami’s novel we witness not only the coming together of individuals
on the run, but a disparate confluence of complex identities affected by
both local Moroccan and distant Spanish cultures as bound by centuries of
relationships that continue to inform, and haunt, their collective cultural
memory. In this study, I investigate ways in which the complex relationship
between Spain and Morocco ensnares the novel’s protagonists and how
Lalami, the most successful Anglophone of the Moroccan writers to date,4
utilizes the novel as a vehicle through which she demonstrates how emi-
grants often come to redefine themselves in light of systematic and socially
Gana, N. (Ed.). (2013). Edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english : The politics of anglo arab and arab american literature and culture.
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150 t h e e d i n b u rg h c o m pa n i o n to t h e a ra b n ov e l i n e n g l i s h
sanctioned processes of exclusion and rejection on both sides of the strait.

In the process of their journeys to Spain and, for two of the protagonists
Murad and Aziz, upon returning to Morocco, they experience a growth of
consciousness about historical memory concerning the recent past and start
to question the limitations of and potential for postcolonial agency in both
countries. This issue is critical as it provides additional insight into the per-
sistence of not only colonial legacies, but that of much deeper relationships,
both real and imagined, between cultures. Exposure to the exploitative and
hegemonic stereotyping and racial politics that the characters experience
through crossing into the host country prompts a process of redefinition of
identity generated by a resurgence of historical memory and development
of a new sense of agency.
Language Politics and the Politics of Exclusion

Although still overshadowed by writers who use Arabic and French, English
has recently become the language of choice for some creative writers in or
from Morocco. This choice has often reflected the academic background
of the authors as well as their career choices, often as university professors
or teachers of English language, linguistics or literature. In this regard, we
can point to the literary work of Jillali El Koudia (English professor and an
established Moroccan short story writer), Abdellatif Akbib (also professor of
English and author of short stories), and Anouar Majid (a scholar, a novelist
and founding director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University
of New England and novelist).5 Laila Lalami, likewise, did her graduate
studies in the United States and is currently an associate professor of crea-
tive writing at University of California, Riverside. Her works, which include
numerous essays and critical newspaper columns, have made her perhaps
the most successful Anglophone Moroccan writer to date. However, this

choice has not been without consequences in terms of her readership in the
Maghreb and has made her works harder to assess as her choice of English
disrupts the established conventional literary and cultural categories used
to classify Moroccan and North African literature.
In her review of Lalami’s Secret Son, Gaiutra Bahadur discusses the
author’s use of English rather than Arabic or French as a language of choice
that is determined by the writer’s desire to reach out to the American
readership and offer them a narrative that unveils the socio-psychological
dynamic that produces terrorism. As she notes, “Lalami has said she
chooses to write in English partly because she wants to speak directly to
Americans, who read few translated books but urgently need authentic
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maps to those parts of the world where inequality has electroshocked the
terrorist id into being.”6
Her first novel, then, can be seen as informed and shaped by the author’s
felt ethical responsibility to provide “authentic maps” to the marginalized
parts of the world where social strife and dispossession have bred despair
and led to acts of destruction of self and others. It is also the author’s strate-
gic intervention in the post-9/11 ongoing cultural debate about globalized
identity politics and alterity as well as a political reflection on the Moroccan
postcolonial scene where past and present legacies not only intersect and
cross-pollinate but are also complicated by the impact shared Hispano-
Moroccan cultural memory has on the lives of emigrants and the overall cul-
ture of migration. In this regard, her novel charts a new territory for cultural
expression that echoes Rebecca Walkovitz’s view that this type of literature
“reflects a shift from nation-based paradigms to new ways of understanding
community and belonging and to transnational models emphasizing a global
space of ongoing travel and interconnection.”7
In her second novel, Secret Son (2009),8 Lalami explores the intimate
connections between Morocco and the West while interrogating a flawed
domestic social system that has disenfranchised all but the elite and edu-
cated. Drawing on the eternal theme of the illegitimate son seeking recog-
nition from his powerful father, the novel dramatizes the social alienation
and psychological disarray that the protagonist, Youssef El Mekki, experi-
ences as he seeks recognition by his father, now an established member of
the new liberal Morocco elite. The reader discovers the stark discrepancies
and widening gap that separates the poor majority condemned to life in
shanty towns such as Sidi Moumen, a neighborhood notoriously tied to the
May 16, 2003 terrorist bombings in Casablanca, from those who inhabit
the lavish and luxurious villas and insulated posh neighborhoods, associ-
ated with the privileged Moroccans who live and experience globalized
liberal lifestyles. The novel connects the roots of terrorism to local politics
and party where both the globally oriented secularists and the religiously
conservative kingpins involve themselves in corrupt machinations and
often violent manipulations of the masses. In both novels, she gives witness
to the lives of those left behind and/or excluded from the wider waves of
progress experienced by better educated and well-connected sections of
society while presenting the reader with often startlingly accurate repre-
sentations of Moroccan society across the lines of social-economic and
cultural classes and divisions.
At the beginning of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, the characters are
in a six-meter Zodiac, designed for eight but carrying thirty, which carries
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its beleaguered passengers only within swimming distance of the Spanish

shoreline. The scene presents a symbolic inverse of the crossing in 711 by
Tariq ibn- Ziyad, then Arab governor of Tangier, who took with him thou-
sands of soldiers to begin his conquest of Spain via the tiny island still known
by his name, Gibraltar (the rock of Tarik). The primary narrator, Murad,
reflects: “Little did they know that we’d be back … Only instead of a fleet,
here we are in an inflatable boat—not just Moors, but a motley mix of people
from the ex-colonies, without guns or armor, without a charismatic leader.”9
From this first opening, we see echoes of historical memory, of a triumphant
earlier time that initiated seven centuries of dominance on the peninsula.
But now, after numerous indignities and hardships in their own land, these
emigrants will turn to Spanish jobs in agriculture, food service and some of
them even prostitution, which have come to be preferable to the rejection
they have experienced in their own society.
The geographical location, specifically Tangier and the north of Morocco,
has witnessed numerous acts of violence and waves of emigrants coming
away from Spain, too. After the fall of Granada in 1492 and the ultimate
expulsion of even converted Moriscos from Spain in 1609, many of those
expelled from Spain settled along the northern coast. Some groups moved
further south into the region of Fez and along the Atlantic to the port
city of Salé, where they formed distinct communities. It is this northern
region, known later as the Spanish zone, which became conquered territory
of the Spanish through the Treaty of Fez of 1912. Since then, despite the
recognition of Morocco’s self-determination in 1956, Spain still maintains
several enclaves on the coast at Ceuta and Melilla and continues to dispute
the sovereignty of the tiny island of Perejil/Leila off the northern coast, as
happened in September 2002.10 These events highlight the ebb and flow of
people and the changing balance of power between these two nations. In the
present, it is this legacy that particularly informs relations between the two
nations and among the characters of Lalami’s novel.
In the fragile Zodiac, the reader meets characters who will speak of
their own in-betweenness, of their engagement with both diasporic and
domestic concerns that infuse postcolonial Moroccan concepts of self and
other, of here and there, of Morocco and Spain. Such transnational and
transcultural interfusion recalls Mary Louise Pratt’s theorizing of the
contact zone, a space associated with the colonial encounter characterized
by “conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict.”11
This encounter, as she elaborates, pertains to “how subjects are constituted
in and by their relations to each other.”12 Despite the political end of the
colonial relationship, the relational positions of power and concomitant
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anxiety have not disappeared but rather persist in acknowledged and
unrecognized ways.
Lalami’s skill as a novelist appears in how this fluidity of time and memory
is expressed in individual lives. Part of the reason for the distinct stories
associated with four different protagonists comes from her process of writ-
ing the novel itself; as Lalami describes in a recorded discussion of her
work, the novel started as a short story about Murad, and was followed by
the composition of the additional discrete stories. As she notes: “The book
started as a short story about a young man, sort of like a male version of
myself.”13 The very structure of Lalami’s work reflects the interpenetration
of past, present and future. As the past continues to haunt the present in
Hispano-Moroccan relations, so for the characters the present leads to the
past and then, only by the end of the novel, implies a better future. This pro-
cess brings memories of distant history into conversation with the colonial
past and the disappointments of the present,14 in which disproportionate
development continues to propel a significant percentage of the poor and
lower classes to dream of either living abroad or of isolating themselves from
their own wretched present. This exclusion leads to a variety of responses
seen in the lives of Lalami’s characters in this novel; some become corrupted
themselves, others become resigned, and still others find either motivation
or safety in conservative Islamic teachings proffered to them as an antidote
to the sins of those in power. But it is the responses of those who choose to
try to leave their domestic situations behind them that Lalami both explores
and critiques most deeply.
We see her critique through the novel’s reflections on how Moroccan
youth experiencing social disparities, the absence of transparent civil society
and the illusion of democratic values can fall prey to exploitative systems
in both Morocco and Spain. As Lalami notes in her commentary on the
uprising in Egypt in February 2011, in much of the Arab world, “our lead-
ers delivered us into a world of silence and fear and told us that we must
watch what we say and watch what we do;”15 in Morocco, the government
system exploits this silence. One example of such a mutually exploitative
system appears in the form of those men who have gotten these people, at
the beginning of the novel, to this Zodiac boat; many men participate in
human trafficking on both sides of the straits and are often helped by the
Spanish guardia civil, who can make the most out of the desperation of these
potential emigrants. For example, Murad, like the others, spent a fortune
to buy a spot; he thinks about how much money the gang that has arranged
his passage stands to gain through their human trafficking, and he estimates
their take being about 600,000 dirhams, “enough for an apartment or a small
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house in a Moroccan beach town like Asilah or Cabo Negro.”16 However,

he also suggests that he is “different” from his fellow immigrants. He has
decided it is a good investment for himself, as his hope is clear; unlike other
“uneducated” emigrants, he believes he will “find a real job” that uses his
linguistic training in both Spanish and English. This is his hope for Spain
after having failed in his home country. As an educated young Moroccan,
one with a college degree from a public university, Murad’s frustrated
expectations and consequent struggle against social marginalization have
become emblematic of his generation. He has become one of les diplômés
chômeurs, the unemployed diploma-holders.
Murad’s initial attempt at illegal crossing into Spain is a way to escape
the intractable problems of unemployment that have unfolded despite his
education, as well as an attempt to reverse his uncertain social future.
Before attempting to cross, he was rejected for a low-level administra-
tive job like the one his sister easily obtained. Now broke, Murad works,
often unsuccessfully, as an illegal or “faux” guide, hustling tourists as they
arrive on ferries from Spain. Seen within the context of this in-between
space, Murad is rejected in his own land by tourists, notably Americans,
members of the new world power. Forced to return to his widowed mother
empty-handed, he also finds himself further stripped of his masculine
role. He cannot earn money while his sisters can, he cannot get a job using
his education in English while his brothers obtain scholarships to medical
school in Rabat, and he is then denied his role as master of the house
following his father’s death. For example, after protesting that a marriage
proposal for his sister was presented to his mother and his uncle, rather
than him, he yells at her, “I should have been in the know.” His mother’s
response provides a final blow to his ego as she replies: “Don’t raise your
voice at me. Are you paying for the wedding?” to which he lamely responds:
“Just because I don’t have a job you think I’m invisible?”17 In fact, in his
own society, he has become invisible, a situation he did not foresee when
he chose to study language and literature at university. In retrospect, he
regrets he did not choose to apply himself to the illicit trade of smuggling,
a thought that further emphasizes the despondency felt by many young
men of his generation.18
Murad’s frustrations come not only from his inability to fulfill his role
as breadwinner and man of the family, but also from rejection from his cul-
ture which finds no use for his skills and his education.19 His story serves
as a counterpoint to that of Faten, a young woman who, abandoned by her
father, moved to Rabat with her mother to “the Douar Hlajja slum, the kind
of place where couscous pots were used as satellite dishes.”20 Despite her
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poverty, Faten manages “to graduate from high school, go to college, find
God, and join the Islamic Student Organization,”21 leading her to meet her
bourgeois friend, Noura, at university in Rabat. Befriending Noura, Faten
enters a different world where a maid cooks the food, Noura’s mother is
a lawyer and her father, Larbi Amrani, works in the education ministry.
His discovery of a copy of Sayed Qutb’s book Milestones, a foundational
text of radical Islamic teaching coincides with Noura’s growing friend-
ship with Faten. At the same time, he notices significant changes in his
daughter’s behavior; she begins to shun the popular music and theatre she
used to love. She begins to dress more conservatively and stops wearing
make-up. To his own liberal dismay, she dons a headscarf, tightly tying
it around her face to hide her hair, “like half the city’s female popula-
tion;”22 such shows of piety were not for his daughter. Soon after, he is
informed by a colleague that Noura was caught helping Faten cheat on a
test and he must use his position and influence to protect his daughter and
prevent further embarrassment. But Faten, with her poor background and
weak connections, never stands a chance to succeed, and eventually fails
her exams, despite Noura’s attempts to have her father intervene on her
behalf. Rather, soon after this, and perhaps as a consequence of Larbi’s
machinations, Faten receives a tip from her imam that she must leave
immediately or risk being arrested. Running from the law, partly owing to
her connections with a radical religious group and also implicated by “a
derogatory comment about King Hassan within earshot of a snitch,”23 she
ends up on the Zodiac. Unlike Murad, who has neither the connections
nor the money to get past the border police, Faten gains access to Spain
after being raped by a member of the guardia civil. Faten’s rape, carried
out while the man still wears the surgical gloves he wore to keep himself
“clean” while inspecting the immigrants, becomes symbolic of various lev-
els of injustice. The returned Moor, as Flesler suggests, has led to anxiety
over both symbolic and literal boundaries24 and such violence, enacted at
the border, is symptomatic of it. Once Faten is “released” into Spain at
large, she will be much less distinguishable as the “other,” melting into
the Spanish population until she can no longer be clearly identified as an
invader. This position is reinforced by the nameless disregard suggested
by the police officer’s calling Faten “Fatma,” just another Muslim woman
to be taken and tossed on to the street. This melting into a nameless yet
threatening Muslim/Arab woman becomes re-enacted by numerous men
she sleeps with, and especially with the young Martín.
Working as a prostitute, she experiences this violence daily, and she lives
through it, she suggests, only with the help of valium and disengagement
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from both her surroundings and her religion. Interestingly, Lalami notes that
Faten must share the street not only with Spanish prostitutes, but also with
immigrant women from Romania and Ukraine—women who also sought
a better life by violating the border into the European Union, but on the
eastern side. Unlike these women, Faten can serve a specific role to Spanish
or even Moroccan men, not simply as a prostitute, or a woman fulfilling the
trick’s own sexual fantasies, but as a woman particularly able to serve the role
of “odalisque” or woman of the seraglio/harem.25 This position can be read
in opposition to that of Betoul, her roommate, who legally works as a nanny
for a Spanish family with two children. Here, Spanish anxiety over the role
of the returned Moor can be seen in the position Betoul takes as caregiver/
substitute mother.
The potential “danger” of her position in the Spanish family is under-
lined when Faten watches as Betoul places a plastic bag of heb rshad, an herb
blend, to help ease the cold of one of the children in the family. Faten teases
her that the mother will either reject such “native” cures and/or laugh at
her, to which Betoul responds, “You’re the one people laugh at—the way you
sell your body.”26 Though Betoul has “lowered” herself to live with Faten,
something she would never do in Morocco due to her perception of Faten’s
lower moral or social status, the two live together in Madrid to save money
and because their two professions, prostitute and mother, have opposing
schedules which allow them to cross paths only rarely.
Faten seems resigned to her role as a morally fallen woman, yet finds some
hope in Martín, a young man who begins to see her regularly. He reminds
Faten of her own failed life at university, when her religious fervor led her
away from studies and towards preaching the power of Islam and women’s
role in society to anyone who would listen. She looks back at this period
as a time of innocence, a time when she made careless mistakes. One such
was her belief that, by befriending Noura, she could change her friend’s
bourgeois lifestyle and beliefs, thus “fighting back” against the morals and
corrupt behavior represented by Noura’s father Larbi. Reflecting on her
friend, she wonders if Noura continued wearing the hijab Faten had urged
her to take on. Faten took it off to survive in her new surroundings, to be
less visible and because she felt she no longer had the moral standing that
wearing it implies. In contrast, Noura, given her social position and father’s
money, had, in Faten’s eyes, the “luxury of faith,” as well as “the luxury of
having no faith;”27 she could wear hijab or take it off without experiencing a
significant change in her lifestyle or social position.
Faten’s self-positioning as both prostitute and Moroccan/foreigner
becomes challenged through her interactions with Martín. Though he pays
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to both talk and have sex with her, he suggests that he actually has additional
power by telling her he has connections enough to give her a new start in life.
This offer of help is, of course, contingent on her accommodating Martín,
whose desire requires that she remain submissive and subservient, just
like Said’s conceptualization of the colonized subject as “fixed in zones of
dependency and peripherality, stigmatized in the designation of underde-
veloped, less-developed, developing states, ruled by a superior, developed,
or metropolitan colonizer who was theoretically posited as a categorically
antithetical overlord.”28 Martín’s promises, at first, stir a sense of cautious
optimism in Faten, who wonders what it would be like to not live in fear
of the police and not to have to sell her body to men. However, despite
Martín’s possession of a copy of the Quran and CDs by Algerian pop star
Cheb Khaled, and despite his supposed interest in her life, he turns out to
be hardly different from any other man she has encountered. After claiming
to want to talk, he tells her, “Can we get on with it?,” which leads to Faten’s
resigned conclusion, “even when they said they only wanted to talk, they
always wound up wanting some action, too.”29 In fact, Martín sees Faten
as a dish to be consumed, with skin “like black olives,” and breasts “like
mangoes.”30 Such a view perpetuates the stereotyped and limited position
often accorded to Muslim women, as Shahnaz Khan notes in her work on
Muslim women, often immigrants, who work to define their identity in a
North American context. She writes, “Muslim women in particular are
seen in simplistic and limiting ways as part of the undifferentiated group,
Muslim woman. They can only be members of religious communities and
not thoughtful, independent individuals; and certainly not progressive or
feminist.”31
Eager to reject this position, Faten suggests that he pick up other girls like
Isabel. To this, Martin replies: “Women in this country,” he said, shaking
his head, “don’t know how to treat a man. Not the way you Arab girls do.”32
He thus calls attention to their discursive location within a colonial context,
a context that constructs difference not only between male and female but
between Western female and Muslim/North African female. He suggests
that he does not see himself in a sufficiently powerful position with Spanish
women, but by eliding into the role of Muslim male, he could gain additional
capital in a relationship with an Arab/Muslim woman. This provides a pow-
erful fantasy in which he accesses a power position not available to him as a
young man, a son of a powerful father.
Despite such positioning by Martín, or perhaps because of it, Faten finds
a moment of self-possession that prompts her, perhaps for the first time
since her arrival in Spain, to assert what power she can—the power to hold
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back her body despite the potential loss of income. In a clear indication of a
changing perception of her own role, she determines that, despite her own
fantasies about Martín as being “different,” he is, in fact, “no different than
his father,” a former general in Franco’s army.33 She realizes that fulfilling
these roles would be a requirement for his help, so she rejects both this role
and his potential aid in getting her legitimate immigration papers. Thus, she
firmly refuses this position as a cultural artifact object to be studied.
History, Memory and Identity

Faten’s refusal to succumb to Martín’s fantasy constitutes a strong and sym-
bolic act of non-compliance with his Eurocentric male world-view. Faten has
come to realize that, in her own way, in fulfilling Martín’s sexual desires and
his need to “save” her, she would be, in fact, extending the colonial regime of
cultural appropriation. Abdul JanMohamed underlines this type of postco-
lonial dynamic in his study of racial difference in colonialist literature when
he suggests that “the colonialist destroys, without any significant qualms,
the effectiveness of indigenous economic, social, political, legal and moral
systems and imposes his own versions of these structures on the Other.”34
Here, the “Other” has now returned to the colonizer’s own land, where the
next generation attempts to perpetuate this economy of dominance and
control in different ways.
Faten’s nascent self-determination leads to a type of reconciliation
even with Betoul, for whom she prepares an Eid meal. Besides rejecting
Martín, Faten decides to stay home on the Muslim holiday rather than
work, suggesting a changing attitude towards her relationship with Islam.
Rather than being combative, the two women discuss their situations and
can even recognize the irony of Betoul’s position in relationship to her own
employer. Betoul describes how the mother did not go to work that day
and rather spent it in bed crying because she finds herself “too fat” and
“undesirable” to her husband. This leaves Betoul to take over as caregiver,
taking the girls to school, putting the baby down for a nap, making lunch
and altering the woman’s pants to accommodate her growing waist.35 In
this moment, Betoul stands in as “mother” while Faten, in her role of
satisfier of sexual needs, can be seen as the cause of the Spanish woman’s
tears, as the wife implies that someone else, perhaps a prostitute or other
woman, perhaps even Faten, is sexually satisfying her husband. On a larger
level, the holiday gives them an opportunity to reflect on what they have
both sacrificed for this life in Madrid, and then they finally share a meal
together.
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This sense of what must be sacrificed by the immigrant is further extended
through Lalami’s character Aziz, in some ways a “typical” Moroccan emi-
grant. Unable to find permanent and financially viable employment in his
home city of Casablanca, he makes two attempts, spending his own money
and that of his family, to get to Spain. Following the trail of thousands
before him, he works in the fields of Catalonia before finding a job in a
restaurant in Madrid. Such a role is explored by Rebecca Saunders in her
critical analysis of emigrants as “global foreigners who are often perceived
as material objects—their value assessed in terms of capacity for physical
labor or embodied service, their presence confined to the body,”36 a position
occupied by Faten and Betoul as well as Aziz. In the five years Aziz spends in
Spain, he manages to regularize his status and obtain the needed papers and
permits. After all the pay-offs and fees, he is able to save 50,000 Moroccan
dirhams, about $5,000 U.S. Rather than returning triumphantly to his wife
and family, dressed well and bearing gifts, he returns on foot, sweating in his
warm sweater, with his luggage in his arms. He finds his widowed mother
living with his wife, whom he barely remembers, his sister-in-law wearing
hijab and his family urging him to remain with his wife. Retelling his expe-
riences in Spain, he puts a positive spin on his life there, describing his
friends and his apartment but neglecting to add the numerous humiliations
he routinely suffers, such as being suspected of being a thief in a department
store, of being routinely checked for his papers, and of being treated as if he
“were invisible” by cashiers.37
Like many returning Moroccan emigrants, he quickly realizes that he
has no place in Morocco, and, even if he would like to be with his wife,
she would have no satisfactory place in Madrid away from her family and
culture. Despite the repeated calls for them to be together, neither of them
is content with the idea of them being in either Madrid or in Casablanca
together. His dislocation also suggests frustration, as he thinks, “What did

she expect of him? He couldn’t give up an opportunity to work just so he
could be home with her. Did she have any idea what he’d gone through to
make it in Spain? He couldn’t give it all up now. He had to go back.”38 Such
a predicament underlines the disaffection that often follows emigrants and
which often permanently alters family dynamics. Though there is an attempt
to improve the overall quality of life for his family, even this is fraught with
lack of communication—as suggested here when Aziz proudly presents his
wife with a new sewing machine and learns she has already purchased a
second-hand one.
The stories of Faten and Aziz, seen together, present several ways in which
the “Moor has returned to Spain,” yet both underline the persistent cultural
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disruption, and at times violent ideological positioning, of the Spanish vis à

vis their former colonial subjects. Economically, domestically and sexually,
these North Africans point out the needs and fears of the colonizer. Though
emigrants may believe, before departure, that working in Spain will be
value-neutral, merely a place to earn a living for themselves or their families
who stay both mentally and physically “behind,” this novel suggests the
pernicious price that they often pay. In Spain, living as “global foreigners,”
these workers bear what Saunders calls “the stigmata of an ambivalence, of
an infantile and ‘primitive’ past.”39 Such a primitive past serves the needs of
the Spanish imaginary; however, Lalami does not merely cast blame on the
receiving country, but also on the failure of the Moroccan state and society.
These feelings of exclusion, as we saw at the beginning of the novel, are not
bound to the present, but also connect characters to their illustrious histori-
cal past, to a past when indigenous leaders were conquerors and transmitters
of a rich Arab-Islamic culture. The psychological persistence of this more
illustrious and more “indigenous” Moroccan past reappears at the closing
of the novel. After being returned to Tangier, Murad strives to function
in the unwholesome social conditions within which he finds himself and
realizes that he must also resolve a deeper crisis concerning his personal and
cultural identity. Murad finds himself working in a tourist shop, selling off
bits of his own culture in the form of wooden tablets used by students early
in the twentieth century, rugs made by Berber women, cheap trinkets and
even stories about Morocco. Yet, as is demonstrated through his interaction
with two female tourists, even his role as “expert” of his own culture is
put into question. Implicitly, his knowledge is ironically compared to that
of Paul Bowles, who, one of the female tourists suggests in a conversation,
knew Morocco “better than Moroccans themselves.”40 This conversation
reminds him of what he used to tell tourists about Paul Bowles in an attempt
to have them hire him as a guide—ironically using the name of this foreigner
to attract them. This time, however, the impact is totally different as the
information about Bowles comes from these tourists. Bowles’ reputation for
being knowledgeable derives from people’s readings of his later works, where
he literally takes over, or colonizes, the oral stories of Morocco as given
to him or taken from oral storytellers such as Ahmed Yacoubi and Larbi
Layachi, who were themselves illiterate. The resulting stories were “strange
bicultural hybrids” that became read as authentic retellings of Moroccan
oral culture.41 Yet this time, rather than “selling” his knowledge of Paul
Bowles to these two women, one of whom mentions several times that she
is interested in seeing Bowles’ home and the café he frequented, Murad
claims a voice for himself and offers, instead, to tell the two young women
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a tale. The conversion of Murad from a reader, a consumer of translated
Moroccan oral tales written into English by Bowles, into a storyteller, a
producer of tales in their original oral form, correlates with the emergence
of a new sense of self; the act of storytelling represents a shift in Murad’s
political consciousness and a performance of his self-affirmation. It is also an
act of postcolonial resistance and personal cultural triumph. This situation
triggers a moment of deep reflection on the past as he remembers how his
father used to sit on the side of bed at night and tell him stories he is now
unable to remember in detail:
He remembered the stories only in fragments, names like Juha and Aisha
rising to his consciousness now, pieces of a puzzle that he couldn’t recon-
struct. Realizing this, he felt at once angry and sad, as though he had just
discovered that a part of him was missing. He stared at the page for a long
time, trying to bring back the memory of a single story.42
Though he is frustrated at his inability to recall orally transmitted cul-

tural heritage, North African stories of characters such as Juha and Aisha
Qandisha, as well as tales from 1001 Nights, he also realizes their importance.
Past memories and stories are revalorized.43 This time, however, he does not
give up, nor does he rely on the telling of his culture by others, as repre-
sented by Bowles. Instead, he initiates his own act of storytelling, his own act
of creating a cultural identity. He comes to a critical decision point, as did
the other characters in the book. Instead of eagerly ingratiating himself with
the two women, as he might have done on earlier occasions, he offers them
himself, suggesting, that he can tell them a story while they have tea. And
later, when he finds his co-worker offering a rug at a ridiculously low price,
he does not let the error go, but rather wants the women to value the rug,
which he knows is connected, in the minds of these women, to how much

they must pay for it. Thus, he intercedes and coolly corrects the low price
of the rug offered by his co-worker. In addition, once the woman accepts a
revised price that accurately reflects what the rug should be worth, he does
not try to offer them or sell them anything else. Rather, he turns from them,
“already lost in the story he would start writing tonight.”44 Here we then see
a connection that Lalami suggests herself—in light of persistent coloniza-
tion of land, politics and culture, the indigenous must write new stories
to pass on. Indeed, we see here the connection she herself has suggested
between her own role as writer and that of Murad.
The story Murad tells the women reproduces a story of society’s victimi-
zation of the poor and, more specifically, of women and the religious, but
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also suggests ultimate self-empowerment and the return of the victim for
revenge against the oppressor. In the story, Jenara, the beautiful daughter
of a poor muezzin, who calls the faithful to prayer, is betrothed to a young
rugmaker named Ghomari who struggles to make enough money to pay the
girl’s dowry and get married. They are truly in love, but an ugly dwarf who
works for the sultan falls in love with her and is subsequently rejected by her;
he seeks revenge by having her kidnapped and delivered to the sultan. Angry
but unable to fight against such powerful forces, the rugmaker designs a
masterpiece in which his beloved is pictured holding a knife with which
revenge will be meted out to the sultan. By the end of the story, Jenara
herself is able to actually murder the sultan with a knife, thus revenging both
Jenara and her beloved, who had already been sentenced to be executed by
the sultan as punishment for creating the rug. This story, with bits of magic
and localized Islamic culture, has affinities with the stories of Paul Bowles,
stories such as “A Distant Episode,” about a European professor of linguis-
tics who travels to a North African desert to do research on a dialect and ends
up being beaten up and his tongue cut by the Reguibat tribe, or “Allal,” a
story about a boy who is transformed into a deadly serpent. However, in this
story the triumph is ultimately reserved for those who have been wronged,
not only the rugmaker Ghomari but also his family and that of Jenara. This
act of storytelling is self-empowering by virtue of the space that it opens
for the native storyteller’s voice to “write into the history of modernity the
ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and the
ironies that attend it”45 and also contest the contradictions and ambivalences
in the neocolonial modern project in order to regain agency.
Agency Regained
Murad’s storytelling episode comes in the aftermath of overhearing Sandy

and Chrissa’s reactions to the motifs and patterns of Moroccan rugs and
their comments on the Qur’anic slate, artifacts highly coveted by tourists.
These artifacts underline the tourists’ perceptions of Moroccan art and
culture, items to be re-presented in living rooms and on bookshelves in the
first world by what Leslie Sklair (1998) calls “the transnational capitalist
class.”46 Sandy and Chrissa represent this class’s anthropologically informed
approach that remains anchored in its exteriority, drawn by the patterns of
the rugs and the exotic cursive turns of Arabic calligraphy. Commenting
on the ideological discourse of tourism in developing countries, Gonsalves
observes that the lifestyles and attitudes associated with tourists contribute
to the “view that modern tourism is an extension of colonialism (with all the
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attributes of a master-servant relationship).”47 Such an ideological homog-
enizing of other cultures is evident when Sandy suggests a parallel between
native Moroccan carpet weaving styles and the motifs to be found in Native
Americans’ rugs, thereby both eliding difference and placing Morocco in
a similar position via the dominant culture. Such an analogical structure
contests the epistemology that informs such an attitude to the significance
of Moroccan weaving and highlights the postcolonial critique of the colo-
nial paradigm that approaches rugs woven by indigenous women as desired
and coveted collectibles controlled by consumer values catering to an elite
market. This position is reinforced by the women’s discussion of which item
would be most appropriate as a wedding gift for Chrissa’s sister—a rug or
a tablet. By purchasing such items, Saunders would argue, the two women
promote their own “membership in the transnational capitalist class” that
is “to a large degree, certified by appreciating and possessing such foreign
goods.”48 Their own status would be further embellished by having obtained
such an object “from the source” rather than Pier One imports.
The story of the rug, however, rather than the rug itself, promotes a
new interpretative paradigm according to which a daily practice of carpet
weaving serves also as an artistic form of expression that projects Moroccan
women as agents of cultural resistance to oppressive abuse and domination.
The plot of revenge in the story involves dexterity in reading symbolically
encrypted language whose codes Jenara and Ghomari construct to counteract
hegemony, proving that artistic design and weaving is not divorced from the
everyday struggle of identity building and self-affirmation, from the natu-
ral world of daily practices, and connected to not only making a living but
also political activism. Alternatively, Murad’s story repositions the artistic
design by inserting it in a human narrative of language and symbolism that
goes beyond the paradigm of commoditization that disregards the producers
and renders their agency invisible. Murad’s deployment of artistic design

in his narrative provides a posture that conflicts with “the basic tenet of the
Western concept of art [which] maintains that the essential value of material
culture lies outside the context of its meaning and use.”49 The story blurs the
dividing line between the imaginary artistic realm of fulfillment and that of
political engagement and moral justice. The art of rug weaving is integral
to the narrating process that takes place in the postcolonial context in which
it consolidates the historical memory and also participates in the writing
of the present and ongoing process of redefining and negotiating identity.
The novel ends with a last section, suggestively called “storytelling,” which
binds all these loosely connected lives heuristically and symbolically through
Murad’s newly developed sense of identity as a storyteller. By closing in this
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way, Lalami gives Murad’s narrative a framing perspective that brings the
domestic and transnational conditions in harmony through the trajectory of
his newly acquired vision that reflects on the politics of exclusion as well as
the strategies to overcome them.
The concept of cultural frontier in Lalami’s novel also emphasizes the
constitution of the territorial/geographical crossing as a discursive site
that reflects how borders are constructed by characters through acts of
encounter and how a reconstitution of national memory becomes intimate
and personal. I have explored how multiple forms of identities are formed in
subjects from disparate localities as informed by the economy of a colonial
experience that is then played out within a general context of postcolonial-
ism. By focusing on instances in which micropolitics of resistance are at
work in moments when race, gender and sexuality coalesce, we see how
the production of meaning becomes implicated in postcolonial structures
of power both domestically, in contemporary Morocco, and in the land
of the colonizer, Spain. For example, although Faten’s conversion into a
professional prostitute might signal her desire to enact a move of cultural
rootlessness as a strategy of coping with her traumatic experience of rape,
Martín’s treatment and attitude, in the end, trigger a return of historical
rootedness that enables her to stage her political act of resistance—rejecting
him and finding energy to celebrate the Eid holiday. We can see this as an
example of what Michael O’Riley calls “postcolonial haunting” in which
“the advent of postcolonial consciousness has emphasized the imperative of
returning to occluded colonial history through a reckoning with the spectres
of the nation’s colonial heritage.”50 Accordingly, Faten is able to anchor her
sense of identity within a reconstruction of historical narrative that makes
Martín stand for the return of the repressed “Spanish colonizer” in their
relationship. The relationship between them inaugurates a complex process
of self-scrutiny that prompts Faten to not only refuse to accommodate and

ultimately dismiss his fabricated fantasies of her but to revalorize historical
memory as a central component in the constitution of cultural identity.
A mutual groping takes place immediately after their final sexual encoun-
ter which leads Martín to reveal his hatred of his father, who had served
under Franco, whom he considers “fascist.” 51 Martín, in fact, reproduces a
colonial relationship between himself and Faten, both bearing the memory
of the Rif ’s success in defeating the Spanish army in the battle of Anoual,
and in Spain’s brutal revenge through the dispersal of mustard gas across
the Rif. Martín’s father and grandfather served in the army under Franco,
and Faten’s grandfather was blinded by the mustard gas. Such recognition
on the part of Martín suggests that his interest in Faten can be read as his
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own act of resistance to his father. For Faten, it triggers memories about
what she has been told of the Rif War and its heroic figure, Ibn Abdelkarim
al-Khattabi. The Rif ’s resistance movement led to, in historian C. R.
Pennell’s estimation, “the worst defeat of a colonial army in Africa [Spain’s]
in the twentieth century.”52 Lalami emphasizes the potency and significance
of this embedded historical event in Faten’s newly acquired sense of self
after Martín mentions Franco: “Hearing the Generalismo’s name stirred
in Faten memories about her maternal grandfather, a proud Rifi who’d lost
his eyesight during the rebellion in the north. It was mustard gas, he’d told
his children, and he’d spent the rest of his life begging for a gun to put an
end to it all.”53 This act of retribution inflicted from the air literally blinds
those on the ground and ends their “vision” of a proud victory. In deploying
the memory of the war of the Rif, Faten experiences the return of a past
that has been occluded or overwritten in her attempt to homogenize herself
in Spanish society and culture. Running as a subtext in such a memory is
the figure of Ibn Abdelkarim al-Khattabi, whom we encounter in Murad’s
reflections on the circumstances when the tablets end up in the bazaar.
The postcolonial moment of mutual confession, Martín himself calling his
father a fascist and a pig, leads to the collapse of their bond. Evidently, the
past legacy of conflict and aggression continues to overshadow the present
and shape the contours of Hispano-Moroccan future possibilities since, as
Bhabha says, the experience of colonial time events in a postcolonial era
“impels the past, projects it, gives its dead symbols the circulatory life of
the sign of the present.”54
Conclusion
As we get closer to the end of the novel, Murad not only enacts his own role
as storyteller, but also alters his perspective about his own and his society’s
future. As he states, “There was no use reading stories like this anymore; he
needed to write his own.”55 The closing emphasizes the power of memory
as a source of empowerment for the future. On one level, his act may be
construed as an imitative act that gestures towards the repetition of the
colonial gaze. But it is a conscious act that is coterminous with the regain-
ing of confidence as well as agency. Murad’s story dramatizes the subject
of oppressive use of power and reflects a structure of power reminiscent
of Faten’s dilemma and other characters’ victimization. In that respect, it
can be interpreted as a discursive gesture that points towards the ideology
of resistance that takes the form of storytelling as an act of emancipation
and the forging of agency.56 The trajectories of these characters point to
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postcolonial tendencies in the immigration context, as well as the dynamics

that frame the cultural frontier, which informs encounters with the other
in the various figurations of crossing. In evoking the iconic figure of Ibn
Abdelkarim al-Khattabi they assert the relevance of the past historical expe-
rience of colonialism and show how its memory could be a source of strength
and resilience in the postcolonial time.
The significance of the crossing is not so much spatial as psychological.
In Lalami’s novel, the characters are trapped within a Eurocentric vision
that encounters with the other tend to both confirm and destabilize. But the
novel emphasizes acts of active resistance that do not reiterate victimization
but ones that offer a path towards cultural resistance that honors cultural
memory and calls for the development of more ideologically informed forms
of engaging historical memory in order to promote individual and cultural
agency.
Notes
1. A version of this article first appeared as “‘Illegal’ Crossing, Historical Memory
and Postcolonial Agency in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits”
in Journal of North African Studies, 17.1: 143–56.
2. Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary
Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008), 9.
3. Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Orlando: Harvest Books,
Harcourt, 2005).
4. A growing number of Moroccan writers have begun writing in English since
the 1980s, such as Jilali El-Koudia, Abdelatif Akbib and Majid Anouar, though
few have managed the critical success found by Laila Lalami.
5. Jilali El Koudia, who co-authored with Hasan M El-Shamy, Moroccan Folktales
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), translated and edited other
collections of short stories in English such as Moroccan Short Stories: From

the Seventies to the Nineties (Fez: Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2006),
Moroccan Short Stories: From the Beginning to the Nineties ([Morocco: s.n.],
1998). He also wrote Stories Under the Sun (Fez: I’Media, 1999) and Up and
Down the Road and Other Stories (Fez: Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2007).
Abdellatif Akibib has published Graffiti (Tanger: Slaiki Bros, 1997), The Lost
Generation: Collected Short Stories (Tanger: Slaiki Bros, 2000), Tangier’s Eyes
on America (Morocco: Ado Maroc, 2001), Between the Lines (Fez: Moroccan
Cultural Studies Centre, 2003) and one novel Hearts of Embers (Morocco: s.n.,
2004). In addition to many scholarly books, Anouar Majid has also published a
novel, Si Youssef (London: Quartet Books, 1992).
6. Gaiutra Bahadur, “Vulnerable Morocco,” New York Sunday Book Review
(online), June 5, 2009, accessed January 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.
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com/2009/06/07/books/review/Bahadur-t.html?_r=0.
7. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book
and the Migrant Writer,” Contemporary Literature, 47.4 (2006): 533.
8. Laila Lalami, Secret Son (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2009).
9. Lalami, Hope, 3.
10. The neocolonial context that characterizes the relationship between the two
countries was made more palpable recently over the dispute between Morocco
and Spain about the small island of Perejil, a tiny patch of land 200 meters from
the Moroccan coast. When a group of Moroccan soldiers set up a controlling
base for illegal immigrants on the island in July 2002, Spain was infuriated by
the move which she considered as an aggression against its territorial sover-
eignty. On July 18, 2002, Spain launched a military operation, called Operation
Romeo-Sierra, in which the navy and the air force participated and captured the
island. The Moroccan soldiers were removed to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta
by the guardia civil before they were released at the border again. For a discus-
sion of this issue and its impact on the future of Hispano-Moroccan relations
as well as Euro-Maghreb political and economic future see Avaro Vasconcelos,
“Perejil/Leila: Lessons for Europe – Why Have All Failed?” The Real Instituto
El Cano, July 2000; B. Maddy-Weitzman “The Spanish-Moroccan Crisis and
the Future of Euro-Mediterranean Relations: Farce or Harbinger of Things
to Come?” Tel Aviv Notes 46.30 July (2002): 1–3, and Ron E. Hassner, “The
Path to Intractability: Time and the Entrenchment of Territorial Disputes,”
International Security, 31.3 (2006/7): 107–38.
11. Marie-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London
and New York: Routledge, 1999), 7.
12. Lalami, Hope, 7.
13. Laila Lalami, Authors@Google series: Laila Lalami, Santa Monica, CA,
March 19, 2008, accessed January 2, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=c5xcS4xK90w.
14. Alternatively, the conceptualization of the past in modern Spanish culture is
crucial to the dynamic and complex economy that informs the construction of
identity in contemporary Spain. For more input on that negotiation of the past
in Spanish culture see Flesler, The Return of the Moor; Susan Martin-Marquez,
Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation:
Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
15. Laila Lalami, “Winter of Discontent.,” The Nation, February 3, 2011 (online),
accessed January 2, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/158221/
winter-discontent.
17. Ibid., 102.
18. Ibid., 103.
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19. While the official unemployment rate in Morocco has hovered around 10 per
cent for about a decade, this rate does not take into account more significant
rates of underemployment. Among the most vocal groups of the unemployed
are the chômeurs-diplômés, unemployed graduates, who even have their own
association, Association nationale des diplômés chômeurs au Maroc.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 36.
23. Ibid., 129.
24. Flesler, Return, 10.
26. Ibid., 137.
27. Ibid., 138.
28. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 295.
30. Ibid., 137.
31. Shahnaz Khan, Muslim Women: Crafting a North American Identity (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2000), xii.
33. Ibid.
34. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function
of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 85.
36. Rebecca Saunders, “Uncanny Presence: The Foreigner at the Gate of
Globalization,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
21.1 & 2 (2001): 92.
38. Ibid., 167.
39. Saunders, “Uncanny Presence,” 189.

41. J. R. Maier, “Two Moroccan Storytellers in Paul Bowles’s Five Eyes: Larbi
Layachi and Ahmed Yacoubi,” Postmodern Culture 1.3 (1991): 11.
42. Lalami, Hope, 174–5.
43. While stories of Juha, a bumbling comic figure, appear throughout the Middle
East, Aisha Kendisha is a more localised North African folk figure who is known
for her devilish nature and her potential sexual danger to men.
45. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who speaks
for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 21.
46. Leslie Sklair, “Social Movements and Global Capitalism,” in The Cultures of
Globalization, ed. F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998), 299.
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47. P. Gonsalves, “Divergent Views: Convergent Paths: towards a Third World
Critique of Tourism,” Contours 6.3/4 (1993), 11. For an analysis of the subject
of tourism and the connections of its discourses and ideologies to imperialism,
globalization and neocolonialism, see Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt, Tourism
and Sustainability Development, Globalisation and New Tourism in the Third World
(New York: Routledge, 2003); John Madeley, Big Business, Poor Peoples: The
Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World’s Poor (New York: Zed Books,
1999); John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (London:
Pinter, 1991); Dennison Nash, “Tourism as a Form of Cultural Imperialism,”
in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. V. L. Smith (London:
Blackwell, 1977), 33–47; and Marianne Vardalos, Invading Goa: New Tourism or
Old Imperialism? (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing
Books, 2010).
48. Saunders, “Uncanny Presence,” 89.
49. Kathy M’Closkey, Swept under the Rug: A Hidden History of Navajo Weaving
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 8.
50. Michael F. O’Riley, “Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated
Encounter,” Postcolonial Text 3.4 (2007): 1.
52. Charles Richard Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: New
York University Press, 200), 190. The war of the Rif was a central episode of
Moroccan resistance and struggle against Spanish incursions in the northern
part of Morocco, also known as the Spanish zone. Due to his charisma and
leadership, Ibn Abdelkarim al-Khattabi was able to mobilize massive popular
support among the Rif tribes and to organize an army that fought the battle of
Anoual on July 25, 1921 and resulted in the defeat of the Spanish army and the
death of about 10,000 Spanish soldiers. For more information on the Rif War
and Ibn Abdelkarim al-Khattabi, see David S. Wolman, Rebels in the Rif; Abd
el Krim and the Rif Rebellion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968);
Ronald Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa since 1800, 5th edn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Hart D. Montgomery, The Aith Waryaghar

of the Moroccan Rif: An Ethnography and History (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, for Wenner-Gren Foundation, 1976); Germain Ayache, Les origines de la
guerre du Rif (Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, and Rabat: SMER, 1981); and
Charles Richard Pennell, “Ideology and Practical Politics: A Case Study of the
Rif War in Morocco, 1921–1926,” International Journal of Middle East Studies
14.1 (1982): 19–33.
54. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 254.
56. There are many projects from both banks of the strait that seek to foster under-
standing and the importance of highlighting the mutual recognition of the
cultures that have informed al-Andalus and the history of Hispano-Moroccan
Untitled-1 183 12/09/2013 10:22:42

relations, such as the writings of Juan Goytisolo, including Juan sin Tierra
(Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral,1975), Makbara (Barcelona: Seix Barral,
1980), El exiliado de aquí y de allá (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg: Círculo de
Lectores, 2008), and Said Jdidi’s Yamna: Memoria Intima (Tangier: Asociación
de escritores marroquíes en lengua espagñola, 2006), or José Monleón, ed.,
Cuentos de las dos orillas (Granada: Fundación El Legado Andalusí 2006).
For more on this, see Lara N. Dotson-Renta, “Translated Identities: Writing
between Morocco and Spain,” Journal of North African Studies 13.4 (2008):
429–39.
Untitled-1 184 12/09/2013 10:22:42

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la i la la la m i ’ s h o p e a n d ot h e r da n g e ro u s p u r s u i t s 149

Ahmed Idrissi Alami

Union. Tangier, a space where various cultures and religions intersect,

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sanctioned processes of exclusion and rejection on both sides of the strait.

Language Politics and the Politics of Exclusion

the most successful Anglophone Moroccan writer to date. However, this

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its beleaguered passengers only within swimming distance of the Spanish

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house in a Moroccan beach town like Asilah or Cabo Negro.”16 However,

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History, Memory and Identity

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together. His dislocation also suggests frustration, as he thinks, “What did

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disruption, and at times violent ideological positioning, of the Spanish vis à

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Though he is frustrated at his inability to recall orally transmitted cul-

which he knows is connected, in the minds of these women, to how much

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Murad’s storytelling episode comes in the aftermath of overhearing Sandy

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and renders their agency invisible. Murad’s deployment of artistic design

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of self-scrutiny that prompts Faten to not only refuse to accommodate and

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postcolonial tendencies in the immigration context, as well as the dynamics

collections of short stories in English such as Moroccan Short Stories: From

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40. Lalami, Hope, 174.

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Cambridge University Press, 2004); Hart D. Montgomery, The Aith Waryaghar

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