Another book from my Christmas wish list read and enjoyed! And this is a marvellous and very moving story. Although I tend mentally to sniff a little at ‘historical fiction’ I suppose I actually do read and enjoy quite a lot of it: genre labels are often unhelpful..
Last summer, on my travels, one of the books I listened to in the car was The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, an account written by a Spanish nobleman of eight years he spent lost, with three companions, wandering around the area that is now Florida, Texas and Mexico, in the company of various native tribes. One of the three companions was the Moorish slave of one of the other three Spaniards; he merits a single line in the narrative, and it’s from this that Laila Lalami has crafted her novel: what would Estebanico the slave have made of the journey, the Spaniards, the natives, his experiences?
Historical novels are limited – obviously – by the facts and details that are known and cannot be changed, which means that the creative efforts of a writer are differently directed: perhaps plot is not so important, because circumscribed by actual events and people; tension and suspense are rather more difficult to make use of when the eventual outcome may be known. Instead, a writer may focus more on empathy, on fleshing out events, characters and their responses to them, bringing them to life, and out of the history books, as it were.
The Moor’s Account is narrated from the viewpoint of an outsider from both worlds: neither conquistador nor native American, he becomes curious and perhaps impartial observer of both, yet with his own personal story and agenda: the plot is initially structured from two interwoven strands as his backstory is imagined alongside his sea journey to the Americas; what he wants above all is to be able to return home, a free man.
Lalami is of Moroccan-American origin, and has read and used some of my favourite travellers (Ibn Battuta and Leo Africanus) as background source material; her novel joins others which explore interaction between West and East, Christian and Moslem at this interesting time in world history, such as Amin Maalouf‘s Leo The African, for example, or which seek to give Westerners insight into the rich life of the Muslim world, such as Gilbert Sinoué’s Avicenne (only available in French, as far as I know). I enjoy these insights into the world from different perspectives; I know I’m reading novels, which are perhaps primarily entertainment, but I find it heartening to find common links of humanity between peoples, races and religions when so many nowadays want to convince us we are alien to each other… and yet, the small, sceptical part of me also wonders if there is not some romanticising of the past lives and interactions between Christian and Muslim worlds? In the end, however, what we share must surely outweigh the ways in which we differ.
Estebanico inevitably observes and interprets the world he sees in a different way from his Spanish masters; sometimes this is helpful to them all, but at others, it seems to him, brings disaster. All four are inevitably shaped and changed by their experiences in various ways – some learn from them and others do not. And our hero, in the end, is torn between his yearning for his home, family and community back in Africa, and the new life and possibilities which gradually reveal themselves to him in the Americas. My final response was also modulated by the realisation (which a historical novel can give) that he throws in his lot with a native people who are ultimately doomed by historical inevitability. It’s a slow, subtle and very powerful read.
