I was looking forward to reading this book when I first heard that Laila Lalami would write a fictionalized account of Estebanico as I knew she would provide the necessary insight on Morocco and a Moroccan point-of-view of the 1500s. This book exceeded my expectations.

There are many accounts of the Narvaez expedition and what happened in the years 1527 – 1536, when the four survivors (out of 600) were reunited with other Spaniards. Among the survivors was a Moroccan slave known in the accounts by his enslaved name Esteban or Estebanico. At last is a compelling historical fiction account giving a voice to the first known black explorer of the New World.

I enjoyed how Lalami through her graceful language and journal-like format places the reader in the narrator’s hands, giving him an identity other than a slave – Mustafa al-Zamori. The beginning alternates with chapters of all the pomp and arrogance of the Spaniards decisions and Mustafa telling his life before he was a slave allowing us to see the complex layered reality of his situation. Wonderful storytelling and a fresh robust take of an arduous adventure makes this a book to be read by all interested in early American history and conquest.

As the saying goes – the only new history is history yet to be discovered and I graciously thank the author for her time and research for a thoughtful informative book.

I dislike the word Islamphobia too, when I criticized this fucking shit religion Islam that stoned raped girls and women to death, or forced them to marry their rapists.

Fuck Allah. Fuck Islam. I hate religion and religion that spread religious bullshit to harm human pissed me off. 

Now back to the article. 

Salman Rushdie said, 

"“A word I dislike greatly, ‘Islamophobia’, has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced….”

“And in the second place, it’s important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims….

“It is right to feel phobia towards such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.”

Poor man Rushdie. Forced into hiding. 

That is what society lost when they let those religious deluded who could get away with murder in the name of their delusion. 

Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 24 January 2014

Winter is the season of storms in Europe and everybody living in coastal areas of the North Sea can certainly tell you a thing or two about it. The two biggest storm catastrophes of the twentieth century happened in the Netherlands on 31 January 1953 and in Hamburg on 16 February 1962. Both times cyclones caused huge tidal surge which broke dikes and cost the lives of thousands of people. A novel dealing with the flood disaster in the Netherlands and its impact on the lives of the surviving is The Storm  by the Dutch writer Margriet de Moor.

The opening scene of The Storm  is set in Amsterdam on the morning of 31 January 1953. An omniscient third-person narrator tells the stories of the sisters Lidy and Armanda, the first twenty-three and married with a child, the latter twenty-one, shy and a bit jealous of everything her older sister has. When Lidy instead of Armanda sets out for the small town of Zierikzee several hours to the South disaster takes its course. It’s the night of a winter storm of unexpected power and Lidy is in its centre. After a long and desperate fight for survival she drowns in the floods. This short and thrilling period of Lidy’s life is set against the long and rather ordinary existence of Armanda in well-ordered circumstances that follows the events because Lidy’s body isn’t found. The worries of her family change into grief as the hopes to find her alive shrink. Before soon Armanda takes the place in Lidy’s little family, but for the rest of her days she feels like she were continuing her sister’s instead of her own life.

Reading The Storm  by Margriet de Moor has been an interesting and instructive pleasure as well as a sad and moving experience. And of course I highly recommend the book.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.