Debut Novelist Looks Homeward

Though Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is Laila Lalami's debut novel, the Moroccan-born author has been writing for publications including the Los Angeles Times, The Independent, and The Nation for years. She's also maintained her high-traffic blog, MoorishGirl.com, since 2001. Now, after a long, international journey -- Lalami grew up in Morocco reading and writing in French and occasionally in Arabic, studied linguistics in England, and is currently living in the U.S. -- she has returned to her roots in a November Book Sense Pick from Algonquin.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits begins on a flimsy raft as several Moroccans attempt to illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain. It then explores what drove each of the characters -- Murad, a savvy opportunist; Halima, a mother escaping domestic abuse; Aziz, an unemployed mechanic; and Faten, an erstwhile religious fanatic -- to risk everything for a shot at a better life. Throughout, Morocco's winding streets, markets, and cafes are shown via the characters' vivid and varied perspectives.

Laila Lalami Photo by Sara Corwin

"What struck me about these characters was that hope was their salvation and their downfall," the author explained recently from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and daughter. "I felt like the odds were stacked against so many of them. Hope was what kept them going, and at the same time, it was what led them to a horrific experience."

As a little girl, Lalami wrote fantasies in French about French characters. "When I was a kid, I had received a colonial education and my early exposure to literature was in French," she said. "So when I started writing, that was the language I used. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I started writing about Moroccan characters."

Although she had always been interested in literature, when she applied to college, it wasn't her first choice of study. "I grew up in an environment that didn't value art as a career, though [I came from] a book-reading family. When I finished high school, I was planning on going to the faculty of medicine," she explained. "My application was late ... so I didn't get a chance to take the entrance exams. At that point I thought, Well, I'm just going to major in English."

She received her bachelor's degree in English Literature in Morocco, where she read Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Woolf -- "the British/American canon in literature," she said. "Later I started reading a lot of fiction by writers of color ... Salman Rushdie ... Zadie Smith, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Junot Diaz, Ahdaf Soueif."

Lalami counts the Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri as one of her most important literary guides. "He's so brutally honest," she said. "He teaches about honesty in his work, about trying to write from a place of truth and be as honest as possible. I try to keep writing with that in mind."

After getting a Master's degree in linguistics from the University of London, Lalami went to the University of Southern California, where she received her Ph.D. She explained to BTW that she wrote so many academic papers, all of them in English, she found that English was the language that came naturally to her in her creative writing, too. "It slowly became my dominant language," she said.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits began as a short story that grew out of a series of articles Lalami read in the early '90s about the many Moroccans who attempted to cross the dangerous, unpredictable currents of the 10-mile strait. "It seemed an odd thing," she said. "Like it wouldn't keep happening. Every year during the summer I'd hear about people trying to cross. It became organized pretty soon and turned into a business, like the Mafia. They were charging terrific sums of money and taking advantage of the people."

Their stories struck a chord. "I'm an immigrant myself," she said. "But I came here as a graduate student, so obviously my situation was much more privileged. At the same time, something about the immigrant's choice of wanting to start a new life, to go someplace and start over, really resonated and spoke to me.

"Immigration is such a part of Moroccan culture. Everyone has had a neighbor or friend or brother who has left. It's something I've grown up with, and I thought it would be interesting as a short story."

But as Lalami worked on the story, it grew into a novel." She was engrossed by the story of Murad and the other characters who traveled with him on the raft. "I wanted to spend more time with them," she said. "I wanted them to be okay, and I wanted to know what really happened. The revelation was, I wasn't sure who was going to make it. There were a few surprises."

Once the novel was written, Lalami sold it to literary agent Stephanie Abou, now at the Joy Harris Literary Agency, and she planned on waiting. It ended up being a short wait, however. "Stephanie sent it out at Thanksgiving and had sold it before Christmas. It was a little bit shocking," she said.

Now that Lalami is settled in Portland ("One of the reasons I considered living in Portland was Powell's"), she's eager to return to Morocco, but, again, her travels will mostly be through her mind's eye.

About the book she is currently writing, she said, "I can't wait to get back to it. It's a novel set in Morocco -- in Casablanca and L.A. It's more personal. It has the sorts of things that interest me right now -- politics, religion, and fundamentalism. And it's a little bit about the randomness of life. I just try to use my imagination," she said. "At the end of the day, the writer creates a world -- hopefully I've done that." --Karen Schechner