Laila Lalami · 2014 · survival

Laila Lalami's 2014 novel, a Pulitzer finalist. Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle of the Narvaez disaster gives its fourth survivor one line: an Arab Negro from Azamor. Lalami writes the memoir he was never asked for - Mustafa al-Zamori, sold into slavery by his own hand to feed his family, and the first African to cross North America.

1. 1
   Azemmour

   A merchant's son on the Moroccan coast, trading well until famine and the Portuguese ruin the town - and he sells himself into slavery to keep his mother and brothers alive, which is a decision the book never lets him forget.

2. 2
   Seville

   Sold on in Spain to Andres Dorantes, who renames him Estebanico because Mustafa is not a name a Christian household will use - and the erasure the whole novel is written to undo begins with that.

3. 3
   Santo Domingo

   The expedition crosses to Hispaniola, where a third of the men desert before it has even started - a warning about Narvaez that everybody sees and nobody acts on.

4. 4
   Havana

   Cuba, hurricanes, and months lost to bad decisions - and then six hundred men sail for a Florida they have been told is full of gold, with a commander who cannot be argued with.

5. 5
   Tampa Bay

   Narvaez lands and marches inland, sending the ships away - and Mustafa, who speaks several languages and is not consulted, watches the expedition separate itself from its own supplies and never see them again.

6. 6
   Galveston Island

   After rafts built from hides and horse-hair, the survivors wash up on a Texas island where most of the rest die in the winter - and the four who are left become slaves of the people who found them.

7. 7
   South Texas

   Years among the Karankawa and others, and the transformation the book is really about: master and slave stop being different things, and a Moroccan slave becomes the healer whose word the party depends on.

8. 8
   Sonora

   West and south with crowds of people walking behind them, four men who are now something between doctors and saints - until they meet Spanish slave-catchers taking the very people who had fed them.

9. 9
   Mexico City

   The three Spaniards are asked to give an account and Mustafa is not - so he gives his own, correcting what they left out, and then quietly declines to return to the life the empire has planned for him.