The Other Americans

(Questions)

1. The Other Americans explores themes of immigration, community, and identity. Discuss each of these topics with relation to The Other Americans. How is it a novel of immigration? And community? How do these connect to identity?

2. How is The Other Americans a novel about storytelling and the importance of stories, everyone’s stories? And the importance of telling and listening to stories?

3. Why do you think Lalami tells this story using many different voices and writing in the first person for each voice? And why does she turn to the second person for Salma’s chapter? How does this affect your reading? How do you relate to the various characters?

4. Nora is a composer who loves music and sees music as colors. How does this affect how she views the world and interacts with other? Do you think she is more sensitive than other people?

5. Throughout much of the novel, Jeremy is filled with nostalgia for Nora in high school. She was kind to him after his mother died and his father fell apart. Compare and contrast the Jeremy in high school with Jeremy the ex-Marine and policeman.

6. Both Jeremy and his friend Fierro fought in Iraq. How do they separately deal with the trauma from that time? How does it affect their relationships with women and with each other? Do you think Fierro will ever recover from fighting in the war?

7. How is A. J.’s voice and story important to the novel? How do his bullying and racist comments connect with his fierce devotion to dogs and to his mother?

8. “Lalami captures the complex ways humans can be strangers not just outside their ‘tribes’ but within them, as well as to themselves” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) How has Nora been a stranger to herself? Is it because, as her mother says, she has her “head in the clouds” (p. 17)? Why does she have a tattoo on her wrist reading “a voice crying out” (p. 93)? Has she been running away from herself and chasing something that isn’t necessarily what she needs/wants? How does she find her way home?

9. Nora’s mother, Maryam, moves to the United States from , away from her parents and extended family, and feels “it was like being orphaned” (p. 31). In the United States, she says, “All I ever wanted was to keep my family together.” (p. 79). How does Maryam keep the family together and the family narrative intact?

10. How does Nora’s relationship with her mother evolve over the course of the novel? Why?

11. “How strange the work of memory . . . what some people remembered and others forgot.” (p. 138) Comment on this quote in relation to the novel as a whole.

12. Everyone in the novel is an outsider in some way. How? Discuss each of the characters and their place as outsider or “other,” whether it is by race, religion, or class.

13. How is this a general tale of our time and a story specific to its place, Southern California? Describe the setting. How does nature (and in particular the Mojave Desert and the Joshua Tree National Park), play a part in the novel?

14. The Other Americans begins with a death and ends, in a way, with a birth and a rebirth. Why do you think Lalami has ended her novel with a pregnant Nora?

15. “Home was wide-open spaces, pristine light, silence that wasn’t quite silence. Home, above all, was the people who loved me.” (p. 301) How does this novel revolve around home? Noticing home, returning home, discovering home, creating home? Discuss several of the characters’ relationships to home. How are

Nora’s and her mother’s connection to home both similar and different? How about Coleman’s and Efraín’s? And how about Jeremy and Fierro?

16. Despite both being immigrants, how and why are Driss’s and Efraín’s lives and roles in the town different?

17. The love story between Nora and Jeremy is central to the novel. What does it take for Nora to open up to his love and to accept her love for him?

18. Discuss the differences between the two Guerraoui sisters. What are their similarities and differences? How have their lives taken different paths since graduating from high school and leaving home: where and how they live, what professions they have, what kind of partner they gravitate toward?

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562861/the-other-americans-by-laila- lalami/9780525436034/readers-guide/

The Other Americans

(About the Author)

• Birth—1968

• Where—, Morocco

• Education—B.A., University Mohammed V; M.A., University College of London; Ph.D., University of Southern California

• Awards—American Book Award

• Currently—teaches at the University of California, Riverside

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan American novelist and essayist. She was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her B.A. in English from Universite Mohammed V. In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England, earning her M.A. in Linguistics at University College London.

Lalami moved to the U.S. in 1992, and completed a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Southern California. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Writing

Lalami began writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. Her literary criticism, cultural commentary, and opinion pieces have appeared in , Boston Review, Times, Nation, New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Beast, and elsewhere.

Her debut collection of stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was released in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son (2009), was longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Her second novel The Moor's Account (2014) is based on Estevanico, the historic first black explorer of America and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narvaez expedition. The book won an American Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and nominated for the Man Booker Prize.

Lalami has received an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was selected in 2009 by the as a Young Global Leader.

https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/10361-moors-account-lalami?start=1

The Other Americans

(Reviews)

Booklist

/* Starred Review */ Who killed Driss Guerraoui? Was it an accident, a hit-and-run in the wee hours of the morning? Or was it murder, a brutal act against the Moroccan immigrant who might pose a threat to a neighborhood business in a small Mojave-desert town? The mystery at the center of Lalami’s (The Moor’s Account, 2014) novel brings together an intriguing set of characters, including Driss’ daughter, Nora, a struggling composer who returns home to the remnants of her family. There’s Maryam, Driss’ wife, who misses her native country; Iraq War veteran Jeremy, who is battling his own demons while trying to help Nora; and African American detective Coleman, who is trying to work out the mechanics of the case while facing her own domestic challenges. Now and then the story is nearly drowned out by the nine narrating voices, yet Lalami impressively conducts this chorus of flawed yet graceful human beings to mellifluous effect. “I didn’t know which version of the past I could trust, which story was supported by the facts and which had been reshaped to fit them, whether out of grief or out of malice,” Coleman worries. An eloquent reminder that frame of reference is everything when defining the “other .” -- Poornima Apte (Reviewed 2/1/2019) (Booklist, vol 115, number 11, p26)

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ Lalami’s powerful third novel, after 2014’s Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor’s Account, uses nine narrators to probe the schisms of American community. When Driss Guerraoui is killed in a hit-and-run, his single daughter Nora—a struggling composer who survives by substitute teaching— leaves Oakland for her parents’ home in Yucca Valley. There she navigates her strained relationships with her mother Maryam, who hopes she will abandon

music for a law degree, and sister Salma, who unlike Nora chose a conventional path of marriage, children, and a lucrative career. As Nora grapples with grief for her supportive father and pushes the police to find the driver who killed him, her encounters with Jeremy Gorecki, a former elementary school classmate, lead to intimacy she isn’t sure she wants. Nora, whose parents emigrated from Morocco in 1981, initially worries that Jeremy, a veteran traumatized by his time in Iraq, represents an American aggression that she fears, even as their relationship deepens. The novel depicts characters who are individually treated differently because of his or her race, religion, or immigration histories, but its focus is the sense of alienation all of them share. In a narrative that succeeds as mystery and love story, family and character study, Lalami captures the complex ways humans can be strangers not just outside their “tribes” but within them, as well as to themselves. (Mar.) --Staff (Reviewed 01/28/2019) (Publishers Weekly, vol 266, issue 4, p)

Library Journal:

After Moroccan immigrant Driss Guerraoui is killed in a hit-and-run in California, a host of characters converge to reveal his family's secrets and the town's failings with perhaps redemptive results. Among them are his widow, Maryam, still longing for the old country; his jazz composer daughter Nora; undocumented witness Efraín, fearing deportation if he testifies; the detective, dealing with her own troubled son; and more. From Pulitzer Prize finalist and Man Booker Prize long-listed Lalami (The Moor's Account). --Barbara Hoffert (Reviewed 10/15/2018) (Library Journal, vol 143, issue 17, p43)

http://web.a.ebscohost.com.glendalepubliclibrary.idm.oclc.org/novp/detail?vid=3&sid=519d2423-92ea-4f9b-aa3f- f3bd014d71ad%40sdc-v-sessmgr03&bdata=JnNpdGU9bm92cC1saXZl#UI=10760011&db=neh

The Other Americans

(Enhancement)

To understand some background about an immigrant family’s story in the United States, here is an important resource for gathering & preserving those valuable stories. This is a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities:

Elizabeth Venditto, Ph.D., is an immigration historian and manages the Immigrant Stories project at the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota.

How can we help students better understand the long history of immigration to the United States and the experiences of contemporary immigrants and refugees? How do we encourage students to compare immigrant groups and eras of immigration through the experiences of individuals and families? How can students understand their place within this long history and immigration’s impact on shaping an increasingly diverse society?

The Immigrant Stories Collection contains hundreds of digital stories and is publicly accessible. Individuals from more than 45 different ethnic groups have already created and shared their digital story about a personal or family migration experience. Immigrant Stories also addresses a range of topics faced by newcomers and their families, including: refugee stories; maintaining family ties across borders; adjusting to life in a new country; immigrant entrepreneurship; immigration bureaucracies; international adoption; and reflections on language, race, and identity.

Immigrant Stories work as powerful primary sources for history and social studies lessons examining immigration, race, citizenship, and culture. Each video tells a brief and self-contained story, so that one or two videos are able to be shown and discussed during a single class period. To help teachers find stories of interest, we highlight them by theme on our website’s Digital Exhibits page.

Most videos in the Immigrant Stories Collection address immigration within the past 50 years. But there are also many stories about older migrations created by elders and others who talk about parents, grandparents, and the effects they had on their families. In fact, the entire collection includes stories spanning more than a century.

EDSITEment is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Trust for the Humanities.

EDSITEment offers free resources for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality K-12 humanities education materials in the subject areas of history and social studies, literature and language arts, foreign languages, arts, and culture.

“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” by Thomas Nast,

Harper’s Weekly, November 20, 1869

This document includes immigration from Morocco to the United States.

www.MigrationPolicy.org 2016 Statistics

https://edsitement.neh.gov/closer-readings/connecting-past-and-present-immigrant-stories-project https://edsitement.neh.gov/about