Title: The Moor's Account Author: Laila Lalami
Published: September 9, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 321
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernán Cortés.
But from the moment the Narváez expedition landed in Florida, it faced peril—navigational errors, disease, starvation, as well as resistance from indigenous tribes. Within a year there were only four survivors: the expedition’s treasurer, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; a young explorer named Andrés Dorantes de Carranza; and Dorantes’s Moroccan slave, Mustafa al-Zamori, whom the three Spaniards called Estebanico. These four survivors would go on to make a journey across America that would transform them from proud conquistadores to humble servants, from fearful outcasts to faith healers.
Laila Lalami’s debut novel tackles the European “discovery” and exploration of the Americas from an atypical perspective: that of a Moorish slave. The narrator of The Moor’s Account is Mustafa, a former merchant in his thirties who was forced by a poor economy to sell himself into slavery. This narrative, written in first person addressed directly to the reader, describes not only his childhood and the events that lead to Mustafa’s slavery, but also his experiences in Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition to La Florida in 1527, of which only 4 men survived, Mustafa (given the Christian name Estebanico) among them.
What I really like about The Moor’s Account is that it takes a single line from a written account of the Narváez expedition and expands it into a whole life. Lalami was able to take a mention of a Moorish slave and give Estebanico an entire backstory and future, beyond just the expedition. While the majority of the novel is certainly about the expedition and the 8 years Mustafa spends wandering in the present-day southern and southwestern United States, The Moor’s Account never gives the impression that the author is just using this character as a vehicle to pursue an agenda. Mustafa is very much a fully realized character.
Of course, that being said, I didn’t care for Mustafa very much. While I’m certainly not opposed to the presence of faith in fiction, I felt that Mustafa’s tone was often very sanctimonious and holier-than-thou whenever he talked about anything that went wrong that wasn’t his fault, while he’s all humble and contrite on the rare occasion he does something wrong, and of course, everything was tied into God, which just became grating. It’s hard to explain—I like that Mustafa was religious and that Lalami explored that in The Moor’s Account, but Mustafa as a person didn’t sit well with me.
Another thing I definitely would have liked to see in the book was a map. Over 8 years, Mustafa and his companions go from the gulf coast of Florida across Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, before going into modern-day Mexico. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and aside from knowing that the group was going steadily west, I had no idea where I was each time a new Native tribe was introduced. I would really have liked to have been able to orient myself in the text, though I suppose that since no maps existed at the time, this feeling of confusion mirrored Mustafa’s own. But still.
Definitely, The Moor’s Account was really good, and it’s extremely evident that Laila Lalami did a great deal of research prior to writing this book. I think this novel reveals a necessary perspective on European presence in the Americas, and while I didn’t care for the narrator himself, I don’t deny that he was a strong character with an authentic 16th century voice. Overall, I found The Moor’s Account to be an enlightening read, though not strictly a contender for favorite status.
