Commentary presented by Miriam Gershow, Novelist & Associate Director of Composition, Department of English
I come to The Moor’s Account as a novelist, so my expertise is in fiction writing. What I’m most interested in is the part of the story that was not shaped by the historical record but instead came straight from Laila Lalami’s imagination—Mustafa’s back story and characterization, and how it undergirds the larger structure of the book. In this scene, we have the start of a series of choices that will lead to Mustafa’s slavery. We have a character who turns away from family and tradition and spirituality. And importantly, we have a self-implicating character, an active participant in the same dehumanizing system that will soon dehumanize him. This participation in the system of capital and market leads to his eventual, insurmountable debt and his selling himself into slavery to spare his family.
My main question here was why make this choice? Why create a slave who is self-implicating? Yes, there is the basic precept in fiction that flawed characters are the most realistic and multi-dimensional. But I would argue that the very condition of Mustafa’s situation—the Muslim slave forced into the Christian conquistadors conquest of New Spain—is a situation already rife with dimensionality. He could have had any number of different backstories. On his passage on the slave ship from Morocco to Spain, Lalami nods to all other sorts of backstories. Michael Najjar will be looking at this passage more closely, so I will only highlight the few sentences in which Mustafa accounts for the other slaves shackled around them, “a great number of them…indentured themselves for no money, only the promise of a meal a day…whether we were abducted or traded, whether we were sold or sold ourselves, we all climbed onto that ship.”
Given that Lalami could have credibly built Mustafa’s present action circumstance out of any of those back stories, without losing any of the reader sympathy or alignment—in fact one could argue that a backstory of abduction or having been born into abject poverty would likely have only increased reader sympathy or alignment—why Mustafa’s complicity in the very economic system that would enslave him? Surely it is not so we hold Mustafa responsible for his own enslavement. That is a morally reprehensible stance, and it is reasonable to assume that any reader, regardless of a particular character’s backstory, is not going to think any character “deserves” enslavement.
Okay, so why? It turns out that my answer ties into my second big question about the book—in what ways does Mustafa’s story map onto or complicate Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” monomyth? Very briefly, this monomyth maps the archetypal hero’s journey and is often how we conceive of the three act structure of modern story—act one or rising action is the call to action from the hero’s known to unknown world; act two is the journey over the threshold into the unknown world, featuring the hero’s symbolic death and rebirth; act three is the denouement or period of the hero’s transformation and atonement with his final return to the known world with his newfound “gift of the goddess,” as Campbell put it, or his newfound power.
What is especially compelling about Mustafa in this three-act structure is that he is both hero and slave. So there can be no act one for him. He cannot be “called to action.” He cannot cross any threshold willingly. He has no threshold guardian or mentors or helpers, as Campbell conceives of them. And yet, once we go from the known world of Morocco and even Spain to the unknown world of La Florida and beyond, the story very much begins to read like the archetypal hero’s, given all the near-deaths from the elements and the fever and the Indians and symbolic deaths—Mustafa’s rebirth from slave to medicine man, from non-entity to person with a story, to leader of disciples and followers.
But perhaps the most interesting collision of the slave narrative and the hero narrative, though, comes in act three, the return to the known world with the “gift from the goddess” or new power. The literal return comes when Mustafa inadvertently leads the four survivors of the Narvaez expedition back into empire in Mexico, where they meet up with Castilian slavers. Here, there is the collision between the hero and the slave. Whatever hope Mustafa had that his reversals from slave to free man were real—whatever hopes the reader also had—empire squashes these hopes. Mustafa returns not to his known world with new powers, but rather back to a servility to Dorantes, one of the other three survivors and his original owner. The return has been to empire. And empire could only conceive of Mustafa as Estebanico or the slave. The best he could hope for was to be treated well by his owner, but he was to be owned.
And in this act, act three, I finally came to my answer about Mustafa’s backstory and why his complicity in act one is necessary. Mustafa, pre-enslavement, was beguiled by empire just as the conquistadors were. He was so beguiled by the forces of empire, he could shirk his allegiance to family and spirituality and tradition and culture as we heard in the passage I selected. The only thing that distinguished him from his Spanish counterparts was that the forces of nature and colonialism made it so he was not as successful in his venturing into empire.
This becomes key to Mustafa’s transformation in act three. It turns out that his real transformation is not from slave to medicine man. His real transformation—one that was only possible because of his backstory—was from belief in empire to rejection of empire and all the greed and imperialism and dehumanization that came with it. And his return to the known world does not become a return to Morocco as he so longed for throughout the entire journey, but a return to freedom and his name and love and a life with his wife and coming child. It is the return to family and tradition that he was unable to make in Morocco. After he has tricked his way out of the grasp of the Spaniards, with his pregnant Indian wife, Oyomasot, with plans to return to her Indian village, he says in the closing pages, “This moment was perfect. It was all I had, and it was everything. I did not care for all the gifts that had been given to me along the way to Hawikuh-lapis, coral, turquoises by the purseload, pelts and furs. All I wanted with the freedom to lie here in the tall grass, under a darkening sky, with my wife beside me.”
My students have been studying this book for the past two weeks, and as is so often the case with teaching, they are the ones who crystallized my understanding of Campbell’s final heroic element, the “elixir” or newfound power Mustafa brought with him into the final return. So I am going to credit their ideas here. Stella Park said that Mustafa’s super power was his storytelling, which is what allowed him not only to humanize himself with his captors along the way, but to escape them with his story of being dead, and finally it is what gave him this story for his unborn child within the text and for us readers outside of it. Diane Amadon said that Mustafa was peerless among the survivors of Narvaez’s expedition in the way he came to reject empire. So liberation is his newfound power.
This holds true, both within the book and outside of it. We see the Castilians sliding even further into greed by the end of the book. And we know that it is Cabeza de Vaca who controls the actual historical record of this journey and without a trace of self-implication or culpability. Mustafa alone internalizes a new value system that privileges love, freedom, god and family. This heroic transformation around empire, even though it is a fictional hero and fictional transformation, manages to bring the actual historical record into new relief. That would not have been possible without the slaver turned slave turned free man.
-Miriam Gershow, Novelist & Associate Director of Composition, Department of English
Commentary presented by Elizabeth Bohls, Professor & Associate Department Head, Department of English
The bathhouse where the narrator, Mustafa, and his Castilian companions wash off the grime of their wanderings is located in Compostela, the first town where they and their Indian wives are taken after meeting a group of Spaniards near an “outpost at the border of the empire.” As you'll recall, they had been traveling from band to band of the local Indians, healing the sick and receiving hospitality and gifts. This was a welcome change from their earlier status, after the many disasters of the Narvaez expedition, as near-beggars dependent on the Indians’ generosity. The four men are among the very few survivors of this massive expedition, which came to grief eight years earlier because of its leader's obsessive greed for gold. Now they’re starting the process of re-integration into the Spanish Empire, which will dramatically change Mustafa’s situation.
The bath, shave and haircut becomes a symbolic transformation. Its connotations of spiritual as well as physical cleansing and renewal take on an ironic edge for Mustafa, who feels profound guilt at the fate of their Indian entourage—“penned in the horse run at Culiacán, like lambs for the slaughter of Eid,” destined to be enslaved by the Spanish. The Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac if God commands it. Mustafa and his companions have unwittingly sacrificed their Indian followers to the demands of the Spanish Empire (though the more sophisticated imperialists of the colonial capital will hypocritically disavow slavery and insist that the Indians are willingly becoming “civilized”).
Mustafa himself, as he’ll gradually realize, will also be re-enslaved. His relationship with his Castilian master Dorantes has been transformed, Mustafa believes, over their years of wandering together: “he and I had shared so much danger and so many hardships…A feeling of fellowship…bound us together now,” he says (253). But after he’s repeatedly asked Dorantes to go with him to a notary and formalize his freedom, and repeatedly been put off, Mustafa comes to realize that Dorantes, now that he’s back in his Castilian environment, has no intention of giving up his valuable human property. We get a hint of that in this scene: Mustafa raises the question and it’s implicitly answered when, after his bath and haircut, Dorantes “looked like all the other Spaniards.”
The beautifully realized sensory details of the bathhouse scene capture Mustafa’s reaction to this return to the material comforts of European civilization. “What a miracle an iron basin was! Warm water embraced me ….” His “Castilian companions” are similarly elated. The rising steam recalls Mustafa’s name for the ocean they crossed to get to the New World: “the Ocean of Fog and Darkness.” He’s cleansed of the accumulated dirt of his long journey through Indian territory; however, a different kind of obscurity seems to cloud Mustafa’s situation at this point, or at least his perception of it. He’s justifiably concerned about his future. More than that, though, he’s unsure of his very identity in these new surroundings: “what about me in all of this? . . . [W]ho was I in New Spain?” He’s worried about his relationship with Dorantes, but the existential crisis of this moment goes beyond that. Looking in the mirror, Mustafa sees “a stranger.”
The Moor’s Account is a powerful story of travel and transformation. Mustafa’s life begins on a barge in the middle of a river in Morocco. His mother tells him the story of his birth, saying it means that he’s destined for a life of travel. From Morocco to Seville, across the Ocean of Fog and Darkness to Florida; around and about the Gulf of Mexico and present-day Texas; all the way to Mexico City, the capital of the Spanish colonies, and north again into Indian territory: Mustafa’s eventful life takes him from the Old World to the New, from freedom to enslavement, from abject misery to relative prosperity, contentment, and something like freedom. All this is before his chance encounter with the representatives of the Empire—heralded by a shard of Castilian glass in the wilderness—leads to this penultimate transformation back into a slave. I say “penultimate,” not final: those of you who’ve finished the book know that his trickster maneuvers finally secure Mustafa’s and Oyomasot’s escape back to her people, the Avavares.
By narrating the story previously published in Cabeza de Vaca’s version from the point of view of Mustafa, the “Moor,” Laila Lalami has imagined a Muslim outsider’s perspective on the first Christian empire in the Americas. Unburdened by the conquistadors’ loyalty to the Castilian crown and their obsessive greed for gold, but empowered by his love for his lost family and his belief in the power of stories, Mustafa as narrator is able to produce a richly insightful take on the intercultural encounters, power relations, violence, and fertile hybridity of what one critic has called the contact zone of colonialism and empire. This is Mary Louise Pratt in her classic study entitled Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. She defines the contact zone as “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (8).
Lalami recreates the contact zone where colonizing Europeans and indigenous North Americans met in conditions of radical inequality—because the Spanish had horses and guns—and ongoing coercion. As Mustafa says, “They force people to till the land and those who refuse or fight them are branded rebels and killed” (319). We see the Spanish colonists using hundreds of Indian workers on their estates or encomiendas, one of which Dorantes marries into when he abandons his Indian wife, Tekotsen, and their child for a rich Spanish widow. Mustafa meets Hernan Cortés, conqueror of Tenochtitlán and Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, who sends him as a guide and interpreter on an expedition, led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. So the book begins and ends with Spanish conquistadors marching off into the North American interior in pursuit of nonexistent riches.
Meanwhile Mustafa, the African Muslim outsider, is able to slip away from Coronado and his friars (and their Aztec henchmen, the so-called “Amigos”) to an idyllic Indian town, Hawikuh, that reminds him of his hometown in Barbary. Oyomasot is pregnant with their child, the “promise of a new life,” and Mustafa is once again free, as he triumphantly proclaims: “free no matter what happened next, and a feeling of tranquility settled over me” (317). The happy ending is a relief after the fairly grim events of their sojourn in the Spanish American empire. However, we know that the contact zone is moving inexorably northward, and even the more remote tribes won't escape forever from the European diseases that we glimpsed earlier in the book. We might want to talk about what it means for the novel to position Mustafa in this way with the indigenous, nomadic Native Americans, having him find his freedom and happiness outside the contact zone of empire.
-Elizabeth Bohls, Professor & Associate Department Head, Department of English