ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE TEACHING GUIDE
The Interesting
Narrative of the Life
of Olaudah Equiano
Joe Lockard
Antislavery Literature Project
Arizona State University
January 2016
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Joe Lockard Antislavery Literature Project Arizona State University January 2016 1 Table of Contents Introduction: Olaudah Equiano and Modernism 3 7 9 Joe Lockard Teaching Equiano’s Interesting Narrative Joe Lockard and Shi Penglu Cross‐cultural Study Questions 2 Introduction: Olaudah Equiano and Modernism Joe Lockard Olaudah Equiano was a radically modernized African. His narrative is one of transformation from a village boy into a Europeanized man familiar with naval technologies, new political and religious beliefs, and transatlantic culture. This modernist narrative arrives in tandem with a crime narrative: Equiano's introduction to modernity comes at the cost of genocide against African peoples and his own commodification as a slave. Equiano is both a modern subject and reified product of modernization. Absent the crimes and violence of enslavement witnessed in Equiano’s autobiography, there would be no modernization as part of a global system. This is a familiar paradox of the historic colonial experience. Whether British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, or American colonialism was involved, exploitative criminal acts established and enabled a modern subjectivity. It is a paradox deeply embedded in the modernisms of the Enlightenment and post‐Enlightenment European imperialism. As European empires expand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they produce subjects who come to be defined by the imperial language and culture even as these colonized subjects reject the imposition of colonial practices, policies and authority. Such resistance was to contribute to the collapse of these empires in India, Indochina, Africa and elsewhere, just as Equiano’s contribution to British abolitionism was to assist in ending the slave trade and eventually bring an end to slavery in the Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Equiano is as British as he is African; he is as much of the Americas as he is of Africa and Europe; he is Gustavus Vassa just as he is Olaudah Equiano. As Michael Janis points out, however, the ‘double consciousness’ created by tensions between identities can function for empowerment and creative expression as much as generate alienation.1 Such dualities empower and shape autobiographies of cultural reconciliation. A frequent strategy of these autobiographies is to praise a colonizer's culture while criticizing its racism as a betrayal of the same culture's ideals. One problem inhering in such writing projects is that no real contradiction exists. The exploitation and racism generated by Euro‐american colonialism are intrinsic elements, not an aberration. Equiano discusses slavery as though it were a betrayal of British ideals of liberty and Christian ideals of human fraternity. In the first lines of the preface, Equiano addresses white British legislators: 1
Michael Janis, Africa after Modernism: Transitions in Literature, Media and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2011) 10.
3 By the horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender connexions 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 freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature. Several interpretations are available. Equiano may be read as a fully colonized speaker, one who is willing to forgive a traumatic history in return for social acceptance; as a practical politician concerned to recruit public support for the abolition of slavery; or as having engaged in understandable deceit to accommodate a society that had robbed him to an unimaginable degree. At different moments in the text of Interesting Narrative each of these interpretive possibilities gains strength and credibility. In Great Britain and other European nations engaged in slaveholding, those generous concepts of liberty and human fraternity that Equiano recites, to the extent they were extended to Africans, were entirely subordinate to trade and profit. European social philosophers did not formulate such concepts with Africans in mind in any case. Positing a contradiction was a polite mask over this economic reality, since liberty for Africans meant loss of capital. Since such contradictions are so manifestly apparent, the work of autobiographical reconciliation remains awkward and unachievable. Under conditions of subordination where honest self‐expression is impolitic or very risky behavior, narrative assimilation occurs. The story becomes one that a colonizer master‐class, some of whose more open‐minded or squeamish members are uncomfortable with their roles, wants to hear. Yet it cannot be too graphic because that would offend polite sensibilities. When Equiano writes of the hellish slave‐ship hold that “The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable” he withholds the worst details because they cannot be described adequately nor comprehended sufficiently by a free readership. The experience remains untranslatable. In any case, a master‐class has limited ability to imagine the sufferings it inflicts. Untranslatability and incomprehension push Equiano’s narrative towards palatable phrasings, towards formulations that appeal for sympathy rather than express outrage, and towards assimilation into narrative acceptability. If he speaks of “the cruelty of the whites” there is an implicit exemption granted to sympathetic white readers. In short, Equiano voices a carefully modulated complaint and strong appeal when he would be justified in writing an enraged indictment against British society. His moderation constitutes recognition of the practical need to a need to assist enslaved Africans by enlisting political support within Great Britain. Equiano tells a tale of personal transformation into an enlightened free man and modern British subject, someone whose example represents what emancipated Africans might accomplish. That assimilation to European culture takes the form of demonstrating that Africans too can become capitalist small‐holders. Equiano narrates a story of a poor and possession‐less man who rises out of poverty by virtue of hard work and personal talent. This is 4 a story that finds its analogs in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1771 and following years) and Jean‐Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782‐1789). Autobiographical stories of self‐made Euro‐american men who prospered despite humble beginnings gained currency during the late eighteenth century with its new emphasis on democratic male equality. Equiano’s narrative relates values that were prized under capitalism – entrepreneurship, initiative, thrift, rapid learning, and personal honesty. Yet the self‐invention narrative also echoes with older cultural models – Joseph in Egypt, for example – and lends itself to trans‐cultural comparison, such as Han Xin’s early Han dynasty story of social achievement despite origins in poverty and humiliation. The identification of self‐making with European origin represents a false modernism, one based on ethno‐centricity instead of a universally available opening of consciousness. Equiano complicates the stereotypical equation of modernization with Westernization; his story emphasizes that for many people modernity arrived as vicious, genocidal compulsion. The first shift away from Africa comes when Equiano clambers aboard the slave ship in which he is to be transported. As critic A. Robert Lee phrases this shift, amidst Equiano’s fears that he has fallen into the hands of cannibals “[H]e cannot but see himself as entered into precisely a kind of alien space‐time.”2 Equiano writes his life, according to Lee, as “actual and yet a species of Gulliverism, literal voyage yet the semblance of dream voyage." In Equiano’s account of how he became modern, the mechanical measurement of time and figurative representation separate him from an older mystical relation to objects. On a Caribbean plantation, he writes: The first object that engaged my attention was a watch which hung on the chimney, and was going. I was quite surprised at the noise it made, and was afraid it would tell the gentleman any thing I might do amiss: and when I immediately after observed a picture hanging in the room, which appeared constantly to look at me, I was still more affrighted, having never seen such things as these before. At one time I thought it was something relative to magic; and not seeing it move I thought it might be some way the whites had to keep their great men when they died, and offer them libation as we used to do to our friendly spirits. Equiano lives in a new world where temporal and representational organization have altered dramatically, leaving his previous Africa‐born consciousness fractured. At first he resists, believing these objects to contain magic spirits that watched and disciplined him. His past‐
tense re‐telling of these encounters emphasizes that this was an older uninitiated self and that now he functions within rationalist norms. Equiano’s unitary and linear conceptions of time, space and their representation fracture and get reconstructed, an experience crucial for his education as a modern Western subject. This does not mean that Equiano leaves mysticism aside, only that he adopts a new European form by becoming a convert to Christianity. He initially attributes the phenomenon of snow, for 2
A. Robert Lee, Designs of Blackness: Studies in the Literature of African‐America (London: Pluto Press, 1998) 22‐
23. 5 instance, to a personified grand old monarch in the sky scattering it about. Eventually Equiano adopts Methodism because it offers equality and fellowship, a substitute for the family he lost in Africa. At this date Methodism and Quakerism were the two Protestant denominations that at least nominally recognized equality between blacks and whites, although practice could be quite different. When Equiano embraces predestinarianism, not fully characteristic of Methodism, it seems a choice that is only nominally theological. Rather, Equiano finds in predestination an explanation for his unique experiences as an emancipated and widely‐
traveled ex‐slave. As he writes in the opening paragraphs, “I might say my sufferings were great: but when I compare my lot with that of most of my countrymen, I regard myself as a particular favourite of Heaven, and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life.” Equiano views himself as unaccountably living within a state of divine grace and benefiting daily from its extension. Early Methodism was split on the question of predestination, with John Wesley rejecting this Calvinist belief and George Whitefield accepting it. But this is not a question that appears to trouble Equiano who repeatedly cites ‘providence’ as reconciliation between traumatic experience and personal survival. Providence had a special appeal for Christianized African writers seeking to explain how they achieved the distinctions of emancipation and literacy. For Equiano, providence was the means of mental survival and physical endurance. “Every extraordinary escape, or signal deliverance, either of myself or others, I looked upon to be effected by the interposition of Providence,” he writes. Although now framed in normative terms of western Christianity, there is no essential difference between his faith in an animistic African spirit‐system and its European metaphysical counterpart. Eventually Equiano, now a free man, falls into despair and recovers through a Christian conversion that brings him inner joy (chapter 10). He participates in late eighteenth‐century British evangelical revivalism, a movement characterized by its reaction against rationalist and deist philosophies. At such moments we encounter anti‐modernism in the Interesting Narrative, especially given that the movement of Enlightenment thought was away from predictability as expressed through predestination and into secular and religious philosophies emphasizing free agency. For evangelicals, the modern world was an invitation to sin and spiritual self‐destruction. While this certainly explains part of Equiano’s preoccupation with sinful behavior, his concerns can be distinguished from his white brethren. The providential discourse that Equiano voices originates from an absence of free agency for enslaved Africans and an effort to frame enslavement and post‐emancipation life as having a greater meaning incomprehensible to humans. Providence levels slaves and free people: all are subject to the dictate of divine will, and so Equiano embraces the doctrine of salvation by grace. It has been argued many times that one of the distinguishing features of modernism lies in a new consciousness that appearances deceive and that surfaces are false. An underlying structure must be discerned and this structure relies on borrowed interconnections. In this case, Equiano’s life itself provides the interconnection between extraordinarily rich cultural and geographic experiences. The ethnographic conclusion of Equiano’s narrative lies in his affirmation of a fundamental human commonality, one about which he has learned both 6 through spiritual fellowship and the mundane practices of everyday life. He is an anti‐racialist, one who recognizes the contradiction between individual self‐realization and a predetermined racial subordination. This has become a more common consciousness today with the emergence of global post‐modernity that relies heavily on a preceding history of transatlantic capitalism but denies the continuing function of race and other measures of subordination. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, with all its contradictions and achievements, reminds us of the incompleteness of the larger human emancipation he sought. * * * Teaching Equiano’s Interesting Narrative Joe Lockard and Shi Penglu Fifty years ago, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was a text known largely to historical specialists. After nine editions during its author’s lifetime, it remained out of print between 1834 and 1967. Today it has become one of the most popular texts to study and discuss Atlantic slavery. Since its original publication in 1789 over five hundred full, abridged, or anthologized editions have been published, including many translations. A significant accompanying pedagogical literature has emerged during the past two decades. First we shall review potential pedagogical themes in discussing Equiano, and then we will present a series of cross‐cultural study questions. Theme: Bio‐Historical. In recent years Equiano (1745?‐1797) has been both the subject of two major scholarly biographies by James Walvin and Vincent Carretta, as well as the subject of considerable historical controversy. Equiano’s birth in Nigeria was accepted on the basis of his autobiographical testimony, however Carretta’s research on baptismal and naval records raised a question of whether Equiano might have been born in South Carolina. This question is unresolved and likely may remain that way. There are strong opinions on both sides of this debate, but no one questions the fundamental facticity of this narrative and a conclusive answer will make little difference in readings of Equiano. Equiano’s narrative lends itself to chronological discussion of his life’s stages: (a) youth in Ibo‐
land (current‐day Nigeria), including his native culture and the circumstances of his initial enslavement; (b) his transport on the Middle Passage and years as a slave in the Caribbean under Michael Henry Pascal, James Doran, and Robert King; and (c) emancipation, independent life, and spiritual crisis. In discussing these stages, it is important that students realize that Equiano has antislavery political purposes that bind together his description of these stages. Underlining this point, Equiano concludes with a petition to the Queen "supplicat[ing] your Majesty's compassion for millions of my African countrymen, who groan under the lash of 7 tyranny in the West Indies." He is presenting to British readers his life story as an illustration of the potential that can be unloosed if slaves throughout Britain’s colonial empire gain their freedom. He is a successful citizen telling his story so as to persuade readers that Great Britain would benefit from universal emancipation. Centering discussion on Equiano as a self‐modeled republican citizen often produces questions about the opportunities and limitations for a black in late 18th‐century Britain. Today Olaudah Equiano is often referred to as ‘the father of Black Britain,’ referring to the post‐World War II growth of the Caribbean and African communities that provide important elements of contemporary multi‐cultural Great Britain. Students who will be encountering global society should become informed that multiculturalism emerges from prolonged historical processes, and Equiano provides an example of how an African diaspora established itself in Europe. Theme: Freedom. One reason that slave narratives continue to interest readers is that they create arguments and understandings on the nature of freedom. The nature of freedom was an endless subject of debate in the European Enlightenment, in which Equiano’s narrative participated. Slavery became the state against which liberty was judged. The French philosopher Jen‐Jacques Rousseau despised slavery as an offense against human liberty and viewed it as one of the sources of social inequality, writing that slaveholders used “their old slaves to acquire new, thought of nothing but subduing and enslaving their neighbors; like ravenous wolves, which, having once tasted human flesh, despise every other food and thenceforth seek only men to devour.” Yet it was Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and a large slaveholder, who adopted Rousseau’s ideas about equality based on human freedom when Jefferson began the US Declaration of Independence with the statement “all men are created equal”. Equiano’s narrative can be discussed with students as highlighting the gap between words and reality, and as illustrating social hypocrisy that limited the idea of freedom by race and gender. Yet it may also be argued that the concept of universal human equality is an ideal and Equiano’s narrative represents an effort to expand the domain of human freedom. Theme: Religion. Equiano participates in a millennial tradition of describing a spiritual conversion to Christianity. The conventions of this tradition can be traced back to the apostle Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in the early 1st century BCE (see Acts 9). Those conventions include recognition of divine grace, repudiation of past wrong‐doing, a transformational clarity of vision, an experience of salvation, and a life newly‐dedicated to testifying to others about Christ. Chapter 10 contains a lengthy description of Equiano’s embrace of evangelical Christianity. He writes of this moment of spiritual crisis: “When I considered my poor wretched state I wept, seeing what a great debtor I was to sovereign free grace. Now the Ethiopian was willing to be saved by Jesus Christ, the sinner's only surety, and also to rely on none other person or thing for salvation. … The amazing things of that hour can never be told‐‐it was joy in the Holy Ghost! I felt an 8 astonishing change; the burden of sin, the gaping jaws of hell, and the fears of death, that weighed me down before, now lost their horror; indeed I thought death would now be the best earthly friend I ever had. Such were my grief and joy as I believe are seldom experienced. I was bathed in tears, and said, What am I that God should thus look on me the vilest of sinners? I felt a deep concern for my mother and friends, which occasioned me to pray with fresh ardour; and, in the abyss of thought, I viewed the unconverted people of the world in a very awful state, being without God and without hope.” It is important that this moment occurs late in Equiano’s narrative. His autobiographical account has been leading towards this moment. Previously he has learned about and participated in Christian worship. Now he becomes a fervent evangelist. In teaching this narrative, it is important to remember that Equiano’s religious history begins in African animist traditions and not neglect that origin. By beginning discussions of Equiano’s religious thought in Africa, class discussion confronts what he and other African peoples lost. It frames the issue of religious conversion within a surrounding history of genocide, slavery, and generations of oppression. African adoptions of Christianity became a means of forming faith communities that resisted this oppression. Equiano describes this conversion in terms of his own conscience, but in the late eighteenth century African slaves in the Americas were adopting Christianity in large numbers. One not‐infrequent student reaction in discussing Equiano’s conversion is ‘He lost his family and his home, and he suffered terribly. But he found Christ and salvation.’ This type of response to the reading can be challenged with a question: ‘Is finding spiritual comfort in Christianity sufficient rationalization for genocide and the enslavement of millions?’ Cross‐Cultural Study Questions 1. One common approach in US and British university classrooms to discussing Equiano’s narrative is to consider the text as a spiritual autobiography. The elements of personal history for conducting this conversation are clear. Equiano undergoes a conversion to Methodism, gets baptized, and develops a consciousness associated with evangelical Christian culture of the latter eighteenth century. He comes to believe that divine providence guides his life. Yet these facts alone represent a deceptively simple approach. What are the problems of accepting Equiano’s conversion at face value as free choice? What does he lose in this conversion? What coercive forces does Western society apply to create Equiano’s spiritual transformation? How does Equiano come to equate Christian belief with civilizational progress? 9 In larger terms, what did Western society gain – or lose – with the mass religious conversion of African peoples? Was this entirely a story of colonialism and imperialism, or did Christianity contain emancipatory ideas that Africans and the African diaspora were able to use for empowerment and liberation? After considering these questions, turn to a comparison of the modern history of Christianity in China. How much of this discussion about Equiano’s Christian conversion and the role of religion in Western imperialism among can be applied to Chinese historical experience? For example, learn about and discuss the rise of anti‐missionary thought and politics within the May 4th Movement. Are there earlier examples, such as the Eight Nations invasion in 1900, where conflict between domestic and foreign religion played an important role? If Equiano represents a troubling and conflicted case of religious conversion due to belief in European superiority, what similar or different cases can be found in China? 2. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative belongs to a large canon of what critic Paul Gilroy persuasively deemed ‘Black Atlantic’ literature. Gilroy’s heavily influential book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), created a new paradigm that shifted discussion of African expressive culture from single countries to the broad African diaspora created by the Middle Passage and its historical consequences. In his narrative, Equiano resides in Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and England, and visits many more places in his military service and travels. Equiano is in many ways a forerunner of modern migrant workers and travelers. How does this text evidence Equiano’s sense of a larger, trans‐oceanic African community? What are the literary and social implications of such a community? Can this question be asked about the Chinese diaspora across the Pacific Ocean? What texts do you know from Chinese diasporic writers and how do they relate to China? Consider, as Paul Gilroy did, how a modern consciousness emerges from mass trans‐
oceanic migration and encounters with new cultures. How does this begin to occur in nineteenth‐century China? 3. For Equiano to write this autobiography required the sublimation of a great deal of justifiable anger. After all, he had been seized and separated from his family; enslaved and transported to another continent; betrayed and sold away again; and generally treated as a subordinate and unequal human being. Yet throughout Equiano’s narrative there is almost no mention of personal anger. Indeed, in the preface he speaks to his ruling class readers saying – “By the horrors of [the slave] trade was I first torn away from all the tender connexions 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, 10 by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature.” In contradiction to his own story, Equiano praises Britain for its liberality, humanity, and freedom. Why does he praise the freedom of society that allowed his enslavement, or in whose colonial territories English masters routinely tortured slaves (see chap. 5)? Where did his anger of these “horrors” go? How and why does Equiano suppress or express anger in his narrative? Can you identify and discuss Chinese historical or fictional accounts that engage with the question of how we deal with social or personal anger? Considering that Equiano’s personal history and Chinese history were both shaped by colonialism, what commonalities might such angers share? How do we re‐shape anger as a force for productive change rather than a destructive force? 4. As a genre in Western literature, the memoir originated among aristocrats and powerful figures. There was a late‐eighteenth century democratization of the genre that accompanied the European Enlightenment. Autobiographers of humble social origins began publishing their life stories, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau who published his Confessions in 1782 in France, and the famous American printer, politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin whose Autobiography was published in 1788. Life‐writing became a means of explaining how men rose in the world from poor families and advocating for democratic social changes. Such autobiographies often argued that individual initiative was the necessary agent to shape a life that benefited both oneself and society. How does Equiano’s Interesting Narrative correspond with or differ from such new European and American uses of the memoir genre? Given a widespread Euro‐american disbelief in African intellectual capacities, how do race, authorship, and genre intersect in Equiano’s case? Is there a corresponding democratization of the memoir genre in China? Can you name examples and compare them to Equiano? 5. Slavery takes many forms across different cultures. The common denominator is that a person is not free to leave their work. A master owns, does not release, and profits from labor; a master may or may not own a slave’s person, depending on the form of slavery. From the first chapters forward, Equiano describes several types of slavery in this narrative. What are the differences between the slaveries he describes in Africa and the Americas? What types of slavery can be identified in Chinese history? How do these compare with the slaveries of Equiano’s narrative? What roles does gender play in shaping slavery? 6. An often‐cited passage of Equiano’s narrative describes the hold of a slave‐ship: The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated 11 us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. (chap. 2) Approximately a tenth of African slaves died in the Middle Passage transport. The historian Marcus Rediker has pointed out, however, while a key issue, exclusive focus on horrific mortality rates represents a limited approach. He writes that death was only one feature of social terror and an element of a broad human drama. “How many people died can be answered through abstract, indeed bloodless, statistics” Rediker writes, but “how a few resisted terror and how the many experienced terror – and how they in turn resisted it – cannot.”3 Discuss Equiano’s despair in chapter 2 and how he emerges from the experience of the Middle Passage. Are there contemporary forced emigrations that bear any parallel to the 18th‐century slave trade? What are these and how do they compare or differ from the Middle Passage? What narrative literature emerges from these contemporary experiences? See, for example, the collection of present‐day slave narratives at http://antislavery.eserver.org/narratives/contemporary‐slave‐narratives. How can we read the narratives of Equiano and contemporary slaves as autobiographies of invisible and unknown subjects, especially where these subjects never speak? Further, how do we treat inarticulate speakers in literature courses and how can we do better? 7. This memoir records a process of acculturation, self‐refashioning, and assimilation into a Western society. Equiano learns literacy, numeracy, and navigation. He applies this new knowledge to enter into commerce (chaps. 5 and 6). Beginning with trading capital of three‐pence Equiano accumulates the 40 pounds sterling that his master, Mr. King, asks as the price for Equiano to purchase his own freedom. Discuss how cultural knowledge and capitalism interact in this narrative. How does Equiano gain citizenship through self‐education and capitalist practice? What are potential questions and problems associated with linking human rights and social status with possession of capital? 8. Throughout Equiano’s narrative he invokes “providence” for preserving his life and enabling him to rise above his origins as a humble slave. “Providence” refers to a belief in a divine intervention in human affairs and the protective care of God for an individual or community. Equiano writes “I was sensible of the invisible hand of God, which guided 3
Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007) 354. 12 and protected me.” (chap. 10) He invokes providence not only for avoiding dangers and death, but for successful business deals and financial prosperity. For Equiano, God is not only his protector but an invisible business partner. Discuss the function of providence in Equiano’s narrative. In so doing, consider that Equiano provides an extremely rare example for the achievement of freedom and financial success among the millions of Africans who were transported in captivity to the Americas. How might a belief in divine providence provide Equiano with an explanation for his good fortune? Equally, how might invocation of providence conceal the conditions of Equiano’s enslavement, emancipation, and freedom? 13 The Antislavery Literature Project