Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

Laila Lalami is an author, linguist, and professor from Rabat, Morocco. She grew up in Morocco speaking French and Arabic and studied in England for her MA in Linguistics. Lalami moved to America in 1992 and lived in California, where she received a PhD in Linguistics. Since 1996, Lalami has written both fiction and nonfiction. Her works include Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, The Moor’s Account, The Other Americans, and Conditional Citizens, her most recent work. She has received the Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, and she is currently a professor at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches creative writing.

Conditional Citizens contains many elements of memoir, meaning that the collection spans much of Lalami’s life, from her childhood in Morocco to her more recent accomplishments and lectures. Growing up, Lalami recognized early on the contradictions of learning in French but speaking in Arabic, being forced to stay in while her brother went out late at night, and the mistreatment she faced in professional environments. She left Morocco to study linguistics but decided to settle in the US when she fell in love with her husband, Alex. She includes her daughter’s experiences in the collection to show both her own experience as an immigrant and her daughter’s as a US-born Arab American.