The Moor's Account - Laila Lalami

Before this story, I have never heard of Narvaez pxpedition or Spanish Requerimiento. So everything the story revealed was new for me and it was a brilliant read full of surprises. This is a story of struggle between strong and weak, good and evil.

This is the story of the four survivors of the failed expedition to conquer New World. The main focus of this story is the slave Mustafa, who was baptised as Estebancio. He was a Muslim from Azemmur , Morocco . He is the narrator of this story. He sold himself to the Spanish to rescue his family from starving death. First he works in a merchant's home and shop where he meet Ramatullai. She herself was sold as slave . They comfort each other.To pay the credit he was sold to Dorantes who took him to the expedition.

“A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.” 

Though expedition started well, it went downhill once Narvaez decided to part with the ships in search of gold. The expedition suffered with navigational problem, heat, mosquitoes, contagious diseases and above all constant fight with native Indians. Everyone who started the expedition dies within a year except the four  - Cabeza de Vaca , the treasurer, Alonso del Castillo, one of the captains,Dorantes , a nobleman and his slave the narrator Estebancio.

These four joins various tribes and move along the region as the tribes moves. Estebancio learnt their languages. Most of the tribes made them to work very heard for their food.  Due to the groups atrocities during the earlier part of the expedition made, most of the tribes suspicious of these four's actions. Each tribes have their own unique life style. They struggle a lot, being a nobleman, treasurer and captain ,they were not used to these kind of back breaking work but Estebancio quickly learns everything.

The main difference between the three Spaniards and Estebancio was he respected native Indians way of life and did not feel and treated them as inferior . Healing - which started by chance by Estebancio ended up giving them the freedom (from hard work) and fame, which in turn brought them gifts and plenty of food. More importantly they were married to Indian women.

“Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies.” 

Estebancio in her joint report tells their survival tactics, wars between India tribes and description of beautiful landscapes.  It should be noted that it was the greed of Spaniards which brought all the disasters both to themselves as well as to the native Indians. These expeditor's brought all the unknown diseases too.  There were even cannibalism by Spaniards not by the natives in this story. Father Anselmo's character was a memorable one, he was the one who diffused the frictions among the group, he prayed for the death and friendly with everyone irrespective of their tone and behaviour.

Silence taught me to observe. Silence made me invisible to those who speak.

Among the many female characters - Heniya, Mustafa's mother, Ramatalli, slave in the same household and Oyomasot, Mustafa's wife were the one's which I will remember for a long time. Three distinctive characters.

"Everything had already been loved and everything has already been told. If we only listened to the stories."

The author is an excellent storyteller. The writing is fluid, one will not get bored at any point in this story. The language is simple, clear and credible. The narrative is filled with stories and stories within stories. Most of the folk stories were new to me specially "The story of the Embroider and the Sultan" and "Seven Cities of Gold" etc.

Love is like a camel’s hump, for it cannot be disguised

Historically   (Mustafa al-Zamori) Estebanico, a Moroccan slave who was said to be the first African and the first Muslim to cross the American continent. As always the case, no one interested in slave's story and considered as irrelevant, luckily this author gave some, though its a fictional one. In the original report Cabeza de Vaca talks about the slave in only one line " an Arabic-speaking black man, a native of Azemmour".'

The story is authentic,credible and highly entertaining.