The Moor's Account
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Average rating4.2
Brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America--a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. 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 conquis-tadores to humble servants, from fearful outcasts to faith healers.
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4.5 stars. This book is beautiful and lyrical and haunting. A fascinating imagining of exploration and its ills.
Recently I've been thinking that I should try to expand my reading choices somehow, so that instead of always reading books that I've heard a lot about and are highly rated, I should instead be more spontaneous. So when I saw this in a bookstore in Oaxaca de Juarez, México, I thought, why not. Thankfully, it did not disappoint!
It's a wonderful retelling of the Spanish exploration of La Florida from the perspective of a black slave. At the beginning, I wasn't sure how much of the book is factual vs imagined, but the book piqued enough interest in me to go down a Wikipedia rabbithole afterwards to learn more about the expedition mentioned in the book. (It turns out Mustafa/Estebanico is indeed a real person with a Wikipedia page!). Being in a country with a lot of Spanish influence and reading this book really made me want to read more about the Spanish inquisition!
This is a well told story of a 16th century North African man, Mustafa, who sells himself into slavery to alleviate his family's poverty during an occupation and drought, and ends up accompanying a Castilian nobleman on an ill fated voyage to the New World in search of gold and other plunder. The story is told through the eyes and voice of Mustafa. As we follow his experiences on the expedition, we also learn about his past and how he came to be a slave. We also see the leaders of the expedition through his eyes. As the expedition breaks apart and the companions meet various forms of hardship and disaster, the relationships between them change. This is the heart of the novel, and I thought Laila Lalami did it so well. With the subtle and not so subtle changes in relationship as circumstances change in the story, she illuminates the effects of colonialist attitudes, slavery and racial prejudice on people and the lives they are able to live.
I really enjoyed this novel's beautiful storytelling, but I learned from it too.
