We are living in a world where our conversations, calendar, transactions, transfers, appointments and everything that we do is being watched, recorded and turned into data and statistics that can be used and misused. The reality is already scary. And once you step into the world of Sara Hussein, Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami’s protagonist in her latest book The Dream Hotel, things get daunting. The dystopian setting inches further into a future where not just actual actions, but even dreams, a reflection of the subconscious mind, are under vigilance, and a bad score can land you in trouble.
Lalami, whose The Moor’s Account was shortlisted for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, attempts the dystopian theme for the first time and taps on contemporary anxiety. A tete-a-tete with Lalami whose other notable works include Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, The Other Americans, and more.
Airport trips are not going to be the same for me anymore, as it was life-changing for Sarah, your protagonist in The Dream Hotel. What was the initial spark that compelled you to imagine and construct this particular dystopian setting?
One morning in 2014, I woke up to a Google notification on my phone that said, “If you leave right now, you will make it to (the name of my yoga studio) at 7.28.” Obviously, I had never told Google what I did on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, but the company’s tracking software had learned my habits and schedules and decided to remind me about them. It occurred to me then that data collection has become so vast and so invasive that it could well threaten the world of the subconscious.
The premise of the novel is that one day, in the near future, our dreams will be collected and tracked and commodified in the same way that our other information already is. I chose to focus on dreams because sleep is the only time we have left where we are not under constant capitalistic pressure extraction.
My character, Sara Hussein, is a museum archivist and busy mother of twins. Desperate for a good night of sleep, she gets a sleep aid device, not caring that this device collects data about her. Then one day, on her return from a conference abroad, she is detained at the airport because her dreams indicate that she will soon commit a crime.
The novel’s characters navigate a reality that blurs hope and disillusionment. How did you balance giving the characters personal stories while also making them reflect bigger social issues?
Life is a mix of both, isn’t it? In the novel, there are all kinds of scientific and technological innovations (like, a pill to treat Alzheimer’s, or a fridge that figures out dinner menus) but the canvas of the novel allows me to focus on the most terrifying one: dream surveillance. But even though this is a frightening innovation, the characters are essentially living in this world without questioning it (much as we are with our world) and find pockets of hope and action that enable them to survive.
Dreams themselves carry strong symbolic weight in literature. In your book, they also act as tools of power. How did you approach weaving this aspect into the novel?
All I had to do was look around me. Crime is not a static category; it shrinks or expands in different eras and under different policymakers. Right now, in the US, the government is sending masked agents to arrest immigrants outside their homes and workplaces because they lack work authorisation paperwork. Many, if not most, have committed no crime — other than believing in the “American dream”. In essence, they are being detained because of that.
You have often written across genres — memoir, essays, and fiction. Did The Dream Hotel demand a different approach to structure or pacing compared to your earlier works?
Each book teaches me how to write it. With The Dream Hotel, I realised fairly quickly that it had much in common with The Moor’s Account, a historical novel I wrote a few years ago, in that both involve companies that lay claim to other people’s property. In the dystopian novel, a tech company collects data from users’ sleep and gives itself the right to own it and commodify it. In the historical novel, Spanish conquistadors arrive in Florida and declare that the land now belongs to the Spanish crown.
The other commonality between a futuristic novel and a historical novel is that I had to create a world that no one alive had ever seen, but one which seems normal and mundane to the characters. I had to build these worlds through perception, not explanation.
For me, writing a novel is a journey of exploration. I go through several drafts, fleshing out characters and refining sentences until I feel satisfied with the story.
Dystopian fiction has long served as a mirror of contemporary fears. In today’s climate of political instability and technological upheaval, what role do you think dystopian literature plays in helping readers confront, or even resist, the anxieties of our age?
Dystopian fiction is a great place to work out our anxieties about the future, to see what might happen if certain trends — societal, political, technological — go unchecked. It’s a thought experiment, but one to which actual characters are subjected and have to survive.
Also, this was your first dystopian novel, how did you think this important element helped in pushing the narrative?
Each literary genre has its own conventions, but ultimately every story asks the same question: What if...? And then once that question has been posed, the next is: What now? So, in that sense, writing this dystopian fiction wasn’t all that different from writing my other fiction.
It’s also the first time you have written a near-future novel, unlike your past novels. How was that experience?
It was exciting to be able to imagine a future — a world no one alive has yet seen — and to make it seem as ordinary to my characters as the present time is to me.
What are you planning to take up next?
A new novel, set in a completely different era.