The Moor's Account by Laila LalamiMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The premise of this alone makes it stand out: a North African man, who’s had to sell himself into slavery to pay his family’s debts, arrives in 16th Century “New Spain” to serve as part of a Conquistador’s mission of conquest. On top of that, though, Lalami adds a thoughtful layer of what it means to tell history, and we’re left with an original and provocative story.
The premise here reminds me of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. (If it is not as accomplished as that novel, don’t worry; very few things are.) Both of those books imagine the New World at a moment before it coalesced into a place capable of the sort of slavery we know. Each explores (and largely rejects) the possibility of friendship and partnership between people of different races, but each does so at a moment in American history before there is an America.
The best parts of this one come as the explorers get their first glimpses of a southern North America that, if familiar to us, is bewilderingly new to them. There may be a sameness to our experience of their discoveries – it does get difficult to distinguish one new tribe or one new river from another – but the group’s gradual diminishment changes their experience in ways that sustain the narrative. They lose their arrogance, and the nature of their encounter takes on an ever-changing tone.
Early on, the narrator notes of the would-be conquerors, “They gave speeches not to voice the truth but to create it.” They name everything they see as if they are in a world without history.
Later, once their hardships compel them to acknowledge the history and power of the land around them, they become more descriptive. The narrator even subtly mocks them for switching to a shorthand of “first river” or “second river” where once they thought of themselves as drawing a new map.
Lalami adds to that drama the sense that the very business of telling the group’s story follows a similar pattern. The arrogant tell their story and think of it as history in full. And, at least as I have learned the history, the Spanish story feels like the full and familiar one.
The central joy of this book is the realization that, without “the Moor’s account,” we have only a partial history of that awful and awesome time. It takes a black man, enslaved to the Spanish, to help us see those Native Americans in a new light. If the picaresque of this occasionally drags (but only occasionally) that implicit narrative correction to our history makes it all come together as a compelling and entertaining story.
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Here's the addendum to this that, somehow, fell off in this post but not the Goodreads:
ReplyDeleteFollow-up reading: Feb. 26, 2020
As I revisit this close to four years later -- is that possible? -- I am as impressed as I was the first time. I have been reading this as part of teaching it to a thoughtful group of students, and it's been a pleasure to feel as if I am on Estebanico's adventures along with them.
I would add to my original reflections on this, though, that it also reveals a deeply sophisticated take on the nature of language and "signs."
One of the earliest lessons the book has to offer is the sense that power supports meaning. That is, when the would-be conquistadors first arrive with their horses and guns, they bring the implicit power to name along with them. As power shifts, though, as they become dependent on the tribes they meet along the way, they become subject to the language/naming dynamic which they once controlled.
In perhaps the most haunting example of that, one of the Spanish -- the gentle Diego -- is the object of a native woman's dream. She reports that, as she slept, she dreamed that he attempted harm against her and her unborn child. We, as Westerners, see this as a silly claim, but the natives regard it as an authentic truth. Since they have the power at that moment, there is nothing the Spanish can do when they cut Diego's throat.
There is, then, a sustained inquiry here about the nature of "sign" in the Saussurian/Derridean sense of the concept. It's all offered subtly, though, without the heavy hand of anything theoretical. And, what's more, Lalami proposes a thoughtful way through the tangle of theory if, indeed, we follow Derrida and acknowledge that the sign has a great deal of "play" in the space between signifier and signified.
That is, Lalami ultimately proposes that "story" is a particular kind of utterance, one that acknowledges potential power outside of the notion of true/untrue. We tell stories for many purposes -- to inform, to console, to heal, to be remembered after we are gone -- and we do so with an awareness that many details may ultimately be false. True or false, though, stories can accomplish something.
Given that this novel is a series of chapters entitled "The Story of...," we come to see that Mustafa's work to inscribe himself into an American history that denies him stands as a collection of stories in opposition to the official narratives coalescing even in his lifetime.
Lalami seems to say at the same time that, whether this story is entirely "true" or not, it is a story with the power to remind us of the breadth of the history that's made up this nation that is our home.