Amphibious storytellers in Leo Africanus and The Moor’s Account

Abstract

This article discusses the traces of two Early Modern Arab figures dramatized in The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and Leo Africanus (1992) by Amin Maalouf. Marginality, nomadism, and humanism are dramatized in the lives of Mustafa Al-Zammouri/Estebanico a black Arab from Zammour taken as a slave and sold to a Spanish conquistador who joined the Narváez Expedition and Leo Africanus/Alhassan Alwazzan who was captured by Spanish pirates and sent as a gift to Pope Leo X (1475–1521) around the same time. The lives of those two Early Modern Arab travelers provide the flesh for a bicultural humanism that avoids jingoistic nationalism that is centered around ideas of the canon that excludes narratives and texts from “the other world.” Bicultural humanism, I argue, is a unique space where both Maalouf and Lalami exercise their talent of recovering the lives of the silenced other and in doing so, challenge Orientalist stereotypes by creating dynamic narratives of Arabs and Muslims as complex nomad characters not essentialized violent multitudes enraged at Western modernity.