An Interview with Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account was called a “brilliant imagined fiction” by Salman Rushdie.

Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, longlisted for the Orange Prize; and, most recently, The Moor’s Account, a New York Times Notable Book and a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, and in many anthologies. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

To read an excerpt from The Moor’s Account, a retelling of the voyage of Cabeza de Vaca from the viewpoint of a Moroccan slave who became the first black person to explore America, plus an exercise on writing dialogue without listeners, click here.

In this interview, Lalami discusses the challenges of creating 16th century characters and a 16th century mode of writing and the difference that POV makes on framing a narrative.

Michael Noll

One of the wonderful moments in the first chapter is the realization that the characters have no word for the alligator that just attacked one of them. The Spanish explorers are described as giving out names as if they were “the All-Knowing God in the Garden of Eden.” Yet they don’t seem to take any joy in this act. After the alligator attack, the governor declares that “this animal…would be called El Lagarto because it looked like a giant lizard.” His declaration is so unimaginative, so lacking in awe—it was really unexpected. How did you approach creating the characters of the lead explorers? 

Laila Lalami

It was a difficult task for me, as I had never written about historical figures before and had no idea where to start. I used the basic facts that we have about the Narváez expedition as constraints on the story; that is, I knew the what, the when, and the how of the story. But I gave myself complete freedom with the who and the why. So I tried to approach these characters as I would any other, which is to say with as much imaginative empathy as I could. When Dorantes, Castillo, and Cabeza de Vaca land in Florida, they want to find the gold, of course, but they also see themselves as noble men, men who are serving a greater good. Cabeza de Vaca, in particular, is an idealist. Dorantes is more pragmatic, while Castillo is young and impulsive, and gets swept up in this adventure because he wants to emulate his older brother.

Michael Noll

I’m also curious about your approach to the narrator, Mustafa al-Zamori, a Moroccan slave who belongs to one of the explorers. They call him by his new, Christian name, Estebanico, which makes al-Zamori feel “that this Estebanico was a man conceived by the Castilians, quite different from the man I really was.” What a cool, complex way to create a character—a person working with two lenses on the world, the authentic one and the given one! Did this duality allow you to do things with the narrator that would have been difficult if his name had simply been al-Zamori?

Laila Lalami

In The Moor’s Account, according to a New York Times review, “Lalami wants us to understand that storytelling is a religious act.”

This is exactly what attracted me to the story. This Moroccan man, whose identity had been taken from him and replaced with a new one, was part of a Spanish expedition that was about to do the same thing to indigenous people in America. His perspective was narratively intriguing and exciting for me. As Estebanico/Mustafa tells the story of the Narváez expedition, we get to see the facts as they happen, as the conquistadors frame them, and as he interprets them.

Michael Noll

There’s a great scene early in the book when the explorers capture some of the first indigenous people they meet. Don Pánfilo believes that he can communicate with them even though he’s never set foot in Florida and doesn’t speak their language.  A character says about him, “But he has a lot of experience with the savages. He can make himself understood quite well by them, and he rarely fails to obtain the facts he seeks.” Of course, then Don Pánfilo proceeds to whip the Indians in order to make them talk. I’m struck by not only the sheer evil of the scene but also its absurdity. It’s funny, in a weird, dark way. Was it difficult to find the right tone for details like that?

Laila Lalami

No. And I think the reason is that this particular mix of violence, absurdity, and a touch of humor is something that I see all the time when I read the news, particularly the news relating to America’s adventures in the Middle East.

Michael Noll

I’ve read Cabeza de Vaca’s accounts of his travels, and while I enjoyed them for their adventures, I also found myself dulled a little by the distance inherent in the language and form of the writing. So I was a little hesitant to begin this book, knowing that you’d likely try to imitate the style of the time. So, I was surprised to discover that though it reads in the vein of the style of de Vaca, it’s also much more readable–it’s clearly a modern novel. How did you pull off the verisimilitude of the time period but also avoid its difficulties for the reader?

Laila Lalami

I wanted to create a sixteenth-century travelogue, without the formality of sixteenth-century language. To make the illusion work, I was very deliberate in my lexical choices. For example, I picked nouns, verbs, and adjectives that date back to the era, but are still in use today. The effect is that the sentences feel authentic and readable at the same time. Of course, I avoided contractions, since they tend to make the dialogue sound too modern. I also removed quotation marks because the conceit of the novel is that it is a manuscript written by an Arab traveler, and Arabic manuscripts of that era did not use  quotation marks. Let’s see. What else? Since Estebanico/Mustafa was born in Azemmur, I had him rely on the Hegira calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar. I had him use place names and units of measurement that were current at the time (e.g. Ifriqiya, not Africa and arrobas not pounds). So these are some of the stylistic choices I worked on during the revision process.

January 2015

Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

Tags: Cabeza de Vaca, historical fiction, Laila Lalami, point of view, The Moor's Account