Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

by Laila Lalami Narrated by Laila Lalami

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Sixteen faceted essays thematically connected, asking the question—who belongs? Who is an American citizen? Who is "not quite"? The question is personal and political and Lalami explores the many circumstances that render this belonging conditional status. An elegantly written, poignant meditation on the effects of exclusion and suspicion and what embracing citizenship might mean.

A New York Times Editors' Choice ¿ Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times

What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize­­-finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections.

"Sharp, bracingly clear essays."-Entertainment Weekly

Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth-such as national origin, race, and gender-that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today.
*
Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.
*
Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami's own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Author Laila Lalami narrates this look at what it means to be Muslim in contemporary America. She does so in a sober, measured voice, beginning her account with her naturalization ceremony, which took place the year of the contentious election of George W. Bush to the presidency. Lalami's memoir is a timely examination of the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. Hers is an unflinching focus on the awkward moments, racial slurs, and other indignities she and other Muslim Americans have suffered since 9/11. Listeners will be drawn in by the consistency of her delivery. The challenges Lalami presents are softened by her gentle yet insistent presentation. Her almost hypnotic delivery leaves a lasting impact even after she has finished. M.R. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/03/2020

In this eloquent and troubling account, novelist and National Book Award–finalist Lalami (The Other Americans) draws on her personal history as “an immigrant, a woman, an Arab, and a Muslim” to argue that becoming a U.S. citizen does not necessarily mean becoming “an equal member of the American family.” Recalling that the first time a U.S. customs agent examined her American passport, he wanted to know how many camels her husband had to trade in for her, Lalami critically assesses political rhetoric from 9/11 through President Trump’s border wall; skillfully unpacks charged words such as “allegiance” and “assimilation”; reflects on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh through the lens of her own experience calling out workplace sexual harassment; and examines the erasure of Muslims from American history. “Conditional citizenship,” she writes, “is characterized by the burden of having to educate white Americans about all the ways in which one is different from them.” Lalami offers essential insights into how racism and sexism function in American society, and makes a persuasive case for preserving the “gray zones” between religious, ethnic, and national identities as a way to push back against tribalism and sectarianism. This profound inquiry into the American immigrant experience deserves to be widely read. (May)

From the Publisher

A searing look at the struggle for all Americansto achieve liberty and equality.” —The Washington Post

“A tightly packed examination of the whimsical nature of American citizenship. . . . Lalami’s writing refects a citizen who’s descried the matted underbelly of her adopted home, a citizen cautioning us that what we believe of ourselves, our laws, our country has and will shift to suit the ever-changing demands of power.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Sharp, bracingly clear. . . . [Conditional Citizens] doesn’t just ask you to consider that the personal is political; it makes you marvel that anyone could still presume otherwise." —Entertainment Weekly

“Political writing at its most effective, grounded in the author’s experience but turned outward, to the inequities (and worse) many Americans face as a matter of course.” —Los Angeles Times

“An urgent, compelling, and persuasive book, written by one of our most important critics of the American character. Lalami has given us a clear-eyed, evenhanded assessment of this country’s potential—and its limits—through her insightful notion of conditional citizenship. Her book is a gift to all Americans—if they are willing to receive it.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies

“Lalami’s passionate exploration shows that for citizens like herself, being treated as fully American is rarely a given. In striking prose, she explores the United States’ tortured history of questioning who belongs and forces us to examine the gap between the dream and the reality of American life.” —Time

“No-holds-barred. . . . [Lalami] thread[s] together the experiences of a breathtakingly diverse underclass.” —NPR

“An argument for active, equal United States citizenship. . . . [A] very strong book.” —The Boston Globe

“Probing, unflinching, and fiercely intelligent. . . . Laila Lalami writes with such sharp clarity and illuminating insight that reading this book was like encountering America for the first time.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

“The beautifully written personal stories . . . give Conditional Citizens a flair and warmth rare in a polemic about what’s wrong with America.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[A] propulsive, fascinating, and infuriating account of citizenship in the U.S. . . . Lalami treats this complex, incendiary topic with nuanced consideration and blistering insight.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Lalami shows how our nation’s schizophrenia toward immigrants—Immigrants built this great country! We are a nation of immigrants! Immigrants bring disease, crime and rob us of our jobs!—can give conditional citizens whiplash as they are simultaneously regarded as America’s best hope and its gravest threat, a combination of suspicion and rejection that Asians, Italians and the Irish, among others, have all faced.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] profound inquiry into the American immigrant experience. . . . Lalami offers essential insights into how racism and sexism function in American society.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With great moral passion and intellectual verve, Lalami explores the questions the political volcanoes of our times have thrown at us. . . . She equips us with bracingly fresh resources to confront our terrible new age of mass deportations, border walls, and brutally enforced statelessness.” —Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger

Library Journal

03/01/2020

Lalami (The Other Americans) explores what it means to be a naturalized citizen in the U.S. post 9/11 and post Trump. Lalami, a novelist and professor who was born in Morocco and educated abroad, provides anecdotes about her own life and experience. She is a Muslim who is married to an American, and her citizenship did not exempt her from scrutiny, bias, and suspicion. She delves into topics that concern not only Muslim Americans but all immigrants, which include faith, allegiance, and assimilation. She speaks movingly about her own mother-in-law, a Cuban-American woman whose moral support she deeply valued, even as she was overtaken by dementia. Traveling internationally and speaking to groups of people on book tours has given Lalami unique insight into some of the indignities that immigrants face, as well as the scope of misinformation that can spread across communities. She argues that, for some naturalized citizens in the U.S., citizenship will always be conditional, at least until we truly reckon with our white supremacist roots. VERDICT Lalami's conclusions are not groundbreaking and have been investigated in other works, but she is a gifted writer and her informative narrative shines when she shares her own experiences. [See Prepub 11/11/19.]—Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Author Laila Lalami narrates this look at what it means to be Muslim in contemporary America. She does so in a sober, measured voice, beginning her account with her naturalization ceremony, which took place the year of the contentious election of George W. Bush to the presidency. Lalami's memoir is a timely examination of the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. Hers is an unflinching focus on the awkward moments, racial slurs, and other indignities she and other Muslim Americans have suffered since 9/11. Listeners will be drawn in by the consistency of her delivery. The challenges Lalami presents are softened by her gentle yet insistent presentation. Her almost hypnotic delivery leaves a lasting impact even after she has finished. M.R. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-01-26
The award-winning novelist gathers eight essays that examine the meaning of citizenship in 21st-century America.

Drawing on history, politics, and her own personal experience, Lalami, a creative writing professor and American Book Award winner, explores the “contradictions between doctrine and reality” that problematize what it means to be an American. To make her points, she uses the concept of “conditional citizenship,” a state of partial (and revocable) acceptance/integration into American society based on factors such as race and faith. In the opening essay, “Allegiance,” Lalami writes about the frightening attitudinal changes she witnessed as a new Muslim American citizen in the wake of 9/11. Suddenly, the “slice of citizenship apple pie” she had been extended was withdrawn as hate crimes against law-abiding Muslim Americans spiked and presidential bans against certain nations eventually became a new normal. The author reminds readers how white supremacist attitudes have always existed by recalling the historical treatment of other nonwhite communities. In “Inheritance,” Lalami extends the concept of conditional citizenship to include not only nonwhites and non-Christians but also nonmales. Even in the U.S., women are often told to be grateful for the rights they have. The author convincingly argues that such attitudes “subtly discourage” women from achieving equality with men and accessing the full citizenship they deserve. In “Borders,” she goes on to emphasize the fragility of allAmerican citizenship. She reveals how the U.S. has 136 internal checkpoints within 100 miles of its geographical borders and how the 200 million Americans living in those zones could be subject to deportation if they “fail to persuade [border patrol] agents” that they are citizens. While walls may seem to offer security, as Lalami points out, the climate change that “unfettered industrialization” has created will eventually render both walls and checkpoints useless. Consistently thoughtful and incisive, the book confronts the perils of our modern age with truths to inspire the coalition-building necessary to American cultural and democratic survival.

A bracingly provocative collection perfect for our times.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940179022435
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	541,937

Read an Excerpt

Allegiance
 
This is a story about love and country, and I will tell it to you how I remember it, in strands that took me years to untangle and then thread together. I became an American on a sweltering day in 2000, a day when the marine layer over Los Angeles cleared off before breakfast. The exact date had been circled on my wall calendar with the same blue Sharpie I used to mark holidays, and I thought of it as an equally festive occasion, the culmination of a journey that had begun when I came to the United States as a foreign student eight years earlier. Over the course of those years, I had adopted, almost without realizing it, two of the more emblematic trappings of that particular era: I worked for a technology startup company and drove an SUV for which I had no discernible need. The deregulation of banks, the war in the Balkans, and Bill Clinton’s angry denials that he did not have sex with that woman were in the past. The NASDAQ was at a record high; unemployment was at a record low. The future seemed full of possibility.
 
The citizenship ceremony was held at the Pomona Fairplex, a 487-acre facility best known for hosting the Los Angeles County Fair every summer. I remember wearing a sleeveless dress, a silver necklace my mother had given me, and a pair of new shoes that blistered my feet. My husband was in the same black suit and tie he had worn at our wedding. Ushers directed us to Building Four, a large, gray hall where I turned in my alien-registration card and was handed a miniature flag in return. Folding chairs had been set up in two columns: those who were to be sworn in had to sit on the left side of the aisle, their guests on the right.
 
At precisely 9:00 a.m., the first few notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played on the loudspeaker, and a hush fell over the audience. The air smelled of fresh roses and heavy cologne, but the mix could not fully disguise the scent of three thousand people gathered in a windowless hall in ninety-eight degree weather. The presiding judge, an elderly man in wirerimmed glasses, came to the lectern and delivered a homily about the rights and responsibilities that awaited us. Citizenship was a privilege we had earned, he said, and we were to honor it by participating in civic life—voting in elections, serving on juries, even running for office. He had kindly eyes and a warm demeanor; it seemed impossible that he would ever pass a cruel or unfair sentence on anyone in his courtroom. After his speech, he moved to the center of the stage and asked us to stand so that we could recite the oath of allegiance. I raised my right hand.
 
Love had brought me to that moment. When I came to the United States, my intention had been to complete a doctoral degree in linguistics and return home to Morocco, where I hoped to work as a college professor. But one day I met a man who made me reconsider many things, not least of which my distrust of romance. Alex and I had nothing in common—he was a network engineer, listened to grunge music, liked to spend entire weekends hiking up one mountain or another in Southern California. My hobbies were limited to reading. Still, whenever we were together, we lost track of time. I remember us driving to a movie in Century City one night, and missing the freeway exit twice because we were so engrossed in our conversation. After it became clear that our relationship was serious, we realized that one of us had to live in the other’s country. I was young and in love; I made a commitment to my husband and another to his homeland.
 
I applied for permanent residency, a process that required submitting to a background check, sending in tax returns, going on interviews, and jumping through various bureaucratic hoops. One day, a notice arrived from the Department of Justice informing me that I was eligible for naturalization. I spent weeks studying for the citizenship exam. Alex helped by quizzing me while we were eating dinner or washing dishes. How many voting members are there in the House of Representatives? Four hundred and thirty-five. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? Thomas Jefferson. What stops a branch of government from being too powerful? Checks and balances. But in the end, I didn’t find the test particularly challenging. Perhaps it was because, long before setting foot in the United States, I had taken courses on its history, studied its literature, and become fluent in its culture. (The familiarity, I realized within days of arriving in California, was not mutual.)
 
Then the moment came when I had to take the oath. I swore to renounce allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince of whom I had been a subject, to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States, and to bear true faith to the same. Faith was an apt word for the leap I was taking: I was placing my trust in America. Alex and I came out of Building Four, holding hands and squinting in the sunlight. Later that morning, he dropped me off at my office, and an hour later I was called to a meeting. I opened the door to the conference room to find my colleagues—lexicographers and programmers and business analysts—huddled together under red, white, and blue balloons. “Surprise!” they hollered in unison. On the table was a catered lunch of hamburgers, apple pie, and lemonade. As I said, a festive occasion.
 
 
Nearly twenty years have passed since that summer morning at the Pomona Fairplex. I am no longer a starry-eyed bride, but maturity has its advantages: I can see better now what I had perceived only dimly back then. Being a citizen of the United States, I had thought, meant being an equal member of the American family—a spirited group of people of different races, origins, and creeds, bound together by common ideals. As time went by, however, the contradictions between doctrine and reality became harder to ignore. While my life in this country is in most ways happy and fulfilling, it has never been entirely secure or comfortable. Certain facts regularly stand in the way, facts that make of me a conditional citizen. By this I mean that my relationship to the state, observed through exposure to its policies or encounters with its representatives, is affected in all sorts of ways by my being an immigrant, a woman, an Arab, and a Muslim.
 
Shortly after taking the oath, I applied for and received an American passport. The blue booklet was at once a tangible proof of my new citizenship and a powerful artifact that gave me the freedom to travel without restriction to more than 150 countries. I made immediate use of it when I flew to Hong Kong in October 2000 to attend the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Alex had decided to tag along, and we spent a few days sightseeing on the island and in the Kowloon peninsula. Coming back to the U.S., we went through Customs at Los Angeles International Airport, both of us relieved not to have to go in separate lines anymore. When we walked up to the counter, the border agent examined both of our passports, then turned to my husband. “So,” he said, his face breaking into a conspiratorial smile, “how many camels did you have to trade in for her?”
 
This was my first interaction with an agent of the state since I’d become a citizen, and the direction it took so stunned me that I was rendered speechless. I think I might have gasped, because the agent threw back his head and laughed, his face as pink as a new scar. With a wink at Alex, he stamped my passport and waved us both through. I was furious, and when I told a friend about it later, she said to forget it, it was just a stupid joke. “Don’t read too much into it,” she said. But I am a writer, and what is a writer if not someone who reads into things? Ten years later, the experience happened again, in almost identical detail, at John F. Kennedy Airport. We were returning from a vacation in Morocco and this time, my husband was asked whether he’d had to trade some cows for me.
 
Twice, I had come face-to-face with the state, in the person of the border agent, and discovered that it held a specific bias about me as a citizen. The two encounters reflect an enduring perception in the United States—by no means restricted to border agents—of Arabs and Muslims as lesser people: their religions, languages, cultures, customs, and modes of dress are marked not only as different but also inferior. The perception flows from representations in popular media, whose purpose is less to illuminate or engage Arab Muslim life than it is to assert its deficiency and justify its subjugation, a dynamic that Edward Said described forty years ago in Orientalism. In a comprehensive survey of representation in Hollywood films, for example, the critic Jack Shaheen found that more than 90 percent of movies that featured Arab Muslim characters portrayed them negatively. These images are ubiquitous and influential—so influential that they can make otherwise sensible people believe that they are true. The complexity of a multitude of private experiences is erased and replaced by a single public story, which grows more convincing with each repetition.
 
When a community struggles against such erasure, I would soon learn, even a small glance of acknowledgment from a politician can feel like an immense validation. A couple of months after I took the oath, Alex and I went to a mosque on Vermont Avenue to donate blood for a drive organized by the American Red Cross. While I stood on the sidewalk, waiting my turn to have my blood drawn, I was handed a flyer from the Muslim Public Affairs Council asking me to vote for George W. Bush in the upcoming election. I can’t recall the specific wording of it, but the basic argument was that Ralph Nader was unelectable, Al Gore didn’t espouse family values, but George Bush cared about issues that mattered to the community. When Alex came out of the Red Cross truck, I showed him the flyer. “Why him?” I wondered out loud. “I don’t understand.” Only later did it occur to me that Bush had made these people—my people—feel like they were seen and heard for the first time.
 
As presidential candidate, Bush had courted the Arab and Muslim vote. He traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab-American population, to meet with community leaders, and appointed an Arab-American lobbyist, Khaled Saffuri, as an adviser to his campaign. During one of his televised debates with Al Gore, Bush pledged to end racial profiling in encounters with law enforcement and to stop the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings, both sensitive issues within the Arab and Muslim communities. At the First Union Center in Philadelphia, where the Republican National Convention was held that year, Bush invited Talat Othman, a Palestinian-American businessman, to deliver a Muslim benediction. This marked the first time that an Islamic prayer had been included in a major party’s convention, a novelty that pundits highlighted during television coverage of the events.
 
Bush’s strategy ultimately paid off. He received more than 45,000 votes from various Muslim communities in Florida, a state he carried, thanks to the Supreme Court’s interference in the recount, by just 537 votes. Notably, however, black Muslims remained unconvinced by Bush’s claims that he was “a different kind of Republican”—a conservative who would rally “little armies of compassion” to address persistent social problems like drug abuse or teen pregnancy—and by wide margins chose Al Gore instead. The “Muslim vote” was not monolithic, it turned out. Black Muslims had a different perception of Bush than non-black Muslims, many of whom seemed either unaware or unconcerned about the racist flyers that were sent in support of his candidacy during the race for the Republican nomination in South Carolina. Openly pursued for the first time by a presidential candidate, and apparently persuaded by his campaign promises, Arab Muslims cast their ballots for him.
 
The day after Bush was sworn into office, a group of prominent Republicans, including Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, met with representatives from the Arab and Muslim communities to discuss issues of concern, including racial profiling. Legislation to stop the practice was introduced in Congress—by Russ Feingold, a Democrat. To remind Bush of his campaign commitments to them, Arab and Muslim leaders asked to meet with him directly. The appointment, much discussed and much delayed, was finally scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
 
The meeting never took place.
 
That morning, my phone rang a little before 6:00 a.m. It was my brother-in-law, his voice filled with urgency, telling me to turn on the television, something terrible was happening. I stumbled over to the living room and turned on the set, in time to see thick plumes of black smoke billowing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and people jumping from the windows of the building. At least, that is how I remember the moment. It seems to me now that the television cameras were too far away to have captured the falling bodies, that this was a detail I read about later in a newspaper or a magazine. Yet my memory insists on the detail, as though it were necessary for me to see the individuals in order to apprehend the full scale of the tragedy.

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