A review by jaclyn_sixminutesforme
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, by Laila Lalami

5.0

Laila Lalami’s essay collection, CONDITIONAL CITIZENS (@pantheonbooks #gifted), has been a particularly striking read in the lead up to the 2020 election in the US. She grapples with what it means to be an American at the moment, and what her own experience has been since moving from Morocco for graduate study. This is an infinitely complex question, particularly when also considering race and religion and class and caste, which Lalami discusses in these essays. Her examination of borders particularly struck me, including the way people are “othered” as part of the process inherent in articulating any border. The way she draws on personal experience and policies and judicial decisions was striking and poignant. She also engaged in discussions around whiteness and caste which I think readers of recent nonfiction like Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE or Claudia Rankine’s JUST US will find thematic overlaps in. I think this adds an interesting lens to some of these broader discussions. To use her own wording, there is much in these essays that “disturbs the silence” around many of these topics, while also engaging in these conversations raised in many texts that have come out this year alone.
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I can’t recommend this enough, and it’s prompted me to get to Lalami’s fiction as a priority (@sumaiyya.books assures me I will also love it!).