It's a truism that history is written by the victors, and officially, the only eyewitness account recorded of Pánfilo de Narváez's ill-fated 1527 expedition to Florida was penned by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in what is now known as Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition. One line in particular from that book caught author Laila Lalami's attention: “The fourth (survivor) is Estevanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor”. Out of an expedition of over six hundred men, only four survived, and this one line is all that de Vaca affords to Estevanico. The Moor's Account is Lalami's imagined history from Estevanico's point of view.
Estevanico's (née “Mustafa” in Lalami's imagination) is an interesting perspective: As he lingers in the shadows, watching the Conquistadors in action, he remembers his Moroccan childhood and the famine that forced him to sell himself into slavery in order to feed his mother and siblings. From there, he was taken to Spain and resold to a merchant, and after several years, he was given to a Spanish nobleman to settle a gambling debt. It was this man who brought Estevanico to the New World, and it was as a slave that he became the first African explorer of America. As disasters and poor decisions plague the expedition, and as the survivors are forced to settle with various Native American tribes, The Moor's Account eventually illustrates the inner workings and philosophies of these three distinct societies. So far as historical fiction goes, this book was an interesting look at a time and place I didn't know that much about.
By making Estevanico a slave, Lalami is able to create dramatic irony as he watches his Spanish masters enslave the Indians, and the irony is ratcheted up when he admits that as a formerly successful merchant, Estevanico himself was once a slave trader; but this felt a bit gratuitous to me. There are more layers of irony as Estevanico's father had wanted him to train as a notary public, and such a notary is employed to record his indentureship, and for want of a trip to a notary, Estevanico's eventual freedom is long delayed. The main theme of The Moor's Account, however, seems to be about the primacy of storytelling: from Estevanico's mother's instructive tales to the embellished accounts that gained the four survivors their audiences with powerful caciques (chiefs). Sometimes, stories took on a darker purpose:
How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians – just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.Estevanico writes that he understands the pressures that de Vaca was under to create an acceptable account for their lost eight years, and it is to leave a more accurate record that he proposed to write his own. After reading The Moor's Account, I can't decide whether Lalami's purpose was to show that everyone is capable of corrupting the truth in order to make themselves look good or whether she really wanted us to believe that the Moor was consistently the most moral man on the expedition (one of the few to refuse to rape captured maidens), the most clever (the only one who would think to build rafts to cross the Bay of Oysters), the most loyal (the only man not to disavow his Native wife), and the only one of the four survivors who would stand in defense of their former Native hosts:
The Indians, I said, are like people everywhere else in the world. They are born and die, and in between they live lives according to their own laws and customs: they worship God in their own way, find joy in raising their children, and when the moment comes they mourn their dead. They do not seek war, but they will not retreat from it if it is brought to them. All they wish is to carry out their own lives in peace.And I'm uncertain what Estevanico – the moral heart of this story, who is devout a Muslim – ultimately means by this:
In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world.There is more irony in that, of course, but as Lalami is a Morrocan-American, is she making a statement on American imperialism? Is she trying to untangle the knotty skein that connects the Ottoman Empire to the Conquistadors to Manifest Destiny to American Adventurism in the Middle East to the rise, perhaps, of the ISIS Caliphate? That would be full circle, for sure, but is it a fair view of history?
In The Moor's Account, Lalami appears to be attempting to correct the official record – which has endured only because it was “written by the victors” – with an account written by a not disinterested party; someone who is either inhumanly good or an unreliable narrator; someone who is intent on correcting the “vicious savages” vision of Native Americans with a “noble savages” view. (And despite making some tribes more warlike and some more hospitable, the Natives here are a fairly homogeneous, shallow population.) On the surface, Estevanico's was a very interesting perspective to try and fill in, but in the details, I'm uncertain if Lalami fulfilled her vision.
The only thing at once more precious and more fragile than a true story is a free life.
This is my second title from the Man Booker longlist, and if the last one was a failure of clever writing tricks that denied the importance of story, this book was all about the story -- and for the most part, I found that story boring. Here's to better titles to come!
Man Booker Longlist 2015:
Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family
Anne Enright - The Green Road
Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings
Laila Lalami - The Moor's Account
Tom McCarthy - Satin Island
Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen
Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations
Marilynne Robinso - Lila
Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter
Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways
Anna Smaill - The Chimes
Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread
Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life
I was really pleased that A Brief History of Seven Killings took the prize; even more pleased that it didn't go to A Little Life as seemed inevitable.
