All my life, I’ve had the sense of being an outsider, watching other people as if through a pane of glass. This feeling has often been a source of pain; I’ve wanted so much to be as bound to a place as others, as certain of my beliefs, as trusting that the language I speak belongs to me.
When I was five years old, my parents left the apartment they’d been renting near my grandmother’s house in Rabat, Morocco, and moved to the suburbs. The new house was too far from the French school my mother insisted I attend, so it was decided I’d be dropped off early each day at my grandmother’s and picked up after my father was finished with his shift at the power and water department. My grandfather had served in the army and spent much of his career in the police, but he was at heart a poet, gathering with friends to compose or listen to malhun, a form of sung poetry that dates to the 15th century. His library, kept under lock and key after his death, was a source of pride for my grandmother, all the more so because she was illiterate.
This article appears in Issue 26 of Alta Journal.
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I was very close to my grandmother, but as I spent hours in her courtyard, doing homework or reading French comics, I had the keen sense that my life was headed in a different direction from hers. The education she so prized was pulling me away from her, teaching me to live in a language she couldn’t speak, to feel shame at the tattoos that adorned her chin, to treat the ornate caftans she wore as impractical dresses best left for special occasions.
My grade school had once been a mission school, and after Morocco had gained independence, a few nuns had decided to stay on, splitting school hours between French and Arabic to meet basic educational standards. Yet the Arabic curriculum was weak, and some of the teachers were uncertified, and by the time I finally moved to an all-girl public school in the sixth grade, I had trouble catching up. When the teacher called on me and I made a basic grammatical mistake, the class laughed.
I clammed up.
The taunting lasted for much of middle school, until my Arabic improved. By then, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a guest in the language that should have been my home. I watched the other girls and marveled at how comfortable they were, at how little consideration they gave to what came out of their mouths.
In the 10th grade, I was required to take a foreign language. I chose English, mostly because I wanted to understand the lyrics of the American songs on the radio. The red leather jacket Michael Jackson wore in “Thriller” was the most sought-after item among the boys in my school, while the girls teased and styled their hair to copy Whitney Houston. As I began to learn English, I noticed that no one laughed at anyone else in class. Instead, we puzzled at the strangeness of a language that didn’t differentiate between maternal and paternal aunts but infused prepositions with enough meaning that washing up, washing off, and washing down meant three different things entirely. We helped one another memorize irregular verbs or the proper order of adjectives. English wasn’t our home; there was no fighting over it, no bullying over who spoke it better.
Then I left to go to school in England and, later, the United States. All along, I was writing stories, though I never really thought about publishing them. To have a story in print would mean claiming this language for myself. It was only years later, after finishing graduate school, that I realized I had been struggling against silence. I had to risk, to speak, to write. My first book, a collection of stories titled Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was about immigrants who embark on a dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. I kept coming back to the theme of crossing borders, whether in contemporary Casablanca for Secret Son or in 16th-century Florida for The Moor’s Account.
When I began writing The Other Americans, I wanted to explore how that feeling of unbelonging can manifest within a family and a community. Set in a small town in the Mojave, the story involves a wide range of characters who are brought together after the hit-and-run death of Driss, a Moroccan immigrant. Spending four years with these characters showed me how elusive and malleable belonging can be, how much power we allow it to have over us, and how easily it can be used against us.
The sense of being different has never gone away. But as the years have passed, I’ve learned this feeling is a gift; it allows me to observe, to remain open to possibilities, to probe at the lines people draw between belonging and unbelonging.
It’s what makes me a writer.•
