Under the Western Eyes: Reading Moroccan Migrants’ Tryst with Memory, Identity and Destiny in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Abstract

The increasing number of Moroccan citizens leaping at a chance of illegally crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in the pursuit of even a slightest “charm of luck” critiques the neo-liberal ideas of State which presents the freedom of movement itself as a crucial terrain of rule. While the influx of migrants from the other North African countries towards Europe continue to surge in numbers, the recent sway in the number of refugees and migrants from Morocco arriving in Spain by no safe and legal routes have led to an increased militarization and strategic aggressiveness on their borders as part of repressive state apparatus. The deplorable living conditions of refugees and migrants, reduced to ‘bare life’, make us question the ‘laws of hospitality’ of both the host countries. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), a collection of short stories by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami, identifies the desperation of Moroccan youth and captures their multifaceted migratory experience across their stratified, postcolonial society through the lives of four young Moroccan immigrants who hope to seek a better life in Spain by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar on a lifeboat. Drawing from the colonial wound of the postcolonial nation of Africa, Lalami’s book dispels any unjustified homogenisation of its Moroccan community by contrasting its economic precarity, social invisibility, conflicting “Muslim” identity and gender normativity through the characters who reject the traditional, stereotyped performance of a Third-World immigrant. However, this paper seeks to investigate such a pluralized, free community whose individuals do not appropriate their differences, but allow their cultural positioning to contextualise their migratory experiences and precariat living within the contemporary social discourse particularly through the lens of gender. For this purpose, the paper draws upon Roberto Esposito's ideas of a community, and follows Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, Butler and Hall in their critique of State (Morocco and Spain) and their unequal power structures that reconfigure gender performativity amid crisis, all the while exemplifying through the stories the constructs of how discrimination against the migrant ‘other’ is embedded, operated and legitimised in the West.