Speaking Across Borders: Language, Migration, and Postcolonial Identity in the Fiction of Laila Lalami and Boualem Sansal

Abstract

This article studies the politics of language in North African migrant fiction through a cross-textual reading of the works of Laila Lalami and Boualem Sansal. Language, the article argues, particularly in the postcolonial era, does not simply function as a communicative medium, but as a discursive space where political meanings of power, identity, memory, resistance, and societal critique are continuously negotiated. The study adopts a postcolonial framework to explore how both writers engage with the wor(l)ding of colonial and postcolonial experiences that constitute a major concern of migrant fiction. Lalami and Sansal write in foreign languages — English and French respectively — which are both considered linguistic legacies of colonialism in different parts of the world; hence, their multilingual narrations, code-switching, and stylistic choices are of paramount importance for a well-founded understanding of their literary engagement with colonial legacies and postcolonial sociopolitical realities in their home and host countries. Across Lalami’s fiction (mainly The Moor’s Account), language serves the purpose of restoring silenced histories, functioning as a repository for cultural memory, and as an intermediary through which hybrid identities are negotiated across borders. By contrast, Sansal gives a fractured and politically charged presentation of language that reveals alienation, failed integration, ideological manipulation, manifest discontent with the past, and the lingering effects of colonial and postcolonial violence. This article shows that the interaction between Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and local vernaculars in North African migrant fiction leads to a language pluralism which embodies the persistent yet ruptured conditions of migrant subjectivities. In the end, it demonstrates that the literary expression of displacement, belonging, and postcolonial resistance continues to be mediated through language.

Across Lalami’s fiction (mainly The Moor’s Account), language serves the purpose of restoring silenced histories, a repository for cultural memory, and an intermediary through which hybrid identities are negotiated across borders. By contrast, Sansal gives a fractured and politically charged presentation of language that reveals alienation, failed integration, ideological manipulation, manifest discontent with the past, and the lingering effects of colonial and postcolonial violence. This article shows that the interaction between Arabic, French, English, Spanish and local vernaculars in North African migrant fiction leads to a language pluralism which embodies the persistent yet ruptured conditions of migrant subjectivities. In the end, it demonstrates that the literary expression of displacement, belonging, and postcolonial resistance continues to be mediated through language.