Top 15 Laila Lalami Quotes

books hold so many memories of the times and places in which I’ve read them.

(What books would you recommend for somebody who wants to know more about Morocco?) The work of Mohamed Choukri, which I discovered when I was 15, was a revelation. His first novel, “Al-Khubz al-Hafi,” loosely based on his childhood and adolescence, was banned by the Moroccan government, but copies were making the rounds in my high school in Rabat. There’s also a fascinating book he wrote about his troubled and troubling friendship with Paul Bowles, which Telegram Books recently issued in English as “In Tangier.” Another writer I came across in my teens, and who was a huge influence on me, was the late, great Fatema Mernissi, the feminist scholar and sociologist. Several of her books appear in English, including “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam” and “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood.”

(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m moved by voices that ring so true that they make me feel kinship with characters who are completely different from me. As I get older, I also find myself moved by depictions of friendship and kindness, which are so much harder to execute convincingly on the page than cruelty or betrayal.

I think of history as a dialogue with the present, so whenever I’m puzzled by the turn of current events — which is all too often these days — I look to the past for context.

White Americans take that for granted in that they just have to turn on the TV or open the newspaper to see that. That isn’t something that everyone has, so these kinds of stories can be very affirming. As far as representation, it’s an interesting word. It conjures up some kind of necessity. For me, I write what I know. I’m Moroccan so I write Moroccan characters. I write in the specific, not with the burden of representing an entire Moroccan immigrant experience, but just those of my often very-flawed characters. I write in their specificity, with their unresolved conflicts and flaws, and that is how I expect to have any hope of reaching readers and showing some kind of truth that resonates with them. (2019)

(about The Other Americans) It’s a book that really questions how we remember one another on a personal level, but also on a public level. You can take an event, like the Iraq war – which figures in the book – and people even today are shaping it and remembering it and contextualizing it in very different ways depending on their views. So history itself is an argument, and we are still litigating it many different ways. (2019)

All of my books have focused on characters that are displaced and having to start over in some place new, and how the new landscape shapes the person you are and the person you become. (2019)

I’m an immigrant myself. One of the things I’ve noticed over the years, when I do events, is that people will—not unkindly—suggest that I’m “doing well.” It’s something that’s always mystified me, as if there are different classes of immigrants, and the immigrants who “make it” work harder than those who don’t “make it.” As if success is entirely determined by an individual’s effort, irrespective of society’s structural inequities. I’ve always been very suspicious of that notion. It’s very dangerous. It’s an idea that I think makes people feel guilty when they’re not successful. Like if you’re poor, it’s your fault because you didn’t work hard enough…

When you move into a new place, it does involve a refashioning of the self. We derive our sense of identity at least partly in relation to the landscape around us, in which we’ve grown up..…

They’re supposed to be the people who support you, who love you no matter what, and the reality is they’re the first people who teach you to cast doubt on yourself, they’re the first people who sometimes don’t have your back…

There’s a disconnect between how people imagine their families and how families are in real life.

He needed someone to trustworthy to deal with Faten, and he knew Raouf would not let him down.

Lucky Aziz. He curses his own luck.

We're so blinded by our love of the West that we're willing to give them our brightest instead of keeping them here where we need them.

Better than the Moroccans themselves.