The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

92 SEPTEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Florida and the Gulf Coast. These experiences involved the group’s absolute vulnerability and dependence on Indian hospitality as well as cruelty and enslavement. Lalami captures this through the perceptions of Azemmouri, himself slave to the Spaniards but increas- ingly their leader and only guarantor of survival. She does, however, fictionalize an ending of escape and marital bliss in place of death by Indian arrows. Francisco de Coronado and his 1540 expedition has, of course, received all the glory for first exploring the present-day states of Arizona, NewMexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, including dis- covery of the Grand Canyon. And, until now, Azemmouri’s earlier, epic 4,350-mile journey across North America, ending in violent death at Cibola, 6,215 miles from home in Morocco, has been lost to history. Azemmouri is admittedly an unlikely hero. The huge class difference between him, a Berber slave, and Coronado, the great conquistador, explains much of his obscurity. From the Moroccan side, his forced conversion to Christianity makes him an unpopular hero for Muslims. Yet while serving in Morocco for eight years, I was often struck by the repeti- tive and threadbare rhetoric about the 200-year-old U.S.-Moroccan relationship and amused to read each year in the local press the text of George Washington’s December 1, 1789, letter to the Sultan of Morocco. Azemmouri’s exploits add several cen- turies to the narrative. Yet few, even in the Southwest where he was killed, are aware that vast regions of the United States were first explored on foot and by boat from 1528 to 1539 by this Moroccan adventurer. Laila Lalami’s fascinating account is well worth reading and should draw new scrutiny to this early chapter of our his- tory. n Richard Jackson served as a Foreign Service officer from 1965 to 1999, with postings in Mogadishu, Tripoli, Thessaloniki, Athens, Rabat and Casablanca, as well as subsequent service as president of Anatolia College in Thessaloniki from 1999 to 2009. He is a regu- lar consultant on higher education abroad and in the United States for the Council on American Universities Abroad.