Though some among us possess the talent and or the good fortune to enjoy good lives, enriched by friends, family and the rule of law, many others are not so gifted, or lucky. For them, life, and the sociopolitical circumstances that define it, is something to be endured until they can reach better horizons, distant lands where their contributions are fairly earned and properly remunerated. They are not marinated in the love and hope that characterizes the lives of the successful. They are, instead, forced to stew in a toxic sea of poverty, a place where what few opportunities exist fail to offer any chance of achieving something more, something grand, something worthy of all of us. This is the value of immigration, granting labor to advanced nations and honest prospects to the poor people trying to get there. And it's this notion that underpins both of Laila Lalami's excellent novels.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits welcomes us into the minds of a boat full of Moroccoan immigrants fleeing in the night across the Strait of Gibraltar. Having each paid their boat captain handsomely to sneak them into Spain, they pray for good weather and careless coast guards, both of which will aid them in finding their way off Spain's beaches and inland to where they can work to better themselves and the families they've been forced to leave behind. But when all but one of the illegals are seized by the watchful Spanish authorities, their hopes for a future in Europe are dashed and each must, in their own way, deal with the fallout of being forceably returned to the corrupt country they turned their backs upon.
Secret Son eschews such multiple, tragic perspectives to focus on the singular family drama of the Armanis. Poised at the top of Moroccan society, their hands thrust deeply into its business and its politics, they can quite literally make or break the lives of the many thousands who work for them. This not only burdens their only child, amal, with the expectations of inheriting an empire, even while she studies in America, it reaches out to forever alter the life of Yousseff el Mekki, a youthful boy living in the slums outside Casablanca who gradually realizes that he is the bastard son of the Armani patriarch. Despite his mother's efforts to keep him out of the Armani world, Yousseff falls headlong for the wealth, the power and the pride of his father's world even though it's bound to break his heart. For this is not power wielded in the name of anything like social justice. It is, like power in all corrupt nations, deployed for the betterment of those who already have it and at the expense of those who do not.
Slim volumes whose narratives are shaped by a tone akin to observational journalism, Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are mesmerizing works of fiction made all the more potent by their unusual perspectives. Western culture is awash in immigrant stories, tales of hardship endured for the sake of "the children," the generation that, in following on in prosperous nations, make the enormous sacrifices of their parents worthwhile. Ms. Lalami sifts out these success stories in order to find those who tried and failed to emigrate, people who were willing to pay the same ultimate price of their successful brothers and sisters but who were ensnared by blood, by bad luck and by circumstance, compelled to linger on in a corrupt country with little hope and few jobs. The despair is a palpable throb just beneath the surface of these works which cannot be read without at least once provoking the thought "there but for the grace of god."
Though not explicitly stated, a powerful sense of fate pervades these novels. From Yousseff, the slum-dweller, to Murad, the thwarted academic, ms. Lalami has crafted a host of characters whose talents are rarely appreciated and never allowed to fully flourish. Sparked by a conscious desire to change such grim destinies, they fight for better futures, better destinies. And yet, the more they try to reject what they are, the more Fate seems to crush them beneath its jacboots, grinding them down until they are forced to return to their stations in life and accept what's coming to them, the good and the bad. Naturally, there are those in life for whom this consequential reality does not apply, but one cannot help but think of the damage one must do to oneself when forced by necessity to reject identity, reject friends, reject family, even reject station, in order to improve one's fortunes. It is impossible to imagine this deed done without a severe price.
There's no doubt that, in being exposed to the lives of the damned, we are left with some measure of despair, a sad hollowness that is not easily shaken. And yet, not only does this come to seem like a small price to pay for being amongst the fortunate, it, in Ms. Lalami's talented hands, is shaped into a powerful tool that widens our perspectives, allowing us to see more clearly the lives of those forced to bear up under life's most difficult burden, that of enduring in the face of hopeless, exploitive toil. This is a gift that cannot be overstated.
Two of the most moving reads this year... (4/5 Stars)