Otherness and Unhomeliness in Two Moroccan Transnational Novels: Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans and Leila Slimani’s The Country of Others

Central to transnational literature are the questions of mobility, home, and identity. Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans and Leila Slimani’s The Country of Others—two examples of Moroccan transnational literature produced by women writers in different languages—embrace this reality. By exploring the stories of Nora and Mathilde, this article examines how these writers narrate the struggles of two female characters living in a state of liminality, simultaneously navigating multiple homes and cultural identities yet feeling unhomed in both. Being on the move, these characters are compelled to negotiate identity and remap the fluid boundaries of selfhood and otherness. As the titles imply, otherness is a running theme in both novels. Otherness—as a process that constructs and re(produces) the Other as inferior to the Self—is core to these characters’ cross-cultural journeys. This article argues that, irrespective of Nora’s and Mathilde’s backgrounds and trajectories, their sense of home is deeply entangled with otherness and unhomeliness. They are doubly Othered—marginalized by factors of gender and race—both in their host societies and in their homelands. Their experiences show that not just home, but also unhomeliness, can be deterritorialized. The article closes by arguing that the writers allow a space for agency and resistance as the two protagonists manage not only to set up reciprocal claims against their otherness but also survive their unhomeliness. Theoretically, this comparative reading employs Freud’s, Heidegger’s, and Bhabha’s theorizations of the “unhomely” as well as the Beauvoirian notion of “otherness” as conceptual and theoretical apparatuses.