57 pages • 1 hour read
Laila LalamiThe Other Americans
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Vehicles
The remoteness of the desert town where the characters live means that vehicles are an essential part of life. Unless characters want to remain in a single place, they have to use a vehicle. This means that vehicles are imbued with a symbolic meaning. Vehicles represent freedom and social activity. They symbolize the ability to break free from a home or family and achieve independence. Fierro and Jeremy drive to their support group to escape their trauma, Coleman drives her son to a baseball game to help him feel less lonely, and Nora transports her life back and forth from Oakland and she tries to find her place it the world. Vehicles become essential extensions of the characters personal freedoms and allow them to search for deeper meaning in their lives.
Vehicles represent personal freedoms, but they also restrict freedom when characters are not alone. Vehicles are essential for travel so characters often find themselves trapped in moving cars with people they resent, fear, or loathe. Nora hates riding in a car with her mother because the shared journeys always exacerbate the criticism from her mother and end in a comparison to Salma. Jeremy and Fierro drive in silence because neither of them want to confront their feelings. Police officers drive around with suspects in the car and cannot talk to them for fear that they might jeopardize their case. Vehicles might represent freedom but the confined space within the vehicle can become a metaphorical prison which traps characters and exacerbates their deep lying, negative emotions.
On one deadly occasion, a vehicle becomes a murder weapon. A.J. runs down Driss with his car and turns a tool for travel into a killing machine. The type of car A.J. uses is replete with metaphorical meaning. He drives his father’s silver Ford. The Ford is one of the most popular manufacturers and a company whose name is imprinted on American history. Ford is a quintessentially American company and the car is painted in the most common color. The car represents the American white majority which A.J. wishes to preserve. The symbol of American being used as a murder weapon is akin to A.J. beating Driss to death with a symbol of national pride. The symbolic meaning of the Ford is to remind the audience of the brute force of American nationalism when wielded against racial minorities.
The Restaurants
Restaurants are the Guerraoui family business. Driss runs a donut shop and then a diner and the success of these businesses is a symbol of his investment in American society. Both the donut and the diner are quintessentially American. Driss purposefully selects the businesses because, to him, they seem authentic. The restaurants are a way he can signal his intent to integrate into the society. He embraces American culture and not only participates in the culture but makes it into his life’s work. Driss’ restaurants symbolize an immigrant’s route to becoming American.
The restaurants also bring Driss into harm’s way. The donut shop is burned down in a racially motivated arson attack and the diner instigates a festering relationship with the business next door. Driss wishes to signify his embrace of American culture but American society pushes back. The symbolic meaning of these restaurants as representations of American culture is reinforced. Driss, an immigrant, involves himself in something quintessentially American and people resent this. The attack against his donut shop is a rejection of the immigrant embracing the American dream. Driss’ murder takes this rejection a step further. The symbolic meaning of the restaurant’s makes Driss a target and he is killed because of it.
With Driss gone, Nora takes over the running of the diner. She notices how shabby the establishment has become. The diner has fallen into disrepair. The disrepair reveals the disconnect between the diner as a symbol of 1950s nostalgia and the way in which the American society and economy has moved on. Driss feared new, more modern restaurants opening nearby and Nora sees the effect of the cultural evolution which has left the diner behind. The worn down aesthetics of the diner reveal the cultural degradation of American society which strives to make sense of itself in a post 9/11 world. Nora does not want to sell the diner. The restaurant has a deeply personal symbolic meaning. The diner represents everything her father achieved over the course of his life and to sell the diner is to abandon Driss’ ambitions. Nora eventually realizes that she will never overcome her grief while still occupying the physical manifestation of her father’s dreams. The sale of the diner symbolizes the moment when the family can finally let go of the past.
The Cabin
The cabin in the desert symbolizes Driss’ second life as well as his roots. The location of the cabin means that it is open, exposed, and surrounded by empty space. This location might not be like the bustling city of Marrakesh that Driss left behind but it represents a certain crossover between American and Morocco that he treasures. Both countries have vast, open deserts in which a person can wander and allow their minds to travel. The cabin in the desert reminds Driss of an idealized version of his home country that he has left behind. He spends so much of his life trying to be demonstrably American that the cabin provides him with a space where he can revel in the idea of being Moroccan that he once left behind.
The cabin also provides a private space for Driss. He almost accidently finds himself in an extramarital relationship. Though he once planned to use the cabin as an extra source of income, it becomes the place where he can spend time with Beatrice. He cannot take her to his house because his domestic setting is too tied to conflicting feelings of family and responsibility. But Driss can indulge his affair in the desert, out in the cabin that his wife always resented. He can be himself in the cabin with Beatrice in a way that he cannot be himself anywhere else. The cabin symbolizes his opportunity to escape from the confines of his family and the expectations placed upon him. Driss is able to be someone else in the cabin and this opportunity represents a freedom that he cannot enjoy anywhere else.
Driss dies and Nora moves into the cabin. She grieves for her father so occupying the space that meant so much to him becomes a symbolic demonstration of her refusal to let go of his memory. Nora understands her father’s desire to have a place all to himself so she hopes that, by occupying that space, she can understand him better. She achieves this in an unexpected way. Nora learns about her father’s affair. At first, she is disgusted, and she can barely remain in the cabin. She changes the bedding and the mattress. But she does not leave. She begins to understand her father as a complex and conflicted individual. Nora grieves for her father and mourns his death, but it is only when she accepts that he was a more complicated man that she is able to put his death behind her. The cabin and her relationship to the cabin represents the way in which she comes to terms with this change.
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By Laila Lalami
