The empire writes back: The Moor's Account's decolonial appropriation of Cabeza de Vaca's La Relación

The article explores the aesthetic and stylistic strategies by which Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account (2014) decolonises alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle La Relacion (1542) and hence writes back to the Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth century. Cabeza de Vaca's account of the doomed Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to the New World centres on 'peaceful conversion', that is, the pacification of the natives so the Spanish conquistadors need no force to crack down the 'hostile' indigenous peoples. Responding to the silencing of the colonised peoples, particularly 'el Negro Arabe' Mustafa/Estebanico (Estevanico or Esteban), The Moor's Account not only gives voice to the oppressed filtered through the protagonist Mustafa's first-person narration, but also introduces the reader to the history of colonialism in Morocco in the sixteenth century. This article draws on the postcolonial theorisation of the terms 'writing back' and 'decolonisation', that is, literature written by authors from the colonised countries to respond to the colonising countries' falsifications and misrepresentations. Specifically, this article analyses how The Moor's Account creatively reconstructs and thus responds to La Relacion by additions, re-readings, re-interpretations, experimentations to combat the Spanish chronicler's discourse on colonialism, racism, gender and European cultural and religious superiority over the colonised natives.

Automated summary

This article examines how Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account creatively reconstructs and decolonizes alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle La Relacion through innovative storytelling techniques, giving voice to the oppressed and challenging the dominant narrative of Spanish colonialism.