%HWZHHQ6ODYHU\DQG)UHHGRP7KH7UDQVJUHVVLYH6HOILQ2ODXGDK(TXLDQR
V$XWRELRJUDSK\
$XWKRUV6XVDQ00DUUHQ
6RXUFH30/$9RO1R-DQSS
3XEOLVKHGE\0RGHUQ/DQJXDJH$VVRFLDWLRQ
6WDEOH85/http://www.jstor.org/stable/462855
$FFHVVHG
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.
http://www.jstor.org
SusanM. Marren
Between
and
Slavery
Transgressive Self
Freedom:
in
Olaudah
The
Equiano's
Autobiography
SUSAN M. MARREN is a
doctoral candidate in English
at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor. This essay is her
first majorpublication.She is
workingon a dissertationthat
examines transgressivegestures, such as racial passing
in selected
and cross-dressing,
Americanliterarytexts of the
1920sand 1930sand assesses
the implicationsof thosegesturesfor Americancitizenship.
94
HE I IN autobiography liberates the author from the constraints of corporeality. In re-creating the self in writing,
one can ascribe to oneself traits denied one in the material world and
reject traits ascribed to one by others. And in a sense this narrative
self becomes real.' In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave, published
his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Like other black authors in
eighteenth-century England, Equiano wrote in response to two imperatives:on the one hand, an internalcompulsion to establishhimself
as a speaking subject and, on the other, an external compulsion to
serve the antislavery movement. Here was paradox, for while white
abolitionists encouraged writing by literate ex-slaves because it disproved the notion that blacks were inferior, irrational beings suited
by nature for slavery, the Enlightenment philosophical tradition that
spawned abolitionism interpreted blackness as absence-an absence
of reason and, therefore, of agency (Gates, Figures 40, 129-30).
Moreover, David Brion Davis argues, "abolitionists unconsciously
collaborated with their proslavery opponents to define race as the
ultimate reality" (14), thus obscuring issues of power and ideology
that, once acknowledged, would raise the specter of a more radical
social critique than even the abolitionists were preparedto undertake.
Black authors consequently found both that race was inescapable
and that it was what had to be escaped if they were to speak at all.
Equiano had to manipulate the terms of racial representation themselves both to demonstrate a black man's capacity for reason and to
elude any definitive, silencing racial categorization.
He achieves these paradoxical objectives by fashioning a "transgressive" narrative self, whose existence, ironically, challenges his
readersto scrutinize the very social structurethat their preoccupation
with racial difference had sought to mask. Transgression, as I use the
T
Susan M. Marren
term here, is the act of interrogating the boundaries that separate the apparently distinct, apparently oppositional categories into which
Western culture has organized itself: black/white,
male/female, master/servant, Christian/heathen,
civilization/savagery, freedom/slavery. Equiano
transgresses first by maneuvering the initially
black African I of his narrative into the position
of a secure cultural insider:the loyal Britishsocial
reformer. He then continually evokes and erases
the totalizing boundaries that demarcate social
subjects and objects in eighteenth-century
England,having the same effect on his new milieu
as the counternarratives described by Homi
Bhabha have on nations (300) and thereby
mounting a quiet revolution against the conservative habits of thought that accomplish his social
annihilation.
Equiano thus manages to counter the ideological tactics that assign racial subjects essentialist
identities. As a freed person, Equiano is entirely
marginal;neitherslave nor free, he finds no secure
lodgment in the jural-political order of the slaveholding society. While the ambiguity of this situation left freed individuals vulnerable to all
manner of threats to their persons and status,
their estrangement from definable social categories also freed them to imagine-if only fleetingly-radically new subject positions to occupy
within radically new networks of social relationships.2The heterogeneity of the transgressiveI in
Equiano's text seems impossibly self-contradictory if what one seeks is a unified subject. But
the transgressiveself must be thought of not as a
stable identity or essence in itself but rather as a
fluid positioning, a mode of articulation of newly
imagined, radically nonbinary subjectivities.
If the I is positioning ratherthan essence, racial
identity may not be knowable at all. That implication carries Equiano far beyond the social or
even textual subject positions that most subsequent ex-slave narrators can maintain. As antislaverysentiment cooled in the 1790s in the wake
of bloody slave uprisings in the West Indies and
as the slave-dependent plantocracy of the American South became more entrenched following
the 1793 invention of the cotton gin, the AngloAmerican racial hierarchy became more rigid,
further limiting acceptable social roles for black
95
persons. Nonetheless, Equiano's transgressive I
had illuminated a space of possibility within
which subsequent black narratorsmight envision
themselves as viable subjects.
I
Most abolitionists and ex-slave narrators who
followed Equiano were familiar with his autobiography. It went through eight editions and
several translations in just six years and by the
mid-nineteenth century had had nineteen editions in Europe and the United States. Of the
three most prominent African writersin England
in the eighteenth century-Ignatius Sancho
(1729-80), Ottobah Cugoano (1757-?), and
Equiano (1745-97), all of whom played significant roles in the abolitionist campaign3-it was
Equiano who was the most instrumental in
bringing about an end to the slave trade. His vigorous activism and the publication of his enormously popular narrative coincided with the
beginning of a parliamentary inquiry into that
trade, and his book was frequently quoted during
the proceedings. The timely appearance of his
firsthand account of enslaved life bolstered the
antislavery side considerably.
Equiano immediately signals to the reader of
his Life that he struggles between two opposing
allegiances, both heartfelt. In the dedication to
the narrative, he explicitly identifies himself as
African, yet suggests that his stronger loyalties
are to England:
To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain.
My Lords and Gentlemen,
Permit me, with the greatest deference and respect,
to lay at your feet the following genuine narrative;
the chief design of which is to excite in your august
assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries
which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the horrorsof that trade was
I firsttorn away from all the tender connections that
were naturally dear to my heart; but these, through
the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard
as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of
the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its
liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious free-
96
BetweenSlaveryand Freedom
dom of its government,and its proficiencyin arts
and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human
nature.
(3)
By referringto the enslaved Africans as his countrymen and suggesting that his own life has been
violently disrupted by the slave trade, Equiano
impresses the members of Parliament with the
devastating impact their inattention to the abolitionist cause would have on countless individuals much like himself. At the same time, he
flatters the Englishmen's notion of the inherent
superiority of their culture. This is a shrewd rhetorical gesture; recognizing that he must plead
the cause of abolition on and in the dominant
culture's terms, Equiano argues that the slave
trade merits abolition because he (and by extension his fellow Africans) can appreciate the superiority of white, Western culture. Here he
appears to prove the currently enslaved African
anglicizable and therefore deserving of freedom.4
The tensions within his dedication reveal the
contradictionon which Equiano's Life pivots. His
identity, the narrative asserts, was first and fully
formed in a black African context. Nonetheless,
the text later unequivocally states that the
ex-slave is both English and white. Much of
Equiano's middle-class English audience considered Africans physically, morally, and intellectually degenerate, incapable of deep feeling or
spiritual sensations. Inherently subhuman, the
black race was conveniently suited to slavery. In
this singularsituation, every gesturethat Equiano
makes to establish himself as a "white" man diminishes his claim to an African identity and risks
leaving the impression not that he is representative of the slaves but that he is exceptional.
Equiano's Life is a recordof his attempt to create,
from slaverythrough a dubious freedom and into
the narrative present tense, a language in which
he can speak authoritatively within English culture as a typical member of the enslaved group.
Orlando Patterson's model of the dialectic of
enslavement, slavery, and manumission foregrounds the notion that slavery is a "complex
interactionalprocess, laden with contradiction in
each of its constituent elements" (13). When applied to Equiano's Life, this model suggests an
interpretation that acknowledges the ideological
implications of the numerous contradictions and
ambiguities animating the narratorand impelling
his linguistic innovations. Patterson uses Victor
Turner'stripartiteparadigm of the rite of passage
to conceptualize slavery. In Patterson's scheme,
enslavement constitutes the first, or separation,
phase, which is symbolic execution. Slaveryitself
occupies the second phase, captivity in a liminal
state of "social death." The last phase is the manumission, the slave's symbolic rebirth. With
manumission the master grants the slave social
life. At this point, however, the slave is not free.
The completion of this rite forms the basis of a
new triad, in which the ex-slave recognizes yet
another obligation to the master: the necessity of
perpetually repayingthe master's generosity with
faithful, dependent service. Although Equiano
initially believes he can buy freedom, it is ideologically impossible for a slave to do so. A redemption fee does not constitute compensation
to the master because no money belonging to a
slave is ever actually the slave's own. The fee
serves instead as the slave's token of gratitude to
the master for the gift of social life. A "new dialectic of domination and dependence" ensues
(Patterson 293-94).
Patterson'smodel suggeststhat, from the point
of view of a given social order, a freed person
and a slave occupy the same space: the liminal.
In any structured order there are groups that the
order cannot entirely assimilate. These groups are
between identities-between, as Equiano indicates in the dedication, political allegiances-and
their liminal state is marked by the ambiguity,
ambivalence, and contradiction that the Life
manifests. Yet this freedom from the constraints
of structure makes it possible to imagine alternative social realities, and the literate freed person, unlike most slaves, may occasionally
articulatethese alternatives.Equiano, of coursein a manner typical of authors of slave narratives-depicts himself as an honest, humble,
worthy individual whose interesting, moral, and
strictly factual life story offers its audience an
edifying lesson. Readers of the genre tended to
view themselves as upright, religious, compassionate persons who would not intentionally
commit wrong (Costanzo 17), but the very existence of an ex-slave's narrative presented them
Susan M. Marren
with a radical proposition: it asked that they give
up utterly entrenched ways of ordering their
world and of positioning blacks, the institution
of slavery,and the slave trade within it. Equiano's
autobiography thus does not merely demand
what a reformer might-that the material conditions of the state be brought into accord with
its ideal conditions: its "liberal sentiments, its
humanity, [and its] glorious freedom." Rather,
because the Life emerges from outside the structured order, it represents revolution: the transformation not only of "the circumstancesbut [of]
the minds . . . the intellects, the ideology, the
world view and the allegiance, the faith and the
understanding, of those who constitute the nation" (Norton 72).
Equiano, in other words, dissembles the revolutionary implications of his story by situating
the narrative self as a reformer. The climate of
late-eighteenth-century England favored, as I
have noted above, limited social change; the narrative coincided with calls for social reform from
such other fields as moral and ethical philosophy,
history and political economy, science, and theology. Leaders of the Methodist and Evangelical
revivals protested the established Church of
England's failure to recognize chronic social
problems and agitated for reform. The new
philosophical school of"benevolism" offeredfirst
an implied and then an explicit argument against
slavery by challenging the egoistic philosophy of
Hobbes and the rationalist ethics of Locke, advocating a set of human ethics based on pity and
compassion rather than on classical notions of
reason and right. Debates over slavery, the condition of slaves on West Indian plantations, and
the place of the black person in the human order
spurred the rise of periodical literature, which
provided a forum for both proslavery apologists
and antislavery activists. The pages of the new
magazines disseminated favorable, if unrealistic,
notions of the African character, preparing the
white English mind for the humanization of
blacks. As the century progressed,Enlightenment
humanitarianism had thus generated a progressive discourse on the natural rights of every human being, a discourse that had begun to rouse
the middle-class English reader out of orthodox
habits of thought (Sandiford 43-48).
97
II
Equiano's intellectual endeavors were not, however, sui generis. A long tradition of African literacy and scholarship in Europe preceded the
Life. European-educated African scholars-usually protegesof European nobility, sons of African
chieftains and officials, or youths sponsored by
English philanthropic organizations-had already begun to convince white Europeans of the
moral and intellectual capacities of extraordinary
black persons (Sandiford 17, 21). There were even
African slaves in this category:Francis Williams,
a Jamaican who earned a BA at Cambridgebefore
1750; Wilhelm Amo, who took a doctoral degree
in philosophy at Halle; and Jacobus Capitein,
who earned a number of degrees in Holland
(Gates, Signifying 129). Such predecessors, together with the benevolent social climate, lent
credibility to Equiano and his contemporaries
(Sandiford 21), including, of course, the American slave-poet Phillis Wheatley, whose Poems on
VariousSubjects,Religious and Moral, published
in 1773, was probably the first printed work by
a black person in England.
Recognizing that Europeans viewed African
scholars as exceptions to the rule of black primitiveness, Equiano may also have realized that
such a categorization could endanger his own effectiveness as an activist against the slave trade.
For this reason, perhaps, he paints a portrait of
Essaka, his African home, that subtly primes his
English audience to accept him as civilized. His
opening account of Ibo culture strikingly corresponds, in many respects,to his glowing depiction
of the English nation in his dedication to the
members of Parliament. While the Ibo differ
widely from the British in behavior (e.g., marriages are polygamous, women serve as warriors,
and chieftains are marked by ritual scarring),they
do not differ in ideals. According to Equiano,
they worship one god; prize industry, chastity,
and cleanliness; and constitute "a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets" (14). He claims for
the Ibo the "liberalsentiments," the "humanity,"
the "proficiency in arts"-in short, the "exalted
. . . human nature"-that he attributes to the
English.5
By describing his African home in terms that
endorse his Britishreaders'collective culturalself-
BetweenSlaveryand Freedom
98
perception, Equiano dispels its threatening otherness; his readers either see their own cultural
ideals reflected back at them, as I suggest above,
or recognize in Ibo culture a variation on the
"Noble Negro" stereotype. This idealized figure
is, of course, entirely a romantic European invention, and it hardly resembles the common
plantation slave or lower-class London black
whose humanity the white reader questions
(Sandiford 61). The reader is not, as yet, made
to confront difference.
Ill
The idyllic portraitof Essakaalso preparesreaders
to appreciate the shock and horror an African
child experiences when suddenly torn from this
peaceful environment. Having enlisted the sympathies of his audience, Equiano now makes his
first narrative gesture calculated to unsettle the
English cultural self-perception: his image of the
naive, uncomprehending black child encountering an alien white world defamiliarizesthat world
and, importantly, its language.6White readersdo
not recognize themselves as described by the
child:
The firstobjectthatsalutedmy eyes whenI arrived
on the coastwasthe sea,anda slaveship,whichwas
thenridingat anchor,andwaitingforitscargo.These
filledme withastonishment,
thatwassoonconverted
to terror,which I am yet at a loss to describe,and
much more the then feelingsof my mind when I
was carriedon board.I was immediatelyhandled
and tossedup to see if I was sound,by some of the
crew;and I was now persuadedthat I had got into
a worldof bad spirits,and that they weregoing to
kill me. Theircomplexionstoo, differingso much
from ours, their long hair, and the languagethey
spoke,whichwasverydifferentfromany I hadever
heard, united to confirm me in this belief. ...
I
asked[someotherAfricanson board]if we werenot
to be eatenby thosewhitemen with horriblelooks,
redfaces,and long hair.
(32-33)
This passage is the first in which Equiano explicitly turns racial stereotypes of brutal blacks and
noble whites on their heads. The white sailors
appear so savage to the young African that he
still cannot describe (in their language) his terror
at their behavior. Nor is his fear unfounded. He
documents instance after instance of inexplicable
cruelty, directed both toward the slaves and toward other white men: a white man is flogged to
death and then tossed overboard "as they would
have done a brute" (34); while the slaves are
starving, the white men eat their fill of some
freshly caught fish and then, "rather than give
any of them to us to eat, as we expected, they
tossed the remaining fish into the sea again, although we begged and prayed for some as well
as we could, but in vain" (36); and of course black
slaves, including Equiano himself, are flogged
routinely.
Equiano continues to portray himself as the
innocent child when he is sent to work on a plantation in Virginia. He describeshis awe and dread
at encountering various artifacts of Western culture: he sees a female slave imprisoned in an iron
muzzle, a watch that he believes will report a
slave's misbehavior to his master, and a portrait
that he thinks might be "some way the whites
had to keep their great men when they died, and
offer them libations" (39). As Henry Louis Gates
has suggested, Equiano's interpretations of the
functions of these objects prove more nearly accurate than they may at first appear: "[w]atches
do speak to their masters, in a language that has
no other counterpart in this culture, and their
language frequently proves to be the determining
factor in the master's daily existence"; and portraits serve as "tokens of the immortality of their
subjects, commanding of their viewers symbolic
'libations,' as the young Equiano [surmised]"
(Signifying 156). The function of the iron muzzle,
the only artifact mentioned that is specifically
designed for slaves, mystifies Equiano not at all;
while wearing it, the slave woman cannot eat or
drink, and she can "scarcely speak." The clear
implication for the enslaved child terrifiedby his
incapacity to speak the language of the dominant
culture is that this incapacity is externally reinforced; even those slaves who are not mechanically muzzled are figurativelysilenced in this alien
culture. This passage suggests that, as the uncomprehending presence in the text, the child
Equiano betrays tremendous insight into the
power relations that shape the slaveholding
Western society.
Susan M. Marren
The child's insight proves to correlateinversely
with his mastery of English. Recounting his earliest experiences in Virginia, Equiano attributes
much of his apparent inability to understand and
adapt to his surroundings to mutually incomprehensible languages:
I nowtotallylostthe smallremainsof comfortI had
enjoyedin conversingwith my countrymen.. . .
We werelandedup the rivera good way from the
sea,aboutVirginiacounty,wherewe sawfewof our
nativeAfricans,and not one soul who couldtalkto
I was now exceedinglymiserable,and
me....
thoughtmyselfworseoff thanany of the restof my
companions;for they could talk to each other,but
I hadno personto speakto thatI couldunderstand.
(38-39)
In the course of the narrativeEquiano's repeated
comments on his inability to understand and to
be understood take on greatersignificance. As he
presents the evolution of his consciousness, he
comes to think of himself as an Englishman to
the degree that he learns to speak and to understand English. When he begins to comprehend,
he apparently loses the ability to defamiliarize
and thereby to problematize the value system of
the English culture. Equiano, as author, traces
the painful compromises that Equiano the maturing slave found necessary for survival in the
alien culture. At the same time, however, the
narrativeI is gaining credibility in the eyes of the
audience. Equiano is confirming, provisionally,
his readers' conservative presumption that the
trauma of cultural displacement is "infinitely
more than compensated" by the enlightenment
that exposure to Western culture and civilization
has brought him.
Equiano is soon sold from the Virginia plantation to Captain Michael Henry Pascal, whom
he accompanies on a ship bound for England.
On board he encounters white men who treat
him humanely, and he begins to think that perhaps not all members of their race have "the same
disposition." In particular, he is befriended by a
young white boy named Richard Baker. Simultaneously, Equiano learns to "smatter a little imperfect English" (40). At this point in the story
the "uncomprehending" child, who "polemically" fails to understand the language of the
99
whites, startshis transitionto the "double-voiced"
narrating adult.7 Though Equiano sporadically
continues to relate incidents in which white men
behave cruelly toward him (e.g., they discover
his fear that they might be cannibals and threaten
to eat him, and they beat him when he refuses
to answer to the new name they have given him),
he reveals as well an increasing subjection to the
languageand values of their culture. On attending
his first church service, Equiano strugglesto understand it in the language of the master instead
of interpreting it for himself through the eyes of
an innocent:
I asked all I could about it; and they gave me to
understand it was "worshippingGod, who made us
and all things." I was still at a loss, and soon got into
an endless field of inquiries, as well as I was able to
speak and ask about things. However, my dear little
friendDick used to be my best interpreter;for I could
make free with him and he always instructed me
with pleasure. And from what I could understand
by him of this God, and in seeing that these white
people did not sell one another as we did, I was much
pleased: and in this I thought they were much happier than we Africans.I was astonished at the wisdom
of the white people in all things which I beheld.
(43)
Equiano's understanding of white culture is now
mediated by the language-and so by the worldview-of the English. He therefore associates
white skin color with the "wisdom of the white
people" and begins to feel "mortified at the difference in [Africans'] complexions" (44). A shift
has occurred in his perspective; earlier it was the
whites whose appearance struck him as odd and
suggestive of barbarism. On learning English,
however, he sees physical whiteness and the philosophical system and social practices of whites
from the vantagepoint of the dominant European
culture; these now seem to him phenomena of
the same order, as desirable to the black person
as to the white.
Equiano does not transmit this evidence of a
perspectivalshift without comment. In a few lines
sandwiched between his account of the church
service and several remarks betraying his newly
developed self-consciousness about his nonwhite
appearance, he voices a momentary fear that he
BetweenSlaveryand Freedom
100
may be no better off now than he was the day he
arrived in Virginia:
I had often seen my master and Dick employed in
reading;and I had a greatcuriosityto talk to the
books,as I thoughttheydid;and so to learnhowall
thingshada beginning.ForthatpurposeI haveoften
takenup a book, and talkedto it, and then put my
earsto it, whenalone,in hopesit wouldanswerme;
andI havebeenverymuchconcernedwhenI found
it remainingsilent.
(43)
As a child, Equiano could not communicate with
whites because his language and theirs were mutually incomprehensible. But in this passage the
shift in tenses (from had to have) indicates that
the book's troubling refusal to engage in a dialogue with him continues into the narrativepresent, despite his having attained fluency in English.
He remains uncertain that the texts governing
white culture will allow an other to enter. Once
again he finds himself "worse off than any of the
rest of [his] companions" (who are now the white
people), "for they could talk to [the books], but
[he] had no [book] to speak to that he could
understand."
The trope of the talking book, however, is
shared by at least three other early black writers
of captivity narratives-James Albert Ukawsaw
Gronniosaw, John Marrant, and John Jea,8-so
that Equiano was not utterly bereft of worthy interlocutors, despite his inability to enter into a
dialogue with white texts. While deployment of
the Africans' trope slightly counters the surface
momentum of the narrative, the story continues
to carry white readerstoward the conviction that
its ex-slave author may be a credible Englishman.
To them Equiano'sconsciousness seems to evolve
naturallytoward anglicization-the direction indicated in the dedication.
IV
In the course of this evolution, as already noted,
Equiano goes beyond merely measuring himself
by white English standards and begins transgressively appropriating whiteness to himself. In
eighteenth-century English discourse, whiteness
is essentialized; it denotes skin color but comes
to signify civilization, Christianity, nobility, justice, industry, intellect, truth.9While Equiano allows the word white to reverberatein the text on
every customary semantic level, he ascribes its
concomitant virtues to himself and, less consistently, to his fellow slaves, just as he earlier attributes to the white sailors the savagery and
irrationality that Western culture associates with
dark-skinned peoples. For instance, though still
enslaved, Equiano narrates the events of his involvement in various engagements between English and French ships in the Seven Years' War
as if he were a fully participating, patriotic member of the British crew. He begins one such account with the remark "[W]e sailed once more
in quest of fame" (58), suggesting that the fame
gained thereby would glorify slave as well as
master.
While Equiano records these incidents in such
a way that he appears more English than the English, he also signals that this stance can be immediately threatening to a white person who
encounters him in life rather than in narrative.
During his travels Equiano is baptized, thus becoming, by law, a free man in England. He therefore expects his benevolent white master to
release him when they return there. Instead, Pascal sells him. Equiano argues the point with his
new master, another ship's captain:
I told him my master could not sell me to him nor
to anyone else. "Why," said he, "did not your master
buy you?" I confessed he did. "But I have served
him," said I, "many years, and he has taken all my
wages and prize-money, for I only got one sixpence
during the war. Besides this I have been baptized;
and, by the laws of the land, no man has a right to
sell me;" And I added, that I had heard a lawyer,
and others, at differenttimes tell my master so. They
both then said, that those people who told me so,
were not my friends-but I replied-it was very extraordinarythat other people did not know the law
as well as they. Upon this, Captain Doran said I
talked too much English, and if I did not behave
myself he had a method on board to make me.
(65)
Captain Doran obviously recognizes the threat
presented by the slave's attempt to intervene in
the hegemonic discourse. English is not to be so-
Susan M. Marren
cially stratified to such an extent that it serves
the expressive intention of the black slave-here,
it could literallyfree him. But Equiano's reporting
of Doran's speech has the subversive effect of
suggesting that the slave prizes the laws and associated liberties of the land more highly than
the captain does. The readerbegins to accept this
portrait of Equiano as the personification of the
best qualities of the British nation, and this acceptance undermines the racial hierarchyblindly
upheld by Doran, the narrative representativeof
white readers before they encounter Equiano's
text.
For the time being, however, Equiano remains
a slave. Since his nominal Christianity does not
suffice to free him, he turns to commerce as the
means of securing his liberty. Starting out with a
capital of threepence, Equiano begins trading
from one island to the next as he and yet another
master sail in the West Indies. Though he is often
ill-used by the white men with whom he dealsthey appear far more barbaric than their counterparts in England-his capital steadily grows.
At this point the Life partakes of the secular
strand of eighteenth-century autobiography in
English, the most notable example of which is,
of course, The Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin.
Ironically, Equiano's mercantile progress toward freedom depends on the slave trade, as
Houston Bakersimilarly observes (Blues 35). The
ships on which Equiano sails with his goods also
carry "live cargo." While he deplores the cruelty
of the white men toward their slaves on the islands, only once does he refer unambiguously to
the slaves on these ships: he deplores the sexual
violation of the female slaves by the white sailors
as an affront to the chastity of African womanhood. His silence on the broader issue of the
slaves' condition may indicate a reluctance,
common to the ex-slave narrators,to alienate the
white audience by providing too graphic or detailed a chronicle of the evils perpetrated by
whites against black slaves. At this point in the
Life, Equiano is a grown man; he can no longer
assume the protective mask of the newly kidnapped, uncomprehending child who innocently
and openly reportsthe atrocities he witnesses. To
transform himself from the status of property, he
101
has had to acquire property of his own (ultimately, himself) and, along with it, the white culture's reverence for profit. Now he must filter his
perceptions through the language and values of
the white man he has to some extent become.
Embracing English mercantilism entangles
Equiano in numerous further ambiguities regardingthe slave trade. Though at various points
he carries out his stated intention in the narrative
and argues for the abolition of slavery altogether,
at other points he argues contradictorily that the
master should treat his slaves humanely because
it is in his best economic interests to do so: "But
by changing your conduct, and treating your
slaves as men, every cause of fear would be banished. They would be faithful, honest, intelligent
and vigorous; and peace, prosperity, and happiness, would attend you" (81). Equiano undermines his explicit antislavery argument here, but
the subtler project of positioning himself as a legitimate reformer within British society-the
projectthat depends on his readers'accepting him
as one of them-goes forward unhindered. His
posture as an antislavery activist within the narrative has already been compromised by his earlier assertion that the Ibo people practice a
superior, more compassionate form of slavery.
Were he to express the abhorrence he must have
felt at the condition of his fellow Africans in the
hold of the slave ship, the more subversive narrative feat-the one that amounts to social insurgency-would fail. And the phrase "treating
your slaves as men," in any case, quietly restores
the black slave to the human condition.
Eventually, having amassed the sum required,
Equiano wins his manumission. He soon discovers, however, that the black person's freedom in
the West Indies is even more fragile than it is in
England. In perfect accordance with Patterson's
model, Equiano repeatedly reminds the reader
that the freed black person is at the mercy of the
white person no less than is the slave. Equiano's
first impulse on gaining his freedom is to sail immediately for England. His captain, however,
presses him to remain a crew member on the
ship. Equiano agrees because he feels an inevitable debt of gratitude for his manumission.
When Equiano finally attempts to insist to the
102
BetweenSlaveryand Freedom
captain that he be releasedfrom the crew, he finds
yet another obstacle in his path:
I had lent my Captain some money, which I now
wanted, to enable me to prosecute my intentions.
This I told him; but when I applied for it, though I
urged the necessity of my occasion I met with so
much shuffling from him that I began at last to be
afraid of losing my money, as I could not recover it
by law. For as I have already mentioned, that
throughout the West Indies no black man's testimony is admitted, on any occasion, againstany white
person whatever, and therefore my own oath would
have been of no use.
(119)
Legally, the voice of the black person is not permitted to sound in colonial(ist) white society. This
silencing,the same condition that Equiano sensed
immediately as a newly enslaved child, is the social situation that necessitates the strategy I have
been outlining: the subversive re-creation of the
narrative self.
Despite little change in his actual existence,
Equiano clings to his nominal freedom tenaciously and continues searching for a language
in which he can speak authoritatively within
white culture. Ultimately, he turns to Christian
Scripturefor solace. Equiano had heard the Reverend George Whitefield, one of the leaders of
the Methodist revival, speak in Philadelphia in
1766 and had, unsurprisingly,been deeply moved
by the Methodists' emphasis on ministering to
the sufferingand on recognizing the personal liberty of all human beings, including blacks.
Equiano's Life enters into the other dominant
tradition of eighteenth-century autobiography in
English at this point: the spiritual life. The Reverend John Wesley, another leader of the Methodist revival, encouraged converts to write
autobiographies as a means to moral self-assessment and spiritualreflection (Costanzo 50). Both
the secular and the spiritual autobiographical
traditions with which Equiano allies his narrative
carrywith them a cultural authority that accomplishes for the Life as a whole what Equiano
strives to achieve for the narrative self: reconstitution as a credibly white and English phenomenon. But his discovery of the power of Christian
Scripture is primarily important because it instantly provides him with an unerring means of
circumventing the white person's language and
its closed categories of meaning. While that language has proved shifting and unreliable and
white persons will not overtly acknowledge a
black person's voice, Equiano finds it possible to
engage in a true dialogue with God, who "hear[s]
and answer[s]" his prayers (136). Equiano's
lengthy account of his struggle to convert to
Christianity culminates in a telling description of
his spiritual rebirth:
In the evening of the same day, as I was reading and
meditating on the fourth chapter of the Acts, twelfth
verse, under the solemn apprehensions of eternity
. . . the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul
with his bright beams of heavenly light; and in an
instant, as it were, removing the veil, and letting
light into a dark place. (Isa. xxv. 7.) I saw clearly,
with the eye of faith, the crucified Saviour bleeding
on the cross on Mount Calvary: the Scriptures became an unsealed book. . . I then clearlyperceived,
that by the deeds of the law no flesh living could be
justified. ... It was given me at that time to know
what it was to be born again. (John iii. 5.). . . This
was indeed unspeakable, and, I firmly believe, undeniable to many.
(142-43)
Equiano has found in Scripture, not only consolation but the "authoritative word" (Bakhtin
342) that will, at least within his own narrative,
free him from the racial and linguistic hierarchy
created and maintained by the white master. The
Bible is the text that supercedes all others in European culture, and it is as well the only text to
which Equiano can claim an access unmediated
by another person. It becomes for Equiano an
"unsealedbook" by the power of God, in marked
contrast to the dehumanizing silence of the book
with which he attempts to speak earlier. As the
power of Scripture reveals itself to him, it also
begins to intermingle with his own speech to an
extent unprecedented in the narrative. Equiano
infuses his text, in this way, with the authority of
Scripture. That authority-an authority "undeniable to many"-has become his by virtue of
his rebirth. The phrase "undeniable to many"
leaves open the possibility that the Bible may in
fact not be the ultimate authority; those who are
not among the "many" may deny its power. Perhaps Equiano implicitly acknowledges here the
Susan M. Marren
competing validity of a non-Christian, African
identity and its sources of authority. He clearly
recognizes, however, that within the white reader's ideological framework, biblical authority is
"undeniable."
Whereas earlier in the text he pleads directly
with the readerto extend justice to the black person, now Equiano claims the authority to intercede with God for the white reader:
Now the Bible was my only companion and comfort;
I prized it much, with many thanks to God that I
could read it for myself, and was not left to be tossed
about or led by man's devices and notions. The
worth of a soul cannot be told-May the Lord give
the reader an understanding in this!
(144)
This gesture is a far more potent rhetoricaldevice
for him than direct address to the reader can be.
By speaking for the reader, Equiano removes
himself from abject dependence on the reader's
good graces and willingness to understand him.
While Equiano clearly finds Christian Scripture,
in Bakhtinian terms, "internally persuasive," it
is useful to him in the narrative as the only "authoritative word" likely to be acknowledged by
nearly all his white contemporaries.
V
Speaking for another to God is the gesture of an
equal; it may even be an assertion of power. And
by the end of the Life, where Equiano recounts
his conversion, he has subtly established his narrative self as the reader'speer. But by what social
and cultural coordinates can this equality be
mapped? At one moment in the narrative, after
Equiano has both bought himself a tenuous freedom and converted to Calvinist Christianity, the
reader is startled by incontrovertible evidence of
his liminality. Equiano has agreed to serve as
overseer on a plantation near Jamaica belonging
to a benevolent white man, Dr. Irving. The
following passage registers Equiano's fluid, antistructural positioning, between allegiances and
between discrete political identities:
Our vessel being readyto sail for the Musquito shore,
I went with the Doctor on board a Guineaman, to
103
purchase some slaves to carrywith us, and cultivate
a plantation; and I chose them all of my own
(154)
countrymen.
A slippagehas occurredin the conceptual racial
dichotomy that ordinarily obtains for white
readers. In this passage Equiano appears both as
the slaves' countryman and as a surrogate for
their white owner. White readers cannot help
markingthe singularityof the situation:they have
come to regard this narrator as an individual of
the highest caliber,as a countryman exemplifying
many of the best qualities of British culture, and
suddenly black slaves are his countrymen as well.
Instead of resolving the inherent contradiction,
the narrative I transcends it, momentarily illuminating a transformed social terrain.
As if to underscore this utterly revolutionary
possibility, Equiano narratively becomes white
at one moment on his voyage with Dr. Irving.
Four Musquito Indians are sailingwith them, and
Equiano undertakes to instruct one of them in
Christiandoctrine. At first receptive to Equiano's
teaching, the Indian prince has suddenly become
reluctant, and his recalcitrancedisturbs Equiano:
I endeavoured to persuade him as well as I could,
but he would not come; and entreated him very
much to tell me his reasons for acting thus. At last
he asked me,-"How comes it that all the white men
on board, who can read and write, observe the sun
and know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk,
only excepting yourself?"I answeredhim, the reason
was that they did not fear God; and that if any of
them died so, they could not go to, or be happy with,
God.
(154)
Equiano does not comment on the Indian's designation of him as white. Far from being disconcerted by it, he indicates by his silence that he
shares that vision of himself. The Indian prince's
characterization of white men as able to "read
and write, observe the sun and know all things"
is yet another version of the list of salient qualities
associated with whiteness in eighteenth-century
English culture. None of these characteristics,of
course, pertains to actual skin color; that seems
to have become irrelevant. And once again,
Equiano fits the description nicely. And when he
answers the Indian prince he speaks as a white
BetweenSlaveryand Freedom
104
man-as one who has convinced the books to
speak and thus has learned "how all things had
a beginning" (43).
VI
The humanitarian social climate of the day was
hospitable to Equiano's reform posture. As the
Life unfolds, Equiano lifts the rhetorical I from
its place in a harmoniously structured African
order and gradually embeds it in a new context:
the established social order of late-eighteenthcentury England. Asserting himself as an Englishman, he manages to lull readers into a sense
that he is both in and of English society and thus
that his protests against elements of that social
order are the protests of one whose differences
with it are fully resolvable within the existing
structure. When the Life suddenly presents startling evidence of the liminality of this I, readers
must confront this other's likeness to themselves
and seriously contemplate a challenge not merely
to the content of English words but to the form
of the language. This challenge, as Norton observes (72), is revolutionary. The conflict that
Equiano wrestles with in the Life-between his
commitment to speaking as an African for his
fellow Africans and the necessity of speaking as
a white Englishman to make himself credible in
eighteenth-century England-is transcended by
the autobiographical I; and this transcendence
impels the reimagining of both individual and
collective identities, the identities of narrator,
reader, and polity.
There is a moment in the Life when Equiano
communicates the danger involved in his desire
to assert a self in writing. It is 1773. Several years
have elapsed since he purchased his "freedom,"
and he is accompanying Constantine Phipps on
the Arctic exploration that will come closer to
reaching the North Pole than any earlier voyage
has. He resolvesto keep a journal of this "singular
and interesting" expedition (129). This is the first
indication in the narrative of his desire to write
the text of his life. His attempt to do so, however,
accidentally causes a fire that nearly consumes
him. Though he knows that it will be hazardous
to reenter the captain's storeroom with a lighted
candle, and though he has expressly been forbidden to do so, he cannot prevent himself: "but at
last, not being able to write my journal in any
other part of the ship, I was tempted again to
venture by stealth with a light in the same cabin,
though not without considerable fear and dread
on my mind" (129). Equiano's willingness to risk
self-immolation indicates how urgently he feels
the need to construct a self and to render that
self in terms of his own choosing.
Nearly one hundred years later, in a narrative
for which Equiano's Life serves as a model, Frederick Douglass capturesthe poignancy of his own
journey to the scene of writing: "My feet have
been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with
which I am writing might be laid in the gashes"
(Baker,Narrative72). With this compelling image
Douglass establishes himself at once as the illiterate, suffering child-slave and as the articulate
freedman and visionary who offers his narrative
to readers.Above all else, Equiano's legacy to the
tradition of African American autobiographical
writing is the gift of envisioning a transgressiveI
within whom proliferating contradictions impel
not social death but ambivalence, fluidity, and
freedom. 10
Notes
'My phrasing here echoes Norton's discussion of the extension and re-creation of the self in writing (23-24).
2I am drawing on Victor Turner's elaboration of the innovative power of the liminal, to which I return below. See
Turner 14-15, 231-70.
3OttobahCugoano, born among the Fanti people of Ghana
in 1757, published his treatise, Thoughts and Sentiments on
the Evil of Slavery, in 1787; Ignatius Sancho, born in 1729
aboarda slave ship conveying his mother and fatherto slavery
in the West Indies, published a collection of letters that went
through five editions between 1782 and 1803. For a more
detailed analysis of these texts, see Sandiford, chs. 3 and 4.
4Arguingthat Equiano'sdedication is deeply ironic, Wilfred
Samuels asks how a nation of "liberal sentiments," "humanity," and "glorious freedom" can justify involvement in a
slave trade that tears individuals from their families (65). But
Equiano was separatedfrom his family, and most cruelly from
his sister, by African slave traders who sold him into African
slavery. The profound irony arises later in the narrativewhen
Equiano attempts to hold up African slavery as morally su-
Susan M. Marren
perior to the European practice. The "tender connections" to
which Equiano refers might well be interpreted as those between himself and his African masters. His desire to justify
and even celebrateAfrican slaverycomplicates any antislavery
position he assumes here or elsewhere.
5Arguing that Equiano's most important purpose in the
Life is to re-createa "single self" as an outgrowth of his idealized Africanidentity, Samuelsdistinguishesa "disguisedvoice"
in the narrative that corresponds to the hidden African self
(66). Like William L. Andrews, Samuels discusses Equiano
as if a clear bifurcation separated the writer's African and
European or Westernized selves. Therefore, while Samuels
correctly notes that Equiano's African identity has been idealized, he fails to recognize that it has not been idealized as
African.
6Bakhtindiscusses the "polemical" function of the uncomprehending presence in the text (403-04).
7Here again I rely on Bakhtin's language. His notion of
"double-voiced discourse," which is always "internally dialogized" in that it always embeds a concentrated potential dialogue between two distinct worldviews, captures the
ambivalent quality of the transgressiveI at any given instant.
8JamesAlbert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw publishedA Narrative
ofltheMost RemarkableParticularsin the Life of James Albert
Uka\'saw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As Related by
Himsellfin 1770. John Marrantpublished his Indian captivity
tale, The Narrative of the Lord's Wonderidl Dealings with
John Marrant, a Black, in 1785. The poet John Jea published
his autobiography, The Li/e, HIistor, and Unparalled Sufferings of John Jea, sometime between 1800 and 1830. For a
more detailed history and analysis of this trope in the African
American literarytradition, see Gates, Signif'ing 127-69.
9SondraO'Neale argues that such simplified definitions of
"black" and "white" evolved in Calvinist tradition from the
belief that skin color was a visible sign of predestination or
divine election. Although the color black often functions as
a positive symbol in the Bible, sanctions for the slave trade
based on biblical color imagery arose from distorted interpretations of that imagery. For examples of black as a positive
biblical symbol, O'Neale refersthe reader to the Song of Solomon 1.5-6, in which the female persona twice identifies herself as black. O'Neale also assertsthat sin in the Bible is much
more commonly associated with the color scarlet than with
black. Centuries of theologians in England and New England,
however, had failed to teach the positive contexts for "black."
The eighteenth-century audience thus inherited a long tradition of corrupted connotations of blackness that extended
themselves to the secular realm (146).
1?Iwould like to thank Jay Robinson, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., David Artis, and especially Rafia Zafar for their illumi-
105
nating comments and helpful suggestions regarding earlier
drafts of this paper.
WorksCited
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century
of Afro-AmericanAutobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana:
U of Illinois P, 1986.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature:A VernacularTheory. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1984.
, ed. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Bakhtin, M. M. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic
Imagination:Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin.Trans.Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Holquist. Austin: U
of Texas P, 1981. 259-422.
Bhabha, Homi K. "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the
Margins of the Modern Nation." Nation and Narration.
Ed. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291-322.
Costanzo, Angelo. Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano
and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography.New York:
Greenwood, 1987.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution: 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Gates, Classic Slave Narratives 1-186.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives.
New York: NAL, 1987.
. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial"
Self Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
Norton, Anne. Reflections on Political Identity. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
O'Neale, Sondra. "A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley's
Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol." Early American Literature 21 (1986): 144-65.
Patterson,Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative
Study. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1982.
Samuels, Wilfred. "Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African." Black American LiteratureForum 19 (1985): 6469.
Sandiford, Keith A. Measuring the Moment: Strategies of
Protest in Eighteenth-CenturyAfro-English Writing.Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1988.
Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic
Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.