What’s in the name?

So strives 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Lila Lalami to answer in her gripping semi-autobiography of Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al Zamori or as later renamed by his Spanish owners, Estebanico. And sometimes just “the black”. Lalami challenges normative history by retelling the voyage of the 1527 Narváez Expedition from the perspective of who is assumed to be the first African slave in America.

During the 16th century, a crew of 600 men sailed from Spain to the Gulf Coast of the New World in romanticized hopes of veiled self glory to claim “La Florida” and all the prestige that comes with it for the Spanish crown. Amongst this crew is Estebanico, swept along as a servant for Andrés de Dorantes making him one of only four survivors by the end of this tragic odyssey.

The Moor’s Account, however is not only a story of the turmoil of slavery. It meticulously captures the roller coaster of emotions when thrown into the unknown alone, and the anxious, often catastrophic encounters, between the white Spanish conquistadors, the only black Moorish slave, and the Indigenous people of the New World. Very early on, one can sense a moralistic exploration that drives the story, clothed with lessons of Mustafa’s elders, the passing of oral history in nostalgia for a lost home, and transcendence through the spiritual teachings of faith and nature.