The Gifts of Movement

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance

Available on-demand

Experience the visceral weight of displacement through these preeminent North African voices. You navigate complex intersections of identity and artistic liberation within this profound dialogue. Witness how movement reshapes the creative spirit to inform the global canon.

This event is sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders and cultivate intersectional solidarities. The series was developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, and was founded by author and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at Notre Dame, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020.

For more information visit the event website.

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The Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance series at the University of Notre Dame serves as a critical interdisciplinary forum for examining the friction between human rights and the arts. This specific dialogue, featuring Saïd Khatibi and Amara Lakhous and moderated by Alexander Elinson, provides a strategic departure from the exhausted tropes of the migrant tragedy. Rather than viewing movement as a mere byproduct of trauma, the conversation frames the diaspora as a potent site of intellectual expansion and linguistic sovereignty.

A central theme of the discussion is the profound ontological shift precipitated by migration. Amara Lakhous characterizes his journey as a series of three births: his biological arrival in Algeria, his intellectual emergence in Italy, and his current professional evolution in New York. For Lakhous, the loss of inherited protections—family, language, and religion—is the necessary prerequisite for a broader, bilingual existence. Conversely, Saïd Khatibi defines migration through the prism of freedom. He posits that leaving the homeland provides the essential distance required for a clear vision. By moving outside the reach of “Big Brother” social controls and familial censorship, the writer escapes a purely reactionary existence and enters a space of proactive creative liberty.

The narrative analysis of their works further illuminates these concepts, particularly the double absence described by sociologist Abdel Malik Sayad. In the reading from Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet, the character Samir embodies the haraga—those who burn the sea and their documents to escape systemic injustice, highlighting the 14-kilometer chasm that separates African despair from European paradise. This external journey is contrasted by the internal psychological landscape in Khatibi’s The End of the Sahara. Khatibi’s reading evokes a visceral scene: a female body discovered in a meadow among juniper trees and wormwood plants near the informal dwellings of the poor. The protagonist’s hesitation to approach the body reveals a shyness of women rooted in his mother’s strictness, illustrating how the migrant carries the psychological baggage of the homeland even as they navigate new, often violent, realities.

The role of language is perhaps the most sophisticated element of this hybrid identity. Both authors reject the constraints of monolingualism to engage in what Lakhous calls linguistic polygamy. This involves arabizing Italian and italianizing Arabic to bypass standard conventions and create a prose style that is fundamentally universal. This fluidity facilitates a secularization of the Arabic language, reclaiming it from being kidnapped by religious and political dogmas. Writing from the diaspora allows these authors to treat Arabic as a secular tool of high art rather than a vessel for extremism. Ultimately, the conversation establishes that for the contemporary writer, the true territory of belonging is not a specific geography, but the absolute sovereignty of the mind.

How has technology fundamentally altered the psychological experience of migration?
The historical concept of double absence—where a migrant is perceived as missing from their homeland and a ghost in their host country—has been dismantled by digital connectivity. Lakhous illustrates this by contrasting his father’s experience in the 1950s, who went seven years without word from his family during the revolution, with the modern ability to video-call one’s mother in a remote village to discuss a meal. This simultaneous presence allows migrants to maintain deep, daily roots in their culture of origin while physically navigating new geographies.

Why is personal freedom considered more vital than national belonging for the creative artist?
The authors suggest that a homeland is a hollow construct if it lacks the freedom of expression. For an artist, the distance provided by the diaspora is often a prerequisite for a clear vision. By moving outside the reach of social and political “Big Brothers,” writers can move beyond reactionary responses to their environment and instead engage in deep, analytical work. In this framework, the diaspora is not a loss of home, but the acquisition of the liberty necessary to truly describe it.

In what way does the diaspora serve as a site for the liberation of the female migrant?
Migration can function as a fantastic way of liberation for women by removing them from the intense social and religious pressures of their home countries. In the diaspora, religion often shifts from a collective issue enforced by social control to a private, spiritual issue. This transition, explored in Divorce Islamic Style, allows women to experience a new range of possibilities where their identity and faith are no longer objects of public or political negotiation.

What is the strategic value of linguistic polygamy in contemporary literature?
Adopting a hybrid identity and multiple languages allows a writer to bypass nationalistic constraints, which Lakhous notes are always against someone. By mixing images and proverbs across languages, authors create an original style that reflects the universal human predicament. Lakhous wittily notes his desire to be a polygamist with four languages, not four wives, emphasizing that linguistic plurality is the key to creating a style that communicates across cultural borders.

How does literature help reclaim a language from political or religious extremism?
Writing secular prose in a language that has been kidnapped by dogma is a profound act of resistance. By using Arabic to tell stories of human complexity, mystery, and personal desire, authors like Khatibi strip away the stereotypes often associated with the language in the West. Literature serves as the primary tool for returning language to its status as a beautiful, secular, and artistic medium rather than a political weapon.

“Migration for me is a new birth… because when you migrate you migrate from a protected situation into unprotected situation, from stability to instability… but through that experience I became a bilingual writer.” — Amara Lakhous
“Since I am outside, nobody asks me what I dress or how I dress or why I cook or why I write or what I do… immigration for me is connected with another word: freedom. Personal freedom.” — Saïd Khatibi
“The most important value for a writer is freedom, not homeland. Because if you live in your country and you don’t have freedom, you are not free… Homeland without freedom is not life; it is a prison.” — Amara Lakhous
“The Arabic language has been kidnapped by the religious. My [motto] is to say Arabic is a secular language also; it’s not only a religious language… I will continue to write in Arabic to say it is not like people in Western countries think about this language.” — Saïd Khatibi
“I am a linguistic polygamist with four languages and trying to mix them and trying to create a new style.” — Amara Lakhous