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Have you ever wanted a glimpse into the libraries + bookshelves of your favorite authors? What notes do they make in the margins of their favorite books? What books have inspired them? In Show Your Shelf, Author + Journalist Joel Stein talks with authors about the books on their shelves. In this episode, author Laila Lalami talks about her book “Conditional Citizens.” She shares some of her favorite books including “Waiting for the Barbarians.”
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:00
– LOL, this…
00:02
– LOL?
00:03
Really?
00:04
You LOL books?
00:04
Oh, that’s horrible.
00:07
– Well, hello.
00:08
You can learn a lot about someone
00:10
by looking at their bookshelf.
00:11
They say you can learn a lot more
00:13
by actually talking to people,
00:14
which is why I’m talking to people about their bookshelves.
00:18
I’m Joel Stein.
00:19
And this is Show Your Shelf.
00:21
Today’s guest is Laila Lalami.
00:24
She’s a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
00:26
She has a PhD in linguistics.
00:28
She’s a creative writing professor
00:29
and she’s written this amazing new collection of essays,
00:32
Conditional Citizens,
00:34
about what it’s like to be a Moroccan American
00:36
in the United States
00:37
whose citizenship feels questioned every turn.
00:40
Honestly, I’m a little nervous to see her bookshelf
00:43
because she speaks a lot of languages
00:46
and the books are going to be from all over the world.
00:48
And I’m going to feel provincial and small,
00:50
and I may lash out.
00:54
♪ Show your shelf ♪
00:56
♪ Show some spine ♪
00:58
♪ Dust off your tiny jackets ♪
01:00
♪ Show me yours ♪
01:01
♪ I’ll show you mine ♪
01:02
♪ We’re delighted to have you with us ♪
01:04
♪ Perhaps we’re being pretentious ♪
01:06
♪ But we have sincerely here to share the wealth ♪
01:09
♪ So show your shelf ♪
01:10
♪ Show your shelf ♪
01:11
♪ Show your shelf. ♪
01:14
– Laila Lalami, thank you so much
01:16
for coming on Show Your Shelf.
01:17
You’ve written this brilliant, beautiful new book,
01:20
Conditional Citizens, which I truly enjoyed
01:23
and gets at so many things that I am worried about,
01:26
not just for our country, but for the whole world right now
01:28
about what it’s like to be an immigrant.
01:32
So thank you for coming on.
01:33
– Thank you very much.
01:34
Thank you.
01:35
It’s a pleasure to be with you.
01:36
– That is a good looking bookshelf.
01:37
It seems like it’s organized in a very particular way.
01:40
Do you have an organizational structure for that bookshelf?
01:43
– It’s organized alphabetically.
01:47
I know, shocking.
01:49
This is the fiction.
01:50
Yeah, so it’s organized alphabetically by author.
01:52
– Is it organized alphabetically by title within author?
01:55
Or do you draw the line there?
01:56
– Oh, well let’s not…
01:58
I know I’m crazy, but not that crazy.
02:00
No, it’s just alphabetically by author.
02:02
This is The River Between
02:05
by the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
02:08
This is his memoir.
02:10
This is called Dreams in a Time of War.
02:12
So here he talks about having been imprisoned
02:16
as a young writer in Kenya
02:20
and writing his first book on rolls of toilet paper.
02:24
– Someone else famously wrote their book
02:26
on toilet paper too, right?
02:27
– There’s a lot of great literature
02:29
that was written while in prison,
02:31
including one of my most favorite books, Don Quixote.
02:37
I was working on a novel that set in the 16th century.
02:41
And I was trying to sort of educate myself
02:43
about sort of the language of the era.
02:46
And I wanted to know what people back then sounded like.
02:49
And I went back to the masters.
02:51
So for example, Cervantes, I think, in this book,
02:55
he has characters say things like,
02:58
“I had too many fish to fry.”
02:59
– How many languages do you speak?
03:01
– I speak Arabic, French, English,
03:05
and I manage in Spanish.
03:08
– So how many of those books are not in English?
03:11
– Well, you can’t see it, but at the very, very, very top
03:15
there is a shelf where I put foreign language books.
03:18
– I feel like this goes against everything
03:20
I just read in your book.
03:21
They’re like conditional citizen books.
03:24
They have to be banished to a separate area.
03:26
– No, no, no, no.
03:27
They’re not banished
03:28
to a separate area. – There’s borders
03:29
in your bookshelf?
03:30
– No, no.
03:30
They are carefully organized by language and alphabetically.
03:35
It’s a way to find all of the books more easily.
03:38
– Do you write in books? Do you highlight?
03:40
Or do you never touch a book?
03:41
– I used to be the kind of person who never touched books.
03:44
I would not even put them on the ground.
03:47
And it’s only when I started writing very seriously
03:51
that I started writing in them.
03:53
And now I can’t imagine not writing in books.
03:55
I have marginalia in everything.
03:57
This is one of my favorite book.
03:59
It’s called The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nyugen,
04:03
I wrote, ha ha ha
04:06
– Oh, that’s as good as it gets as far as I’m concerned.
04:09
– LOL, this…
04:11
– LOL, really?
04:13
– You LOL books.
04:14
Oh, that’s horrible.
04:16
I’m back to you should never let them touch the floor.
04:23
– So we asked you to pick three books
04:24
that have had a great influence on your life.
04:26
Let’s talk about J.M Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians.
04:30
When did you first read that book?
04:32
– I was in the state.
04:33
So it would have been in the ’90s.
04:35
It says original publication date is 1980.
04:38
And so it took a long time to get to me
04:40
because I found out about it in the ’90s.
04:43
By the way, I never think that books are late.
04:46
You find out about them right at the right moment
04:48
in your life.
04:49
– Well, that’s part of the premise of this show,
04:51
which is that the books that are most special to you
04:55
have to do with the fact of when you read them,
04:58
where you were at at that point.
04:59
So why did you need this book at that moment?
05:01
– I’m going to say, I was thinking a lot
05:03
about for interventions and colonialism,
05:07
and then this book came
05:09
and it’s basically an allegory,
05:12
you don’t know what country it’s set in.
05:14
So you can read it like sci-fi,
05:16
you can read it like an allegory.
05:17
And I was born and raised in Morocco,
05:20
which was a colony of France between 1912 and 1956.
05:27
When I read it, it clarified for me a lot of my own history,
05:35
both as a person,
05:37
but also as a sort of a subject in a country.
05:42
There is an empire and this…
05:45
– An unnamed empire with an unnamed majesty, right?
05:47
– Unnamed, yeah.
05:48
– And it’s a slim book.
05:50
It’s what, may be like 160 pages or so?
05:53
– 140 in this edition.
05:55
It’s not a long book.
05:56
And it’s a very quick read.
05:59
And so the way it opens is that this guy shows up
06:03
at the outpost of the empire and he introduces himself
06:06
to the guy who’s kind of in charge of the outpost,
06:08
who’s named the magistrate.
06:10
And he says that he has come
06:12
because he has heard that there are rumors of a rebellion,
06:16
that the barbarians are rebelling,
06:19
and he’s here to investigate.
06:21
As the book proceeds, you see that this guy,
06:25
the guy who has come to investigate,
06:27
starts to use torture on the prisoners
06:30
just to extract confessions.
06:33
And there is no rebellion.
06:35
And this book is unfortunately ever relevant.
06:39
You could read this and it could apply to something
06:42
that happened in Morocco.
06:45
It could apply to something that happened here
06:47
with indigenous people.
06:48
It could apply to South Africa.
06:50
And basically the idea is that when you create someone
06:55
that you conceive of as a barbarian or a foreigner,
06:58
or an alien, it is a way to basically project
07:01
all of your own weaknesses onto them.
07:04
– So much of your book is about what you project
07:07
onto the other, the foreigner,
07:10
that you’re afraid of in yourself.
07:11
– Right.
07:12
It’s looking at the experiences of people
07:15
with one another, that form a nation.
07:18
And it is looking at the experiences of these people
07:22
toward the state, like basically the government,
07:25
which is supposedly accountable to us.
07:29
– You picked a book called,
07:31
and this is my high school French here, Le passe simple.
07:35
– So this book is in French.
07:36
I do not know if you want me to read
07:45
– It is about a family
07:46
where the father is kind of like a patriarch,
07:50
is very serious and the son is a teenager
07:54
and he’s rebelling.
07:55
I read this book when I was in middle school
07:56
and it was one, it was very…
07:58
– In middle school?
07:59
That seems precocious, doesn’t it?
08:01
– I mean, don’t forget I went to a French school.
08:05
English is not my first language.
08:07
When a country is under foreign influence,
08:10
it disrupts everything.
08:11
And one of the things that France disrupted
08:15
when it colonized Morocco is its educational system.
08:18
When I was little,
08:19
all of the books that I read as a young child
08:21
were in French.
08:22
So there were books
08:24
that didn’t particularly show people like me.
08:28
They were showed French people in French situations
08:33
and French society.
08:34
And so really books didn’t start to speak to me
08:36
until I was in middle school
08:38
and started getting introduced to Moroccan writers.
08:40
– There’s like a new English translation
08:42
that came out of that.
08:42
– Yeah, which I’m not like thrilled about it.
08:45
It’s not the greatest translation for Driss Chraibi.
08:47
He deserves a little bit better.
08:49
– I want at some point in my life to say,
08:53
“It’s not a great translation.”
08:54
That would me feel so smart.
08:56
– Isn’t it funny?
08:57
No, no.
08:58
The fact that you’ve never had to say that
08:59
only means that you’ve had all of the books
09:01
that you’ve ever wanted to read available in your language.
09:09
– One of the books you picked
09:10
is Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.
09:12
By the way, everyone we’ve talked to,
09:14
maybe to a person that’s picked Toni Morrison.
09:17
– Do you know why?
09:18
She’s a writer’s writer.
09:20
There’s a certain freshness of language in her work.
09:24
When you read a sentence or a paragraph by Toni Morrison,
09:28
it doesn’t feel like it’s a paragraph
09:30
that you’ve come across before.
09:32
The language is just fresh,
09:34
then there’s her particular ear
09:36
for how people actually speak.
09:38
And she has a way of kind of rendering that in her work.
09:42
Her characters are very well-drawn.
09:44
And one of the things that she does
09:45
that I personally can never do,
09:48
and therefore I admire even more because I can’t do it,
09:51
is that in terms of how her narrative unfolds,
09:55
it just unfolds in a non-linear way.
09:58
Like her plots kind of like move and circle and go back.
10:03
You don’t get lost,
10:04
but it does not move in a sort of a traditional linear way,
10:08
and I liked that a lot about her.
10:10
– What from her writing has worked its way into yours?
10:15
– The way in which she makes her characters
10:20
the center of a story without additional explanation,
10:25
for people who are not familiar
10:27
with whatever culture they’re coming from.
10:29
In other words, she’s writing about these characters,
10:33
the way that they see themselves,
10:35
they would never explain their own traditions
10:38
or their own folklore or their own food or anything.
10:42
They wouldn’t explain it because it’s their lives.
10:43
And that’s how she writes about them.
10:44
It’s by centering these characters.
10:46
And I think that those of us
10:48
who are not from the majority right,
10:50
there is an intense pressure to do a lot of explanation.
10:54
And she avoids that altogether.
10:56
And I think that that’s very important for all of us.
10:59
And I think that that’s something that has stayed with me.
11:02
It’s been a big help to see it
11:05
on the page done so beautifully.
11:07
– Because you’re getting all this pressure from society
11:09
to explain what kind of tea one drinks and Morocco
11:13
or whatever the thing is,
11:13
because in your book, there’s this moment
11:15
when you’re at a reading about your book
11:18
and then someone asks you about ISIS…
11:20
– Yeah.
11:21
I mean, and these are not questions
11:24
that just come from the audience,
11:26
but they come also from within publishing.
11:29
Let’s say that I have a paragraph about something
11:34
that may seem unusual.
11:35
Oftentimes, it will be the editors themselves
11:38
that would want to add in between commas,
11:42
fill in what this means and you have to resist that,
11:44
or at least I have to resist that.
11:46
Joel doesn’t.
11:49
So I think that it is a pressure.
11:50
And I think it’s because of the power play
11:54
between the people that you are writing about
11:57
versus the sort of context in which the book is coming,
12:00
which is why books that kind of interrogate power
12:05
in our society are so important to me.
12:07
– How do you push back against an editor
12:08
who wants you to explain something in a way
12:12
that probably takes you out of the story?
12:16
– Well, you fight.
12:18
You say no.
12:19
Getting your sort of creative vision out into the world,
12:22
it always involves advocating for yourself
12:27
and standing up for that vision.
12:28
So that by the time it actually is out,
12:30
it is the truest that you can make it
12:33
under the pressures of market capitalism.
12:38
– Is there a section of Song of Solomon
12:39
that you happened to have taught or no or?
12:43
– There are so many, so many sections.
12:45
You see a lot of check marks when you read Toni Morrison?
12:49
– What else have you written in there besides check marks?
12:50
– Here, it appears I have written
12:53
that between this paragraph and this paragraph,
12:56
no break to signal break in time,
12:58
see page 16 for the beginning of this anecdote/ flashback.
13:03
So I’m leaving a note to myself
13:05
that we entered the flashback on page 16,
13:08
and we now have exited it, left that flashback,
13:11
and there’s no overt way of signaling it to the reader.
13:16
Again, in a way…
13:17
– Like a line break or something to make you pause
13:20
and realize that things are changing.
13:22
– Yeah, and that’s because the character
13:24
is kind of just remembered something
13:28
that has been narrated for us.
13:30
And we’re right back into the scene.
13:32
And one of the things that I always talk about
13:33
is really effective writing always does more
13:36
than one thing at a time.
13:37
And here, she’s doing multiple things at a time
13:39
and of course she’s written beautifully.
13:41
And I mentioned earlier
13:42
that she’s obviously wrote this influential books
13:47
of non-fiction and she was an editor at Random House.
13:49
So she just had like a huge influence
13:52
on the culture and on literature.
13:54
And I think maybe that’s why so many writers mentioned her.
14:02
– I got you a gift.
14:04
And so not to give anything away, but it’s a book.
14:09
I wanted to pick a book and I’d never met you before,
14:12
so this is my guess as to what book
14:15
would kind of personify you
14:19
the best I could. – Oh, wow. That is .
14:21
Should I go on and open it?
14:21
– Yeah, I know. I put a lot of pressure on this gift
14:23
– Aw, that is so nice. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
14:28
– Cause I feel like you really explain to me
14:33
and to readers what it’s like to feel ignored and othered
14:38
and people aren’t seeing you as a person,
14:40
cause they’re so focused
14:42
on your race or your religion or your gender.
14:47
And to fight against that, like he tries to do,
14:50
you’re more successfully than that character.
14:53
– Thank you.
14:54
I love this book.
14:55
And of course you note
14:55
it has one of the most famous opening paragraphs, right?
14:58
– It’s amazing, right.
15:00
The first third of that book doesn’t stop.
15:03
It’s so powerful.
15:04
Thank you so much for being on Show Your Shelf
15:07
and revealing so much about your multi-lingual shelf
15:13
that impressed me so much.
15:14
– Thank you.
—
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