by Rebekah Markillie |
My conversation with Laila Lalami started off with laughter and jokes about needing to make coffee. Somehow, by the end, we found ourselves in a discussion of the erasure of minorities’ perspectives.
This seemed telling of Lalami’s way of thinking, finding small instances in everyday life and seeing parallels across history that uncover a larger tendency of human kind.
Lalami is author of “The Moor’s Account,” a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist and this year’s ReadUP book. She will speaking on campus on Feb. 15 at 7 p.m. in Buckley Center Auditorium about her book, and about the intersection between history and fiction that inspires her writing.
Here’s a snapshot of our conversation:
When did you start working on “The Moor’s Account?”
I started working on it in the fall of 2009. It took about four and a half years. It came out in 2014.
Where did you get the idea for this book?
Well, the idea came to me completely by chance. I hadn’t set out to look for ideas to write a book or anything. I was actually reading a book about Moorish history. There was a mention in it of the first black explorer of America who was said to be a Moroccan slave who had been a part of the Narváez expedition. I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute, what do you mean? Why haven’t we heard about this guy before?’ So I decided to get the Chronicles of the Narváez expedition, which is a small book in the Penguin Classic series published in Spain in 1542.
When I read it and found out more about the Narváez expedition, I was completely, completely fascinated because it’s such an epic story. It’s a story of second chances, really. Narváez essentially went all out and got a huge expedition together and landed in Florida in 1527 and just every possible disaster struck him. A lot of things went wrong and there were only four survivors: the writer of the book, two other Spanish noblemen and this Moroccan slave.
When they were rescued many years later, they were asked to provide testimonies about what had happened. The only testimony that was not recorded was the slave’s. That was another thing that fascinated me. That form of erasure felt very modern, very enduring. It’s something I see every day. I see certain perspectives being silenced and others being valued. It really struck me as a very modern story. So that’s where the idea came about, ‘What would it be like to hear the whole story? Would Estebanico’s perspective be different?’
You say that erasure is a modern issue; can you elaborate more on that?
By modern, I guess it’s the way in which we are taught history: that these things happened in this fashion. But many times that history is written by the victors, by the people who get the chance to write about it. It’s selective – but it would be selective anyway because any person who tells a story is making choices. When people are writing history they are promoting a particular narrative about what happened. And so I think it’s sort of inevitable that because of those choices certain perspectives are going to be silenced. When you add on top of that, though, the story of conquest, whenever you add power there’s going to be more of those erasures.
It’s not something you have to travel far and wide to see. You can see it even within the United States. If you look at something like Ferguson, Missouri, when that was unfolding, whose perspectives were we hearing? The people who were on the ground were very frustrated because they felt that what they had to say was not being presented fairly. I think this experience of not being heard, is very much a part of how history is written.
Rebekah Markillie is the design editor for The Beacon. She can be reached at markilli17@up.edu or on Twitter @r_markillie.
