A voyager revisited

“YOU know me, I am one of you.” So said the bird when he arrived among the fish. Blessed with the ability to live in air or water, he had lived happily among the birds until their king came demanding his taxes, at which point the amphibious bird plunged into the sea. Claiming kinship with the fish, the bird found comfort among them. But when the fish-king came around for his taxes, the bird shot from the water and rejoined the flock. So it went for the rest of his days, the bird claiming membership in each of the societies he moved between, but never granting his full allegiance to either.

This tale is told by 16th century scholar al Hasan al Wazzan in “The Description of Africa,” the first narrative geography of the continent to appear in Europe. The itinerant author explains that he will “be like the bird”: He will tell the truth of his subject because he belongs to no nation.

Al Wazzan’s book, which first appeared in Rome in 1550, contained detailed, highly nuanced accounts of the cities, peoples and landscapes of a continent largely unknown to outsiders except through myth and fragments of information. Eventually it was translated into all the major European languages and remained a primary source of knowledge about Africa well into the 19th century. Its mysterious author -- known today as Leo Africanus -- left few traces beyond his writing, yet his life has been the subject of innumerable scholarly tracts and inspired Amin Maalouf’s widely read 1986 novel “Leo Africanus.”

Now, Natalie Zemon Davis offers the first comprehensive reconstruction of Al Wazzan’s life in “Trickster Travels.” Drawing on archival material and the accounts of contemporaries, the distinguished historian and author of “The Return of Martin Guerre” gives a fresh interpretation of “The Description of Africa” and Al Wazzan that grounds him in the 16th century world through which he traveled.

Using hazy and sometimes contradictory evidence, Davis beautifully renders the chapters of Al Wazzan’s life: his birth in Islamic Granada in the 1480s; his family’s flight as Christian armies expelled the Moors from Spain; his education in the madrassas of Fez, Morocco, and his years traveling as a diplomat in North Africa and the Levant, among the Berbers, Arabs, Jews and black Africans who populated those lands. She writes of his kidnapping by Spanish pirates who offered him as tribute to Pope Leo X in Rome; his christening as “Giovanni Leone” by the pope; his life of independent scholarship in Bologna and his departure from Italy after nearly a decade, during which he produced “The Description of Africa” and other works.

In describing this traveler’s life, however, Davis is not so much composing a biography as setting Al Wazzan’s writing against the circumstances of its creation. Moving between scenes from his life and key details in his work -- the bird story first among them -- Davis highlights the dilemmas and benefits facing a writer caught between faiths and continents.

Al Wazzan wrote “The Description of Africa” with a European audience in mind. But perhaps hopeful of a future readership in Africa, he was careful not to denigrate the people of the continent (or at least its Muslims). Pulling off this balancing act -- representing Africa in terms that fit European biases without renouncing his heritage -- was a delicate task. It was achieved, as Davis notes, by concealing parts of his heritage, alternating among his Christian and Arabic names and avoiding direct references to his own past.

Like the shape-shifting bird-fish, Al Wazzan recognized the utility of holding several identities at once. Sharing the virtues of the trickster -- that transient creature of folklore who illuminates the hypocrisies of convention in cultures the world over -- he exhibited the most modern of cosmopolitanisms: an identity based not so much in roots as in routes, a sense of self based not in where he originated but in the places he had traveled and the person he had become.

In a world where encounters with cultural differences far too often make for division, and where fantasists of cultural purity still carry out genocide in its name, there is a lasting resonance in Al Wazzan’s story, one that Davis concludes bears witness to the “possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence.”

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a San Francisco-based writer whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, the American Prospect and other publications.