The Story of How Estebanico Became Mustafa in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account: Retelling Stories in a Post-Colonial Light

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Linnéa Ungewitter

Summary, in English

Both post-colonialism and historical novels are highly topical research themes in today’s literary field, but storytelling as a genre has lost its status. This essay aims to look at the importance of storytelling in the 2014 published novel The Moor’s Account, and how storytelling can be connected to post-colonial rewritings of history. This is achieved through looking at the emphasis on storytelling in the novel, and then drawing connections between retelling stories and rewriting history. Finally this is situated in a post-colonial discourse and analysis. This essay concludes that author Laila Lalami successfully integrates a Moroccan literary tradition of storytelling with a rewriting of a Western travelogue, while also using the act of telling stories to give a voice and identity to a silenced historical person. Lalami’s novel also shows how the multi-voiced aspect of retelling stories promotes diversity, and that the far from primitive genre of storytelling has a given place in literature generally, and in post-colonial novels especially.

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