The Moor's Account

Many characters in the novel—including Mustafa’s mother, the faith healers in the souq, the native shamans, and Mustafa himself—are described as storytellers.

Because the Indigenous groups encountered by the explorers have no written language, information is shared among and between tribes through oral storytelling. During their stay with the Avavares tribe, the survivors come to understand and respect this tradition:

We listened carefully to the stories the Avavares told around the campfire, about their ancestors, their neighbors, good and bad, the spirits that populate their world, but also stories about their origins, the dangers they had faced, and the murderous white aliens who were now snatching them away (232).

A shaman tells Mustafa that “unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if it falls in the hands of the right storyteller” (214). For this reason, Mustafa worries that the natives may believe that all white men are cannibals:

It was the sort of story that would be told and retold, getting worse with each repetition. Between Esquivel and Ruíz, all the Indians in these parts were probably convinced by now that the white aliens who had come to their territory were flesh-eating monsters (193).

Mustafa uses his storytelling abilities to transform himself into a successful shaman:

If I was confronted with an illness I did not recognize, I listened to the sick man or woman and offered consolation in the guise of a long story. […] This, too, was something I had learned in the markets of Azemmur: a good story can heal (231).

Europeans, too, are often tellers of tall tales—Narváez tells stories of a city of gold to entice men to join his mission, Dorantes persuades Castillo with tales of riches and power, Cabeza de Vaca crafts a survival story that changes with each telling, and the bishop uses the survivors’ tale for his own purposes—but the Europeans also use written records to solidify their colonial power. Ultimately, the book suggests a dichotomy between oral storytelling and written record-keeping: In contrast to the new world, where tribes rely on oral histories, the old world relies on notaries, whose governmental authority means that whatever they record becomes the official version of events.

Mustafa’s father is a notary, and when Mustafa becomes a merchant, notaries record his sales—including his sale of enslaved people. When Mustafa sells himself into enslavement, a clerk notarizes the transaction, recording not only the exchange of money but also the loss of Mustafa’s name and his freedom. The notary on the Narváez expedition records everything that happens on the trip. Mustafa observes, “After all, without notaries and record-keepers, no one would know what governors did” (10). This observation captures the role of record-keeping in the colonial world: At every level of society, from a merchant’s shop to the royal court, the written record is what makes power real. When Mustafa arrives in Tenochtitlán, he realizes that he’s back in a place where recording keeping is valued over the spoken word, “where written records were synonymous with power. This was true not just of things like dates and places, but also births, marriages, and deaths” (286-87). The power of the monarchy, distributed piecemeal throughout the colonial world, is the power to say what is true and what is mere rumor, and thus to define the boundaries of reality itself. This power is enacted by the keepers of official records.

Near the end of the story, Mustafa repeatedly asks Dorantes to take him to a notary to set him free. Considering Dorantes’s stubborn resistance, Mustafa doubts whether he will “make legal and official in New Spain what was tacit and obvious out there, in the Land of the Indians” (253). This statement juxtaposes two distinct realities: that of “New Spain,” the sphere of colonial power in which reality is whatever the official record says it is, and that of “the Land of the Indians,” in which reality is found in the stories people tell.

Mustafa is both a storyteller and a recorder. He tells the story of the expeditions to Cabeza de Vaca and his wife, but he also writes it down so that it will be recorded. He observes that “perhaps my father’s dreams for me have come true in the end, for here I am setting down, for my own reasons, a relation of the Narváez expedition” (20). With this statement, he compares himself to a notary—the role his father hoped he would take on—but because he is writing a memoir and not an official record, his written account has a different relationship to truth. Like the oral stories that constitute truth in “the Land of the Indians,” it must either be believed or disbelieved according to its own strength as a story.