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The Power of Stories

No one believes that all news is unbiased, but most people do believe in the modern

historical record. However, all things were news once, and many accounts in the modern record

are just as biased as our own news––even more so, considering there was no internet back then to

make outright lying more difficult. “History is written by the victors” is a quote commonly

misattributed to Winston Churchill, showing how nebulous the past can be. In the end, everyone

is defined by the story written down, so throughout history, privileged groups wrote the narrative

to erase others and ease themselves. However, stories can humanise as well as erase, and the

author of The Moor’s Account exposes and counteracts the intergenerational damage that

previous, written accounts have caused.

One example of a powerful and damaging story in history is Cabeza de Vaca’s account of

the first Spanish expedition in North America. He frames the company’s actions to suit his

audience, the Catholic Church and Spanish crown, and his own goals, ignoring the damage done

in the process. He frames the narrative into an ideal, God granted Garden of Eden-esque

discovery of the New World. He and the other explorers give names to the land and towns, as in

“la Florida” (Lalami, 5) and the animals, as in “el Lagarto” (Lalami, 18), just as Adam and Eve

are instructed to do in the Bible. However, unlike in the Bible, the Castilians aren’t naming

things––they’re renaming them. They erase the Native Americans’ words for all of these things,

and the culture that came with them, in history and today, seeing as the land is still called Florida

and the animal alligator in most languages. Cabeza de Vaca’s religious framing of their

expedition serves to morally justify it, erasing the natives’ claim to the land while making the

explorers into religious icons. Similarly, the Muslim slave the Spanish explorers brought with

them, Mustafa, is only ever named as “Mustafa” (Cabeza de Vaca, 123) once in Cabeza de
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Vaca’s account. Despite his story existing in many folk tales and the writings of other slaves in

the United States, his story was nearly lost to modern history because Cabeza de Vaca barely

mentioned him––and because modern history greatly favours the writings of notable white men

over slaves. He is but another example of Spanish tyranny; they christened him as Estebanico,

which, like the Garden of Eden framing of their exploration, is just a religious moral justification

for something immoral. In Mustafa’s case, his enslavement was necessary for his conversion

which, in the Pope’s (and thus the Castilians’) eyes, meant they saved his soul and thus all else

was forgiven.

Their presumptive attitudes relied on two sources of power, the same sources of power

influencing Cabeza de Vaca’s account: the legal practices of Spain and the teachings of the

Catholic Church. Legally, after reading the Requisition, the Castilians could claim right to the

land, whether or not the Native Americans were present, agreed, or understood it. Thus, Cabeza

de Vaca carefully details that the proper processes were followed (Cabeza de Vaca, 11). Morally,

the Native Americans were heathens and sinners in the eyes of the Church, just as Mustafa had

been before his conversion. The Castilians had to at least attempt to convert the natives to

Christianity and destroy their heathen idols to justify their work; however, if the natives refused,

the Castilians were free to do whatever. To reassure the Church, Cabeza de Vaca frequently

mentions the explorers’ many thanks to God, for His delivering them to a new village (Cabeza de

Vaca, 20) or to food sources (Cabeza de Vaca, 26) and so on. He also feigns a reverence for the

Native Americans, naming one of the chiefs the explorers had wanted information from,

“Dulchanchellin” (Cabeza de Vaca, 19). However, what tells is the absence of any other names

for any other Native Americans referenced in the first half of the novel, before the expedition

went awry. All the other natives are referred to as savages; either Cabeza de Vaca never found
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out their names or didn’t think them important enough to write down, but either way, he erased

them from history by doing so. Naming the Native Americans, such as those taken captive,

would also humanise them to his audience, and by refusing that, Cabeza de Vaca makes them an

inhuman enemy and builds more sympathy for his expedition. His censorship paid off, as the

Church and Spanish crown both looked upon him favourably. However, what worked out for

him in the short term didn’t fare as favourably for the Native Americans in the long run. The

Europeans brutalised the Native Americans and treated them as subhumans; even today, this

view persists, as natives are forced to live on reservations with a comparatively lower quality of

life than other in the United States. While Cabeza de Vaca’s account isn’t solely to blame for this

biased view, it was one part of why the Europeans saw the Native Americans as they did,

sending ripple effects throughout history and harming the natives’ descendants as well.

Today, authors look to change the erasure of the past, painting the characters in it with

the right colours––which includes both the Native Americans and the Europeans. Lalami wrote

The Moor’s Account to do exactly that, using more detail than Cabeza de Vaca to solidify the

events and characters of the past. Lalami begins by calling out the Castilians’ hidden actions in

the New World. For instance, both accounts note the capturing of a few Native Americans, of

which Cabeza de Vaca writes only, “we showed them maize to see if they recognised it… they

told us that they would take us to their village” (Cabeza de Vaca, 13). In Lalami’s story, Narvaez

cruelly tortures the captives for information about the location of gold. Another example of this

was Apalache’s discovery, with Cabeza de Vaca saying, we “found only women and children,

for the men were not in the town at the time… [Later] they returned and began to attack us [and

eventually fled]… we found a large quantity of maize… deerskins, and among them a few of the

woven blankets” (Cabeza de Vaca, 21). He describes little of the battle itself or the night spent
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holding the women captive, but Lalami adds information the reader could assume––that the men

raped the women. She writes, “some soldiers were dragging women out of the earth mound. The

women clawed at the men’s faces and pulled their beards, but the men easily restrained them”

(Lalami, 93). Even though a reader could surmise the subtext of Cabeza de Vaca’s account, by

writing it down Lalami adds the event to history. And it’s not just the Castilians she details.

Lalami mentions many of the nice things the Native Americans did for the group without asking

for much in return, but she goes further. Cabeza de Vaca’s account may leave the details out so

the company can more easily forget their own suffering, but Lalami leaves nothing to the

imagination. Instead, her retelling serves to humanise the Native Americans by showing some of

their brutality; clearly to her modern audience, Native Americans were not simply demonic

heathens, but she points out they were not all angels, either. In particular, she mentions the

Carancahua, who killed two of the company and later turned on Mustafa and the remaining

Castilians. She says, “the tasks that, a few weeks earlier, would have guaranteed [Mustafa and

the Castilians] a good meal now seemed to assure [them] only that [they] would not be kicked or

beaten… what started out as indifference developed into such intense hostility and violence that

[the company] did not dare disobey [the natives]” (Lalami 205-6). Lalami treats the natives not

as demons nor as martyrs, but as humans. Overall, although her details are largely fictionalised

and unprovable, as they weren’t in the actual account, thanks to their believability, her account is

in some ways more historical than Cabeza de Vaca’s.

Going on, Lalami uses Mustafa as a neutral party, both to reveal the Castilians’ true

motives and as a reader surrogate and witness. She compares the Castilians against the Muslim

Mustafa, who answers only to God, unlike the Castilians who answer to human infrastructures of

power. This preserves Mustafa’s credibility as an unbiased story teller, at least when describing
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the actions of the Castilians (or Native Americans); it also emphasises the Castilians’ feigned

reverence for God (when the real reverence is for the Catholic Church and the Pope). Thus,

through Mustafa, Lalami criticises the Castilians for giving, “new names to everything around

them, as though they were the All-Knowing God in the Garden of Eden” (Lalami, 18). She also

emphasises a name’s importance, carrying “inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a

particular way of looking at the world” (Lalami, 7). For this reason, Mustafa only ever names

four things: God, himself, the “Ocean of Fog and Darkness” (Lalami, 5) and the land. Even here,

however, he pays tribute to the natives calling it “the Land of the Indians” (Lalami, 5), after his

own culture’s naming traditions. He is also juxtaposed against the Castilians as a slave forced to

the Americas, and once he is solidified as a trustable person, he begins acting as the reader

surrogate––an intermediary between the Native Americans and Europeans. Mustafa often does

not or cannot take part in the action, just as the reader cannot, but he remains a witness to the

events of the novel and thus the reader does as well. Lalami shows how the reader should feel

about their role by describing Mustafa’s reactions. For instance, when the Castilians rape the

native women, the women raise a “chorus of drums,” further describing it as “a communion of

pain… no one in the city could pretend not to have heard it. The women had made witnesses of

[Mustafa and the Castilians], even those of [them] who had chosen to close [their] eyes” (94).

She asserts the reader could do as the Castilians do, close their eyes and the book and ignore the

human suffering of the past, but that doing so does nothing, changes nothing. Similarly, Mustafa

thinks on how “all along, [he’d] told [himself] that [he] did not have a choice… that [his]

redemption could only come from some force outside of [him]” (131). As the reader surrogate,

his realisation extends to the reader as well; every reader, especially those living in the United

States but also those living outside of it, in some way benefits from the destruction of Native
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American culture and lives. Redemption for this selfish benefit, Lalami through Mustafa asserts,

comes not from expecting others to take action, but from taking actions independently.

Even more, Lalami, as a Muslim woman who immigrated to the United States, has her

own personal motivations for finding and retelling the story of the first Muslim person’s

experiences in the New World. In a way, Mustafa is a spiritual ancestor to Lalami, and while

their lives differ greatly––for starters, she came to the United States willingly––both of them

expect to face some hostility once they arrive. In the beginning, Mustafa supposes, “what each of

us wants, in the end, whether he is black or white, master or slave, rich or poor, man or woman,

is to be remembered after his death. I am no different” (Lalami, 4-5). This is Lalami’s voice

reaching through Mustafa to the reader, this is what she later calls “truth in the guise of

entertainment” (5) where she hopes her novel imparts more on its reader than a more accurate

telling of history. In the end, Mustafa finds himself happy, even in a land where he had to give

up his own language, culture, traditions and family, thanks to his wife and to “the faint heartbeat

of [his] child… It seemed to [him] as if the entire world were speaking to [him], telling [him]

that [he] was free now, free no matter what happened next” (317). To Mustafa, his new child

means everything. Lalami does not mean that everyone must have a child to be happy, but rather

that children are a means of passing on one’s story, and of making a lasting impact on the world.

Writing is likewise an effective way to pass on one’s story, and both Lalami and Mustafa engage

in it.

In conclusion, stories are powerful, and their authors are even more so. Cabeza de Vaca’s

account shows how much an author can skew a narrative to fit their own goals, which Lalami

makes obvious for her own reader through the eyes of Mustafa, who she establishes as an

unbiased person and reader surrogate. Where Cabeza de Vaca erases and ignores parts of the
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expedition, Lalami adds in the details readers could only assume before; she writes how the

Europeans treated the Native Americans when they were in power, and she writes how some of

the Native Americans treated the Europeans when they were in power, to represent both sides as

completely and humanly as possible. While Cabeza de Vaca’s account intended to keep its

author in good standing with multiple power structures, it ignored the many possible ways it

could leave a lasting impact on the Native Americans, both intergenerationally and in the eyes of

the Europeans who view them as no more than an obstacle to overcome. Lalami’s novel seeks to

right the past, to humanise those in it and to write as truthfully as possible, to fix some of the

damage accounts like Cabeza de Vaca’s have done. She also hopes to awaken the reader into

realising their place in this history as someone who benefited from it, and to find her own place

as someone linked to her own main character. She shows that while “history is written by the

victors,” it can be rewritten, too.