Citizenship

The book’s rhetorical framework is built around the concept of citizenship, and Lalami specifically interrogates the disparities between the ideals of citizenship and the realities. Citizenship is designed to afford equal protection under the laws of all of a country’s citizens. However, as Lalami thoroughly explores in this book, not all citizens receive the same benefits and protections. Lalami establishes the thematic groundwork of this concept by contrasting her original idealism—when she became a U.S. citizen in the year 2000—with her later disillusionment: Lalami writes, “I can see better now what I had perceived only dimly back then” (6). Namely, she is know much more familiar with—and knowledgeable—social and institutional disparities that exist between different groups of U.S. citizens. One of the primary aims of the book is to highlight the injustice of such disparities, as well as the moral obligation to...