Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
Laila Lalami
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
Laila Lalami
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... a wonderfully readable series of essays.
... an argument for active, equal United States citizenship. In order to forward her conception of equality, Lalami must first present its counter construct: conditional membership in the body politic.
... a no-holds-barred non-fiction debut.
I read Conditional Citizens as a first-generation immigrant, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who has been teased for being 'a commie' and 'a Russian spy' but also complimented on successful assimilation by those who knew nothing of the process. I read Conditional Citizens while holed up in my apartment, immunocompromised and afraid of catching or spreading the novel coronavirus.I read Conditional Citizens as a break from scrolling through social media feeds and learning about ordinary individuals who couldn’t get tested until it was too late, while celebrities got diagnosed and treated. I saw the president lean hard into racism and xenophobia, repeatedly saying 'Chinese virus,' and thus tacitly encouraging harassment and violence against Asian Americans.
Ms. Lalami’s is a short book, 160-odd pages of often elegantly expressed (and exasperating) paranoia. Portions of it have appeared, she acknowledges, in publications like the Nation, whose flavor her text seems most clearly to carry. She is, in fact, a columnist at the Nation; and in keeping with the locutions of that progressive-dissident magazine, she writes of the 'Los Angeles uprisings' in the wake of the Rodney King beating by the police in 1991 and of 'Latinx motorists' being stopped more frequently than whites by Border Patrol agents. Although the book feels, at times, to be a stitching together of disparate essays, it does have a clear thread that runs right through from start to finish.
Lalami is less insightful when she widens her lens to argue that all minorities in the United States—including people born here but of a race, faith or gender not shared by the dominant majority—are discriminated against by their government and others, a heavily worn argument.
... sharp, bracingly clear essays.
As a novelist, Lalami traffics in the specific textures of individual lives and voices, allowing questions of race, gender, and class to percolate at the edges of her narratives rather than dominate them. A similar instinct infuses Conditional Citizens, which uses the contradictions between American ideals and the author’s experience to excavate histories of exclusion. Tackling questions of national belonging, media representation of Muslims, anti-poor government policy, and structural misogyny, Lalami sets an enormous task for herself: to describe multiple modes of exclusion, each with its own knotty convolutions. But if this collection finds Lalami broadening her scope, its wide lens sometimes vitiates the specificity that is her greatest literary strength.
In 200 pages, Lalami offers a tightly packed examination of the whimsical nature of American citizenship, proffering examples of the weaponization of laws against every race and religion, and yet it is the conditionality of Muslim citizenship upon which she shines the brightest light. In the long-standing tradition of artist-activists, Lalami invites the personal and political, the private and the public.
[A] searing look at the struggle for all Americans to achieve liberty and equality. Lalami eloquently tacks between her experiences as an immigrant to this country and the history of U.S. attempts to exclude different categories of people from the full benefits of citizenship.
On the surface, its timing could not be better.
In a concise and powerful work of nonfiction, Lalami argues that America’s vaunted diversity and pluralism are undermined by actions designed to differentiate systematically between an 'us' group and an 'other' group. The ultimate goal of these actions is to keep white citizens—and especially white men—in control; people of color and women are denied the full rights and privileges of citizenship.
... thoroughly researched, as evidenced by its detailed source notes and bibliography, but in this gifted storyteller’s hands, it never feels like homework. Lalami braids statistics and historical context with her lived experiences to illustrate how unjust policies and the biases that feed them can affect individual lives..
... [a] propulsive, fascinating, and infuriating account of citizenship in the U.S..
In this eloquent and troubling account, novelist and National Book Award–finalist Lalami...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.'.
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.