‘Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God’ diaspora, memory, and historiography from the margin in The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

Abstract

ABSTRACT In The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami dares to dust off the archive of official history that passed over the testimonies of a Moroccan slave during the Discovery Age. This paper explores the way the slave capitalizes on historiography to reconstruct the Western monolithic history. In so doing, the re-constructor’s memory performs a number of roles. It registers the history of the European conquest of La Florida using micro narrative frameworks that highlight salient differences from the official record. Besides, the diasporic memory that the present novel advocates has the intention to mark a difference of the silenced subjectivity from the supremacist histories through a transnational matching of homeland with diaspora. This transnationalism is coupled with a look forward to circumvent the essentialism implied in the monologic narratives. In shuttling between the past, present, and future, memory espouses cosmopolitanism as an alternative to the fundamentalism which threatens people’s cultural diversity.