44 pages • 1 hour read
Olaudah EquianoThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1789A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Black Atlantic
The “Black Atlantic” is the idea that Black identity in Western culture is shaped by travel, connections, and exchanges between countries bordering the Atlantic; Paul Gilroy articulates this idea in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1992), noting that this movement is central to how Black people like Equiano fashioned a modern identity for themselves in a world that saw them as eternal outsiders on the margins of Western history. In The Interesting Narrative, Equiano’s identities as a cultural observer and participant in events of note allow him to represent an identity that gives him authority to speak to readers not inclined to see him as authoritative because of his racial identity.
While The Interesting Narrative is certainly a slave narrative, it is also a travel narrative that paints a picture of Equiano as a cultural observer who is able to present strange worlds to his Western readers. Through his vivid descriptions, Equiano interprets the landscapes of the Igbo (located in what is today Nigeria), the Middle Passage, England, the Caribbean, the North Pole, the United States, and South America. Readers of the period would have been familiar with tales of conquest and adventures in the Americas, but they also would have associated such free movement with whiteness.
By writing about travel through the Atlantic world from the perspective of an enslaved and later emancipated Black man, Equiano carves out a place for himself and other Black authors in producing the literature of modern Western culture. This literature is built, in part, on Western conquest, exploration, and war. Equiano’s description of his action at the Battle of Belle Isle and of the North Pole expedition, for example, vividly demonstrate that he is a part of the expansion of European political and economic interests in the West.
By publishing a narrative about his experiences, Equiano helps the reader to understand that it is possible for Black people to be participants in the making of the West and its history, not just objects to be moved around as a part of the slave trade. His account of how he moves around the Black Atlantic, despite living part of that time in slavery, explains in part why this is such a key text in the literature of slavery and freedom.
Slavery and Freedom
The publication of The Interesting Narrative in 1789 makes it one of the earliest, widely read instances of the literature of slavery and freedom. By some accounts, The Interesting Narrative is the quintessential slave narrative, one that includes a three-part structure as the writer moves from early life, to slavery, and then on to freedom. The Interesting Narrative includes key genre conventions of the slave narrative, including authenticating devices designed to bolster the authority of the writer, an account of life as an enslaved person, narration of the horrors of slavery in the life of the writer, testimony about these same horrors in the lives of others, and a call to action that asks readers to participate in ending these abuses. All those key traits are there in the Interesting Narrative, but Equiano’s work is also an unusual representation of slavery and freedom when compared to other slave narratives.
Equiano’s work is distinguished from similar texts because it includes sophisticated and detailed accounts of his Igbo culture of origin, the Middle Passage, and the unusual degree of geographic mobility Equiano had as a Black sailor, even during the period of his enslavement. These distinctions allow Equiano to represent an African culture as whole and complete before the intervention of complicit African traders, Western culture, and the transatlantic slave trade, making his narrative an important part of Black literature in English.
Equiano’s text is also a major contribution that fills in certain gaps in the literature of slavery and freedom. Equiano represents the transatlantic slavery from its beginning with kidnapping in the interior, through the processing and dehumanization of enslaved people before travel to the Americas, the low point of the Middle Passage, and the trauma of slave markets. This end-to-end description is unusual in part because many of the surviving slave narratives are written by people born into slavery in the Americas much later.
Equiano’s description of the Middle Passage, the Atlantic leg of the trip from Africa to the Americas, is another reason this is such a significant text. The Middle Passage is one of the central moments in the induction of people of African descent into Western culture and history, but there are few firsthand accounts to mark that moment. Its inclusion fills in a narrative gap that other primary sources such as ship manifests and the accounts of slave traders and ship personnel cannot.
Equiano’s testimony about the cruelty of his captors and his terror during the Middle Passage would force most of his potential readers to question an economic system that would allow such abuses to be visited on a child. His description of his white captors as potential cannibals and evil spirits is one that presents the slave trade from multiple perspectives: that of a child, an African unexposed to Europeans, and an enslaved person. Representing his white captors as savages and himself as a child of a well-established African culture is a direct intervention in the way that Westerners typically represented people from outside of Western cultures as lacking in civilization. By reversing the usual conventions of African people as uncivilized and Westerners as civilized, Equiano is able to make the larger point that there is a serious moral hazard to the entire British Empire in allowing the slave trade to continue.
As a slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative is one of the seminal works in Black literature in English and the literature of slavery and freedom. Based on some discrepancies in the records of his birth and service in the British Navy, there is some critical debate over whether Equiano’s account is factually autobiographical or is a combination of his life story with recognized accounts of African culture and the Middle Passage. In Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), historian Vincent Carretta relies on these records to make the case that Equiano may well have been born or at least baptized in South Carolina. If we read the Interesting Narrative as a work that is in part or in whole fiction, it is still an important work that seeks to represent in creative literary form the early experience of Black Americans as they moved from slavery to freedom.
Literacy and Identity
Regardless of its status as fiction or nonfiction, The Interesting Narrative allows Equiano to show his mastery of many important literary forms of the day. During the historical moment of the Enlightenment, sometimes called “the Age of Reason” because of its focus on rationality as a lens through which to understand the world and humanity’s place in it, many white Europeans saw Black people as being incapable of reason, a prerequisite for creative and written expression. Equiano’s literacy is substantial evidence for his readers that Black people are capable of reason and creative expression.
Throughout the text, Equiano shows his awareness of the conventions of many literary forms. In his introduction, Equiano notes that “people generally think those memoirs only worthy to be read or remembered which abound in great or striking events, those, in short, which in a high degree excite either admiration or pity: all others they consign to contempt and oblivion” (7). This statement shows his awareness of the perception that literary memoirs are the purview of “great men” like Benjamin Franklin, ones who were at the center of the major events of the day. Equiano, in other words, is well-versed in what should and should not be included in such a text. This point signals that he is both a thoughtful consumer and creator of texts.
There are also several moments when Equiano explicitly tells the reader about his rhetorical choice to skip over more accounts of the horrors of slavery in order to avoid disgusting or boring his readers. His concerns over being too repetitive about the terrifying but banal nature of slavery shows an awareness of walking a tightrope, balancing his desire to provide accurate testimony and avoiding numbing his reader to the real horrors of slavery through description.
Equiano’s awareness of the need to serve the interests of multiple audiences and purposes means, for example, that he describes the abuses aboard to slave ship that transported him from Africa to the West Indies but also the “flying fishes, which surprised [him] very much” (37), a curiosity that would interest the reader. His attention to genre conventions and a knowledge of his audience are indicators of a writer making intentional choices to make his text more literary to maintain reader interest in the service of his larger persuasive task of arguing against slavery.
Finally, the sheer number of genre conventions in this text make it a testimony to Black literacy and reason. Equiano includes prose, poetry, letters that document his emancipation and character, accounts of travel to the Mosquito Coast, legal documents, and many other kinds of writing. This variety allows him to implicitly make the case that he is a man of letters, no small argument for a man who initially taught himself the rudiments of reading and writing. His use of these multiple forms and conventions allows him to prove that he is indeed “almost an Englishman” (94) as he claims later in the text.
