Leo Africanus Book

Leo Africanus belongs to several very old traditions of storytelling. It is epic, heroic, and, joins a long line of contemporary political commentaries hidden beneath a thin veil of time and space. It is a tale based on the life of (what we're almost sure is) a real historical figure. Leo Africanus- or al-Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazan as his original name likely was, was a Muslim born in Granada about the time of the Reconquista. His story begins with the voices of others, speaking to him, telling him who he is- we follow his family into the large exile community of Granadans in Fez, Morroco, and then, slowly, follow Hasan himself as his story graduaally starts to become his own. We're given a rich, wonderfully filled out picture of the Mediterranean and North Africa at the turn of the 16th century- from Al-Andalus to the Maghrib, from Timbuktu to the Sahara, downtown Cairo to wild independent mountain territories of Africa, Barbary pirate controlled port towns to Ottoman Constantinople, to Italy in the prime of the Renaissance. This is the great strength of the book. The reader is given a much more rounded picture of this era than is often typical in the West- one that does not care what the hell Christopher thinks he can find in the West Indies, or the martial squabbles of Henry of England. Maalouf is excellent at showing us a world balanced and mixed between East and West, where it was a very real possibility that a Sultan might rule in Rome, or the Castilians might decide to create an empire in North Africa. Each little place visited has it's own proud history that matters very much- and who are you over there to think that yours matters more? He does a wonderful job at showing us how absolutely meaningless any kind of border we create is, whether physical or mental. What's great about Leo(/Hasan/whoever he is at the moment) is that he seems both the essence of his time, in the thick of each development, and yet an escapee from history, able to look like many different people, have many different names (as with all exiles' lit, this book is all about the names) while remaining himself despite it all. Maalouf's addition to the beatitudes is: "Blessed are the outsiders," a blessing that his main character is both tortured and exonerated by. It is hard not to be moved by Maalouf's movingly expressed ultimate mission of tolerance and peace- especially when we know that the 40 years of bloody, pointless, absurd conflict that Leo Africanus witnesses is a stand in for an ongoing contemporary conflict that has lasted more than 40 years now and shows no signs of stopping. Despite being published in 1986, this book remains, sadly, as relevant today as the day it was published.

However. And it's a very unfortunate however- I do have to detract some points for the technical construction of this novel. It is an epic, as I said, and since it is trying to give us a history of 40 years of this area of the world, our main character is required to be in a lot of places and meet a lot of people. We're never in one place for very long, which for one thing makes the story rather disjointed and underdeveloped, and for another... a real person would need a miracle to make it happen. And so he gets miracles. Lots of them. His progress is frankly ridiculously unbelievable. It requires every other person he meets to "take a special liking to him," and give him amazing gifts, money, opportunities that allow him to progress to the next unbelievable meeting- he sees everyone from Raphael of Urbino and Pope Leo to the Ottoman Sultan, the pirate Barbarossa, and kings from lands near and far. Unfortunately, our character is not at all developed- one assumes due to time constraints in getting him all over Africa and Europe- so we have no idea why he's so special, and nor are we given much of a reason to care. We are supposed to like him, as he voices a number of modern approved political opinions, but the dispersal of these feels cheap. And also, I just have to note, his character does a number of despicable things that are hard to forgive- such as repeatedly abandoning his wives and children, and even, on one occasion, having sex with his wife on their wedding night despite the fact that she faints away that the prospect (she's quite sheltered and religious). When he's taken to task for this by one of his wives, we get some answer about how "you just can't tie me down, baby!," that's supposed to tie into his exile, rootless nature, but really just reads as a cheap excuse for him to get on with the next scene of his life, since Maalouf has said all he wants to say involving the particular storyline that woman is a part of.

There are one or two developed characters- Hasan/Leo's best friend Hurun, for example, one of his wives, and at one point his father (who serves as more of a representative sample, but it still works), but these are picked up and put down as our Hero needs them to continue on. I love exile lit, don't get me wrong, but it is at it's most powerful where we believe that the main character is exiled from something- this particular character doesn't seem to have much of a stake in anything- he's able to abandon each thing as necessary and we rarely see him carry over any wounds from one "book" of his story to another. It doesn't help that the story is told in a very impersonal tone, a tone that struck me as fairly unbelievable most of the time- after all, the story is meant to be him writing down his life for his young son- and only in the "and here's the message, kids," interludes between the volumes of his story do we see any of that- like the author himself sometimes forgets his format. I didn't feel at all emotionally attached to this book, and I really wanted to. It's just such a shame.

This book should've either been much longer, or found a way to give us it's messages without the "Where's Waldo?" round Maalouf he had to write before he could make the kind of universal statements he wanted to make here. In the end, I felt like I was being called to witness something when what I really wanted (and what he gave us in those all too brief glimpses) was to get to know someone who had witnessed, and survived.