ABSTRACT
“Fourteen kilometers.” With these two words indicating the distance between the North African shore and Spain, Moroccan–American writer Laila Lalami sets her collection of short stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) in the Strait of Gibraltar and the figurative space that lies between the two cultures. The wreckage of a patera, a rickety boat used by immigrants in this boundary water, serves as the point of departure for her stories, and this event situates the Strait as an important spatial metaphor for referencing the complex relation between the Maghreb and Europe in contemporary literature. This geographical setting functions metaphorically as a way to signal a narratological discourse that goes beyond the confinement of neatly defined borders—whether these borders are understood in geographical, political or cultural terms—in favor of expressing the conflicting dilemmas of subjects compelled to live in contact with the diverse social and cultural realities on both sides of the Strait. Thus, this geographical referent serves as the paradigm to represent the interconnection of two cultural and political realities that, like the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, are in constant motion. The Strait, which Lara N. Dotson-Renta has defined as a “nebulous space between the two coasts” (429), represents the site where historically eastern and western influences have mixed. In that regard, the Strait serves as an important metaphor in contemporary narratives to challenge the essentialist concept of identity that Edward Said identified as paramount to the construction of “Orientalist” ideology (26).
