"Trickster Travels" By Natalie Zemon Davis

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0809094347/ref=pd_rvi_gw_3/002-0670725-0807254

Al-Hassan Al-Wazzan. Giovanne Leone. Leo Africanus. Yuhanna Al-Asad. Many names, one man. This book is an attempt, full of conjencture which enlightens the entire world of the 16th century western Mediterranean, to follow the life of the man known in Christian Europe as Leo Africanus (along with other names). A decade before, the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf had written in historical fiction form another book under the title "Leo Africanus" which sought to do something similar. I have yet to read that book but it comes highly recommended as well (it is in English), so this was really my first introduction to the man and the topic. For a quick summary of the book, see the brief editorial reviews from the Amazon site which I copy at the bottom.

Trickster Travels fails and succeeds. It fails in only a superficial way - the reality is that trying to put together the details of just about any single individual from the 16th century, even a reasonably well documented life, is virtually impossible. We get quite a few factual snippets - one gets the sense all the ones that are available - from Yuhanna's life, but most of the book consists of "could have", "may have", "possibly" and other such guesses.

But that is also the book's success. You can only know so much about Al-Hassan Al-Wazzan Al-Fasi (or is it al-Gharnati?), but we can know a great deal about his world. This is where Davis really shines, because this becomes just as much a book about the 16th century realms of North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa (to a lesser extent given that it is told through the eyes of North Africans often then filtered through Europeans and not Sub-Saharan Africans themselves), and Mediterranean Europe. One gets a real flavor for life in Fes circa 1500, in Rome, in travels in the Atlas mountains and the Sahara, in Timbuktu, on the seas of the Mediterranean, in the Ottoman Court, in Cairo, and other places. Suddenly these seem accessible places you or I could travel to and figure out as much as we could different countries of the world today. Suddenly time seems more like distance than time itself, and crossing it a bit less difficult.

Not to get too romantic about it, the point is actually that Davis brings these very different times and places down to earth. She makes them accessible and imaginable instead of just dusty pages in a long forgotten and incomprehensible book. Sometimes that gets into the downright raunchy (a medieval doctor providing a cure and a scolding for a farmer's penchant for his sheep for example), but most of the time it is just about the normal foibles, functions, and curiosities of life. This was in many ways what Giovanne Leone was trying to do when he wrote his Geography of Africa for European readers: let them know that Africa and the world of Islam were neither exotic or barbaric, but places just as ordinary to their inhabitants as the Europe they knew.

*****

From Publishers WeeklyDavis (The Return of Martin Guerre) performs a sterling service in disentangling the twisted threads of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan's fascinating life. Better known in the West as Leo Africanus, he was one of the Renaissance's greatest geographers and the author of a Europe-wide bestseller, The Description of Africa (1550). Born a Muslim in Granada in 1492, al-Hasan al-Wazzan traveled widely as an ambassador and merchant throughout Africa, a continent then a mystery to Europeans, but was captured by Spanish pirates in 1518, presented to Pope Leo X and ostensibly converted to Christianity while explaining Islam to his bewildered audience. Al-Hasan al-Wazzan had the (mis)fortune to live in "interesting times": the Ottomans were on the march, the Habsburgs were on the rise and the Protestants were alarming the pope, yet al-Hasan al-Wazzan managed to flit among a myriad of worlds (including, Davis speculates, taking a formerly Jewish wife). Eventually, he returned to a North Africa riven by turmoil and slaughter, and disappeared from our view. He rose above hard-drawn lines and presented "himself simply as an independent polymath," says Davis, and his life provides a lesson in the "possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence." 16 pages of b&w illus., 2 maps. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New YorkerIn 1518, al-Hasan al-Wazzan, a diplomat of the Sultan of Fez, was kidnapped in the Mediterranean by pirates, who brought him to Pope Leo X. Al-Wazzan had travelled extensively in Africa, and was able to provide firsthand intelligence on the geography and politics of the infidel region. Leo Africanus, as he became known, remained in Rome for the next nine years, converted from Islam to Christianity (he was baptized by the Pope himself), and compiled his "Description of Africa," a collection of learning, hearsay, and personal anecdote that shaped European ideas about Africa for centuries. Few facts exist to illuminate Leo's actual life in Rome, but Davis fills us in on the scholars with whom he may have conversed and the social mores to which he would have had to adjust, arriving at a portrait of "a man with a double vision," straddling two warring cultures. Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker