New World Lit
Book Choice for May 2020: The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
Hello, hello there. It’s great to be back at the blog. It is September, and September is…lovely.
At the outset I want to say that The Moor’s Account is told from such an empathetic perspective that even sensitive flowers like myself can read it: yes there is sometimes gore, but, miraculously for a work about the period of “Contact” (contact between Native North Americans and Europeans in the New World), a period I find very fraught, the racism that usually accompanies this topic has been avoided. Not just avoided in this book, transcended, and that is how this book can somehow be an exciting joy to read.
The Moor’s Account is really well done. It’s super imaginative, and totally engrossing—both of its narratives, one of which takes place in Northern Africa and details how the main character Estebanico was sold into slavery, while the second strand of narrative takes place in Central America, and details what happens to Estebanico when he lands in the New World, attached to his master’s plan of conquest, which is part of the 15th century imperial venture that was ‘New Spain.’
It is fascinating. It is lush. You feel—really you do—the thick leaves of trees hitting you across the face as you trudge inland with these people. These Spaniards, who arrive with nothing but contempt and greed. And you follow them, as they fight, rob, meet all sorts of resistance and, eventually, peril. The characters are well drawn, some you like, some you are happy to see disemboweled, and sometimes you are brought out of the narrative for a second by Estebanico acting or thinking in a thoroughly modern way. Still, it works.
It’s actually kind of one of my favourite things, if I may reduce such an important time period to my own favourite niche genre: it’s a camping story. There’s provisioning, hunting, drying fish, fears about not making it over the winter—adventure stuff. I had fun with this book somehow, I managed to take our current present out of the past, and just follow the action, and the what-might-have-been. The development of the relationship between Estebanico and his master is so engrossing I wish I could say more about it here, but you will have to read it for yourself.
I will say, however, in the last quarter of the book the narrative started to jog a little too fast, for my taste. Things built up to for tens of pages were sorted out in short sentences. And important changes in the main character’s outlook were not given enough time to arise naturally, be explained, or to be grieved, in my opinion.
I really enjoyed Estebanico as a character though, perhaps because I have met him before. In history class in high school, back in the mists of time, my teacher casually dropped that one of the first New World explorers was an African slave—which I have always remembered as it rather disrupted our whitewashed picture— I have long wanted to know more about him—and here is a whole novel devoted to his trials!
The Moor’s Account is a reasonable, respectful, rare and brave re-imagining of the beginnings of an incredibly intense and prolonged clash of cultures. Personally, as a Canadian, I feel extremely conflicted about our history. I really don’t know how to resolve all the feelings I have about it.
The 1500s cast long shadows. Policies enacted then and shortly thereafter are still affecting Native Canadians today.