Week 8: The Name That Walks Ahead
Read this week: Chapters 16–19.
Last week a cure worked and the healer stayed owned. This week the book follows the reputation instead of the man. A borrowed name — the Children of the Sun — enters each village before anyone does, and the healings multiply faster than the truth can be checked. That is the difficulty running through this whole section: a story that travels ahead of a person gets believed, or disbelieved, for reasons having nothing to do with the person. Watch two records compete. One survivor revises his account until an audience recognizes its own fears and virtues in it and rewards the telling; the other keeps his corrections to himself. Eight years of shared hunger make companions of men the law has made unequal, and the companionship is real and reversible in the same afternoon. Meanwhile a cure performed in the wilderness is carried back to an office and becomes a petition, and plunder acquires a signature and turns into lawful property. Ask, before the week is out, who is writing the version of your life that other people believe, and what that version has quietly left out.
Week 8 is for paid members
This week's 11 passages from Chapters 16–19, with the commentary, lineage and criticism on each, are for paid members. The introduction to every week is free on the book's main page.
Passages quoted from Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account (Pantheon, 2014), for criticism and commentary.