Gray Zone Lalam

Laila Lalami: Living her life in the ‘Gray Zone’

Identity—those who are lucky can take it for granted, reduced to what is written in their identity card, never having to stop and reflect on it in order to pick sides. The less lucky ones always remain under scrutiny and feel egged on to choose one side because “they cannot possibly belong to both worlds” (Lalami). People find it hard to accept that identity can be complex, composed of many ingredients—that there is a gray zone in between the “black” and “white” zones. This is why the theme of identity and the so-called “gray zone of co-existence” about which Laila Lalami writes in her essay, “My Life as a Muslim in the West’s Gray Zone”, and which she inhabits with her family and friends, who

In The Moor's Account, those who are escaping the Inquisition are loathed because “they are taking jobs of local people” and we witness the same kind of hatred in 21st century Europe (Lalami). Lalami does not shy away from controversial and hot topics either: in her essay “The Identity Politics of Whiteness” she writes about the double standards of identities, where the white racial privilege is being glossed over in favor of their economic deprivation (though, by no means exclusive to them) and where there are no collective responsibility and abstractions attached to being white (Lalami). Lalami is an immigrant as she is also an American citizen, who admits being economically privileged, but who will never be fully American, the feeling that reverberates in each of her sentences. She will never be fully American, not because she wishes so, but because society will but because society will never allow it. She will be reminded of that whenever someone approaches her to marvel at the fact that her parents “allowed her to get an education”. Whenever someone comes to her book signings just so he can question why she doesn’t condemn her religion. Whenever she has to console her young daughter who fears that they can be banished from the country at any

In the book, she condemns the atrocities committed during the conquest of New Spain, and in her essay, especially within “Chronicles of the Veil”, she speaks out against stereotyping and generalizations associated with Muslims and Muslim women in particular, in both political talks and literature (Lalami). Her discourse can be seen as the continuation of Edward Said’s book Orientalism. In this book, he argued that colonization was preceded by the set of stereotypical preconceptions, which all claimed that Muslims were to be regarded as inferior, irrational and retrograde. Meanwhile their women, who are suffering from what can be described as the Stockholm syndrome, are not even free enough to realize that they are oppressed at the hands of their tyrannical husbands, brothers and fathers, can only be liberated by their Western “saviors”