“They were led to omit certain events, while exaggerating others, and to suppress some details while inventing others, whereas I, who am neither beholden to Castilian men of power nor bound by the rules of a society to which I do not belong, feel free to recount the true story of what happened to my companions and me.”

Mustafa explains that he is giving his account of the Narváez expedition to tell a “true story.” This passage introduces the book’s main theme: history is a story told by the privileged and powerful. In writing this fictional account of the Narváez expedition from the perspective of a slave, the author uses her imagination and creativity to give a voice to a silenced historical character.

“When I fell into slavery, I was forced to give up not just my freedom, but also the name that my mother and father had chosen for me. A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.”

Mustafa reflects upon what he lost when he sold himself into slavery. When Rodriguez buys Mustafa, he loses his Muslim name when he’s christened with the Spanish name Esteban. When Rodriguez sells Mustafa to Dorantes, his name is changed again to Estebanico, which he describes as a “string of sounds that still grates on my ears” (7).

Losing his name represents all the losses he has suffered: the loss of his family, his hometown, his religion, and his freedom. The conquistadors, who have a habit of giving Spanish names to everything and everyone they encounter in the new world, inflict similar losses on the native people they enslave.