The Moor's Account

8.
 
The Story of Seville
 
All around me, voices rose and fell. Shackled slaves spoke in an overlapping multitude of languages, this one asking after an uncle, this other comforting a child, and yet these others arguing about a piece of moldy bread, their cries periodically interrupted by the bleating of goats from the animal stalls. But for a long time, I kept to my silence, wrapping myself in it like an old, comfortable cloak. I think I was still trying to apprehend the consequences of what I had done. For hours on end, I revisited the long sequence of events that had led me from the soft divans and rhythmic guenbris of my graduation feast to the timber bench and jangling chains of the caravel Jacinta, sailing with frightening speed toward the city of Seville. I had played my part in these events I had made my decisions freely and independently at each juncture, and yet I was stunned by the turn my life had taken. The elders teach us: give glory to God, who can alter all fates. One day you could be selling slaves, the next you could be sold as a slave.
 
The hunger I had felt so keenly in Azemmur was tamed now, if not satisfied, by the hard bread the sailors distributed once a day, though it was quickly replaced by a renewed acquaintance with all of my body s other senses and needs. My head itched from the lice my neighbor, an old man with pockmarks dotting his face, had given me. My soiled clothes stuck to my skin, because I could not bring myself to use, on command and with little notice, the bucket that was passed up and down the gallery twice a day. My limbs grew stiff from sitting in damp and narrow quarters. My throat hurt, my feet swelled, my wrists bled. Above all, my heart ached with longing for my family.
 
My family. They had, all of them, learned to accept their fates. Without complaint my sister had spent her girlhood watching over our twin brothers, and without protest she had returned home

Laila Lalami is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and the novel Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize long list. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, and The New York Times, and in many anthologies. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Residency Fellowship and is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

www.lailalalami.com

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book MAN BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of the Year An NPR Great Read of the Year A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year

An exciting tale of wild hopes, divided loyalties, and highly precarious fortunes. The New Yorker

An absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth. Salman Rushdie

Stunning. . . . The Moor s Account sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn t make history. Huffington Post
 
Lalami has once again shown why she is one of her generation s most gifted writers. Reza Aslan, author of Zealot

Compelling. . . . Necessary. . . . Laila Lalami s mesmerizing The Moor s Account presents us a historical fiction that feels something like a plural totality . . . a narrative that braids points of view so intricately that they become one even as we re constantly reminded of the separate and often contrary strands that render the whole. The Los Angeles Review of Books

Richly rewarding. NPR

A bold and exhilarating bid to give a real-life figure muzzled by history the chance to have his say in fiction. San Francisco Chronicle

[A] rich novel based on an actual, ill-fated 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida. . . . Offers a pungent alternative history that muses on the ambiguous power of words to either tell the truth or reshape it according to our desires. Los Angeles Times

Estebanico is a superb storyteller, capable of sensitive character appraisals and penetrating ethnographic detail. The Wall Street Journal

Feels at once historical and contemporary. . . . For Lalami,