What if State Logic Rests on Enslavement? Radical Alternatives in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account

Abstract

This article provides a detailed assessment of Laila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account (2014), in which a slave decides to escape upon becoming certain that his enslaver will never act on a prior understanding to free him. Still, his desertion carries with it the ultimate price: never seeing his home or country again. The article explores what that imaginative escape into the wilderness signifies in respect to statehood, both as an idea and as a practice. The evolving events of the novel suggest that polities create domestication not by accident, but by default. For, in Lalami’s novel, the state sells chimerical illusions to the aspiring bourgeoisie in the form of abstract debts, whose repayment fattens state coffers and enslaves the aspiring bourgeoisie. Such a stance vis-à-vis the state and its logic raises a concern with Lalami’s readership since the postcolonial arrangement rarely diverges, if at all, from this immanent logic, the one that hinges on the state’s tendential predilection for enslavement. Lalami’s readers are therefore invited to reconsider their bias against statelessness if circumventing slavery is indeed possible. The article sceptically considers whether, by pursuing such a radical approach, Lalami could be romanticizing statelessness as an easy means of circumventing postcoloniality. This essay will be engaging not only to literary scholars, but also to political economists, development planners, city designers and environmentalists.