Pory apologizes for John Leo’s Muslim past and assures English readers that, al-
though the author is “by birth a More, and by religion for many yeeres a
Mahumetan,” his “Parentage, Witte, Education, Learning, Emploiments, Trauels,
and his conuersion to Christianitie” make him nonetheless “not altogither unfit
to undertake such an enterprize; nor unwoorthy to be regarded” (Pory, 4 ). It is Chris-
tianity that saves him. “It pleased the divine prouidence,” Pory claims, “for the dis-
couery and manifestation of Gods woonderfull works, and of his dreadfull and iust
iudgements performed in Africa...to deliuer this author” from his “dangerous
trauels” into the hands ultimately of Pope Leo X (Pory, 7 ). Neither the Moor’s
own ethnogeography nor the extra material Pory adds to the text is centered on
these providential designs to the degree that this introduction leads us to expect.
But the conversion narrative allows the promotion of both author and text as the
extraordinary product of two cultures, one dangerous, the other divine.
This emphasis on the double-edged author has become particularly use-
ful in critical and political attempts to complicate conceptions of cultural
identity, to understand its inherent hybridity. Struggling with his own vexed
national affiliations, W. B. Yeats resurrects Africanus and, in response to an
unusual seance, writes letters to and from Africanus’s ghost for six years (!).^6
By the time that Yeats is through with this complex projection, Africanus is
“a distinguished poet among the Moors.”^7 But according to Oliver Hen-
nessey, he is also for Yeats a “liminal” figure symbolically aligned with both
the oppressor and the oppressed, with an imperialist Europe and England as
with the colonial spaces of Africa and Ireland, all which therefore cross in the
mix and mix in the cross.^8 Recent critics have turned as well to Africanus, the
“wily bird,” using his dual subject position to address the inevitable clash of
the West and non-West, Islam and Christianity, Africa and Europe.^9 Think-
ing through the lens of postcolonialism, Jonathan Burton represents author
and text as an “important example of how Eurocentric principles such as
European Christian superiority and entitlement were challenged and even re-
shaped by their non-Western counterparts,” Africanus’s own strategic produc-
tion of his “hybridity” being pivotal to that process.^10 Natalie Davis titles her
history of al-Hasan al-Wazzan (whose name, she notes, means “the weigher”)
Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, and her intro-
duction begins with the idea of “crossing”—she herself crossing, as few schol-
ars have done, into the Arabic language and cultures that surround
al-Wazzan’s life and writings.^11 Culturally and spiritually, her Moor “moves
back and forth between Europe and Africa,” “back and forth between his
identity as a Muslim and his identity as a Christian convert.”^12 He is a “trick-
140 chapter six