The Moor's Account

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.

Did anyone else find themselves thinking, this book was obviously written by a woman? The insight, compassion, awareness of and caring about others' mental states; the continental-scale sense of tragic loss... presented as first-person narrative by a sixteenth-century former merchant? I couldn't buy it, and the incongruity kept jarring me out of my reading experience, and I'm 100% OK with that because damn, what a story and what a writer.

What struck me most is Lalami's gift for negative space: expressing a complex swirl of feeling without a single term of emotion or often without even a direct reference. Much of the writing is declarative—it would be easy to dismiss as a simpleminded journal—but the depth is in the context, in what she doesn't say but the reader's heart nonetheless aches in knowing the rest of the story:

[The Zuni elder] fell silent. He leaned back against the wall, thinking about everything I had said, but his face darkened as he reached his conclusions. Let the white men come if they wish, he said. We have fought intruders before, we can do it again. At these words, his deputies nodded in agreement. The town of Hawikuh was not a settlement that could be taken without a fight, and they were prepared for it.