The seed for “The Other Americans” was planted while Lalami was on vacation in Wyoming. The author found inspiration from an unexpected source. It’s an approach that challenges readers to pay close attention, but it also allows them to see how differently the same event is perceived by various people.Ĥ. Still more voices include a Mexican immigrant in the country illegally, and a cantankerous bowling alley owner and his son. Other parts are told by a high school classmate of Nora’s who served a harrowing tour as a Marine in Iraq and is now a sheriff’s deputy, and by the detective investigating the father’s death.
In addition to Nora, readers get the perspective of her mother Maryam, her dead father Driss, and her sister Salma, a seemingly successful dentist who has her own secrets.
“The Other Americans” has a complex structure, in which the story is told at various times by different narrators. It’s a story told from many points of view. ”My fiction frequently deals with themes of home, and my characters tend to be outsiders, people who don’t quite fit in anywhere.”ģ. “I never expected to become an immigrant or to be writing fiction in English, but these two decisions have had a profound impact on my creative and critical thinking,” Lalami says in an essay on her website. As the offspring of a working-class family in Morocco, she wrote her first story in French at age 9, before she eventually came to California to earn a doctorate in linguistics at USC. It’s a subject on which Lalami has a personal perspective. “It’s something that people have written about literally since the dawn of humanity.”Ģ. “For me, immigration is a timeless theme,” Lalami says. Much of that saga is filtered through the perspective of the couple’s daughter Nora, who disappointed her mother by becoming a jazz composer instead of a doctor. But Lalami tells a story that explores what has happened to an immigrant couple several decades after their arrival.
The true-life dramas of Central American asylum seekers and refugees from war-torn Syria have dominated the headlines over the past few years. It’s a different view of the immigrant experience from what you’ve been reading in the news.
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