Display Interview

Conducted by Dan Wickett on 6/20/2005
The following is an interview with Laila Lalami, author of the forthcoming short story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (October 2005, Algonquin), as well as the founder and operator of the LitBlog Moorishgirl (www.moorishgirl.com).  Originally from Morocco, she currently lives in Portland, OR.


Dan:

Thank you Laila for taking some time away from writing to answer some questions.

Laila:

Thank you for having me. 


Dan:

Your author bio states you were born and raised in Morocco.  How old were you when you left?  Was the United States the next residence of your family?

Laila:

I was born and raised in Rabat, the capital, and left Morocco in the early 90s to do a Master’s degree in Linguistics at University College, in London.  My advisor there, a gentle old soul who wore tweed jackets regardless of the season, suggested that I apply for a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California.  I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do, so after I finished school in England, I went back home to Morocco and worked as a staff writer for Al-Bayane, a French-language daily based in Casablanca.  Eventually, I ended up applying into USC and getting in, and so I arrived in Los Angeles in 1993. 
A few years later, my sister, who has a degree in neuroscience, ended up coming to work for a medical devices company in California, and my brother, a telecom engineer, moved to New Jersey as well. But my parents still live in Morocco (though they visit the U.S. very often) and I still have one brother, several cousins and many, many relatives in Morocco.  


Dan:

The initial story in the collection, The Trip, describes a rather harrowing trip for Moroccans looking for a better life in Spain.  They ride a six-meter long Zodiac inflatable most of the 14 kilometers between the two countries before being ordered out once Spain's beaches are in sight.  I hope your exiting the country was less interesting of a story?

Laila:

Oh, yes.  As I mentioned, I came here to go to graduate school, and became an immigrant quite by chance.  A couple of years into grad school, I met Alex--my future husband and ended up staying in Los Angeles.  But even though I came to this country under more privileged circumstances than many others, there was something about characters risking everything for a better future that spoke to me.  I just couldn’t get them out of my head.  I’ve often wondered what I would have done had I been in their shoes, had I been poor and jobless, had the lottery of life dealt me different numbers.  


Dan:

How did you end up getting a book deal with Algonquin?

Laila:

The usual way, I suppose.  I queried and found my agent, Stephanie Abou, in 2004.  She sent my manuscript out around Thanksgiving of that year, and by the end of year we had a couple of offers.  It all happened very quickly, much to my delight and surprise. 

Dan:

You've put together your collection of 9 stories in an interesting manner.  As mentioned before, The Trip starts off the collection and out of the thirty odd Moroccans attempting the trip, the story focuses on four of them:  Murad, Faten, Aziz and Halima (along with her children).  The book is then sectioned into Part I:  Before and Part II:  After, with individual stories for the four concentrated on in The Trip.  

What thought process led to this structure, as opposed to say, having The Trip fall right in the middle of the collection, as it would have occurred chronologically?

Laila:

I started out with a bunch of characters on a boat, but after finishing the story, I found that I wasn’t satisfied.  I wanted to know more, so I decided to write another story about Murad (the narrator of “The Trip”) to see how he ended getting on the boat, and little by little I wrote about the other characters too.  Later on in the process of revising these early stories, I felt like I had ended up with a big question mark, and I was still unsatisfied.  I wanted to know whether the risks these characters take were worth it, which led me to write the additional four stories, about what happened afterwards.  When I was structuring the collection, this sequence seemed the most natural to me, because it reflected the way in which I wrote them, sort of organically. 

Dan:

When you began writing these stories, was it always your intention to have such a fully formed collection, or after writing a couple of stories, did the idea
strike?

Laila:

No—I had no idea I was even writing a collection.  I was mostly following my instinct about what interested me and it wasn’t until after about 4-5 stories that I realized what sort of beast it was.

Dan:

As the collection began to become clear in your mind, did writing any of the individual stories, due to either specific bits of information, or even having a sense of unbalance regarding the cause and effects of The Trip, cause a need to go back and change any stories you had already completed?  

Laila:

There were some tweaks here and there, a few technical details, but no major rewriting. 

Dan:

Was there a method to the ordering of stories you used within the two sections?  The ending with Murad's story seemed perfect as The Trip was told from his point of view, as well as the way it ends.

Laila:

Ah, yes, the ordering is different in the “Before” and “After” sections.  Again, I was just following my instinct.  For instance, I wanted to open the “After” section with the story about Halima because I knew the reader would be worried about her and her kids and so I wanted to provide that story first so that the suspense wouldn’t feel forced. 

Dan:

When you finally sent in a completed manuscript to Algonquin, how attached to these characters had you become?  Do any of them sneak ahead of the others as a favorite of yours?

Laila:

I’d grown quite attached to them, and I might very well end up using them again later on in something else.  As for having favorites, that’s a tough question.  I have affection for all of them, even when they say or do something that enrages me.  But in some ways, I suppose Murad would be my favorite—he came to me first and he stuck around the longest. 

Dan:

There are frequent cases where you utilize an Arabic word as opposed to an English word.  What is your rule as a writer for this?  Only when there is no translatable equivalent?  During a character's
speaking?  

Laila:

That’s an interesting question.  I started learning English in high school, and even though I’ve been speaking the language for years, in some ways I still feel as though it isn’t my own.  And yet at the same time, I can’t write in Classical Arabic—I don’t master the language nearly well enough anymore to write as well in it as I would like to.  So I find myself in this in-between space, where I write in English, but when I hear my dialogue in my ears, I hear it in Arabic.  So I try to represent the cadence of Arabic as best as I can in English.  If there’s something I can’t translate or that doesn’t feel natural being translated, then I use Arabic.  The same goes when I’m writing narrative from a character’s point of view and an English word doesn’t work there.  

Dan:

The author Paul Bowles is brought up a few times in stories, specifically those involving Murad, as he was a guide for tourists prior to his attempt to leave the country.  Is there still a great an interest in where he lived, and wrote and hung out by current day tourists?

Laila:

It’s funny, it wasn’t really intentional on my part to bring up Paul Bowles so often.  I suppose I have a bit of a conflicted reaction to him.  I love his prose—it’s beautiful, precise, very tight—but overall I feel he writes about a side of Morocco (sex, drugs, danger) that hasn’t been part of my experience or, I dare say, that of most Moroccans.  But interestingly enough when people speak of Moroccan literature, few can name great writers like Mohammed Choukri, or Tahar Ben Jelloun, or Leila Abouzeid or Abdellatif Laabi or Fouad Laroui or Fatema Mernissi—the only name that comes up again and again is Paul Bowles.  He’s still very much a mythical figure associated with Tangier.  I’m not sure if his house is open to tourists, but I do know that when he was alive he often received visitors, people who had come all the way from America or Europe, looking for him, for the legend. 

Dan:

If I'm not mistaken, your book deal with Algonquin was for a short story collection and a novel.  How is the progress going on the novel these days?

Laila:

It’s going well (knock on wood, khamsa, khamsa, spit three times). I’m about 60,000 words into it and I’m enjoying it enormously.  It’s got lots of race and religion and sex in it.  Maybe even a touch of rock and roll. 

Dan:

You have also taken on writing a Blog (and have since late 2001).  www.moorishgirl.com is geared both towards writing and towards the Arab world.  How, if at all, do you think working on the blog has helped you become a better writer of fiction?

Laila:

I don’t know if it’s helped my fiction at all. If anything, it probably took away time that I could have spent on my fiction.  But on the other hand, it has also exposed me to writers I might not have heard about otherwise.  I read a lot more now, paradoxically, than before, so in that sense it does help me with my writing. 

Dan:

Those who have read your blog for some time know that you're a writer who added blogging to your daily to do list, and not vice versa.  Do you believe the notoriety, such that it may be, of being a LitBlogger will help, or even possibly hurt, when it comes to publicity and reviews for the collection?

Laila:

We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?  One of my friends, upon finding out I was going to residency to work on my novel, said that I should repeat the words “I am the Goddess of this novel!”  I was amused by this and loved her for it.  It’s nice to remind yourself that the world you create is yours, but that changes when publishing comes into play.  The book is no longer yours in a way, it becomes the reader’s as well, and it becomes a dialogue rather than a monologue, so those are all new experiences for me. 

Dan:

Did getting married, and/or having a child, affect your writing at all?  If so, just in terms of schedule, or did either affect your life view to a degree that it changed your writing?

Laila:

I was writing before getting married and becoming a parent, but it’s true that it becomes a challenge to find the time to write.  I’m fortunate that I have a supportive spouse and I’m also extremely disciplined, so it all works out.

Dan:

You live in Portland, OR.  Is there much of a writing community in the area?

Laila:

Portland is a very literary town.  Quite a few writers make their home here, and I’ve met and befriended a few.  And of course Portland has some great independent bookstores, like Powell’s and Annie Bloom’s and Reading Frenzy and others. 

Dan:

Lastly, if you were a character in "Fahrenheit 451," what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Laila:

That’s tough.  As a Muslim, I feel like I should pick “The Satanic Verses,” just to make sure that the loonies who went after him never win, and that the book doesn’t disappear, even though it is isn’t my favorite of Rushdie’s novels.  I also would try to memorize something by Chinua Achebe, maybe “Things Fall Apart.”  

Dan:

Thanks again Laila, I really enjoyed the collection and look forward to seeing it in stores this Fall.

Laila:

Thank you so much, Dan, for having me.