The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami
Introduction to Laila Lalami (lifted from Wikipedia as usual):
Laila Lalami was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her BA in English from Mohammed V University. In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England and completed an MA in Linguistics at University College, London. After graduating, she returned to Morocco and worked briefly as a journalist and commentator. In 1992 she moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California, from which she graduated with a PhD in Linguistics.
Lalami began writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. Her literary criticism, cultural commentary, and opinion pieces have appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. In 2016, she was named both a columnist for The Nation magazine and a critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Her first book, the collection of short stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in 2005. Her second book, the novel Secret Son, was published in 2009 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. The Moor's Account, Lalami's third book, was published by Pantheon Books in September 2014. The novel is told from the perspective of Estebanico (or Estevanico), a Moroccan slave who was part of the ill-fated Narváez expedition, and who later became the first black explorer of America. The Moor's Account won the American Book Award., the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Lalami has received an Oregon Literary Arts grant, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was selected in 2009 by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.
She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
In the following video, Laila Lalami talks about The Moor's Account at the 2016 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
If you want to visit Ms. Lalami's blog, which the interviewer refers to in the above video, click on this link here.
Based on a True Story
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| The Cathedral in Seville |
As she mentioned in the interview, Ms. Lalami structured her story around the facts of the Narvaez expedition as related by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in his statement to King Carlos V of Spain after returning from his adventures. She admits that the timeline of the original doesn't make much sense, but as best can be determined, this is the route that the expedition (and ultimate four survivors) took.
Sorry the red line delineating the route is hard to see. Here's another interpretation of the route showing the Dorantes/Estebanico expedition, the one in which Estebanico was reported to have been killed.
In 1990, a joint Spanish/Mexican movie was released about the ill-fated journey, which I have long believed had been nominated for a "Best Foreign Language Film" Academy Award, but apparently I was wrong. Be that as it may, it was one of my favorite movies from that era. Here are the first eight minutes of it that I was able to find on YouTube.
And just because Mustafa (AKA Estebanico) never made it back to Azzemour, I thought I'd take you back to where it all might have begun.
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| Azzemour Old City — photo by Ggia |
