The Moor's Account

Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account is a historical novel centered on the life of Mustafa Azemmouri—a real historical figure about whom almost nothing is known. In Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of the disastrous Narváez expedition, a single line acknowledges Azemmouri’s existence, calling him by the name his enslaver imposed upon him: “The fourth [survivor] is Estebanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor.” Other information about Azemmouri—including his real name, the identities of his parents, and the people who enslaved him—was pieced together from contemporary records. He is believed to be the first African explorer to see the Americas, but his status as an enslaved person means there is very little information about him, and all of it comes from people who showed little interest in faithfully representing his experience. Lalami thus aims to use fiction to give Azemmouri a voice and a chance to tell his own story.

When the Spanish explorer Pánfilo de Narváez set out for the “new world,” he had a mandate to claim the Gulf Coast for the Spanish crown, and he was in command of approximately 600 men. Nine years later, only four members of this original crew remained alive. Narváez’s ill-informed and impulsive aggression toward the first Indigenous communities they met doomed the crew: Attempting to conquer a group of Apalachee people and exploit their resources, they soon found themselves outnumbered and decimated by retaliatory attacks. They headed west, their numbers steadily dwindling due to disease, starvation, and fights with Indigenous groups. By the time the four survivors reached Mexico City in 1536, they had traveled on foot from what is now Tampa Bay, Florida, across the entire Gulf Coast, becoming the first non-Indigenous people to see the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. They had lived among several Indigenous groups, their social roles within this complex network of societies shifting from servant to healer to leader. One of the four survivors, Cabeza de Vaca, wrote an account of these years called La relación (The Story). Published in 1542, this account became the first written description of the peoples and landscapes of inland North America.

In fictionalizing the life of Mustafa Azemmouri, Lalami supposes that during these years of wandering, he found freedom not available to him in the European world. As the power structures of that world become increasingly distant, Lalami’s Mustafa sets out to write his own story—one in which he is not Estebanico but Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, a name that signifies his family and his birthplace. In the act of storytelling, he reclaims ownership of both his past and his future.