Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (review)

In Vincent Carretta black literary history finds its Melville. It is now obvious that a full study of Olaudah Equiano's abolitionist memoir (his only large-scale publication) requires Melville's knowledge of maritime life and seafaring vessels, as well as his familiarity with literature in English and his good ear for allusions. Equiano was representative of black men of the eighteenth century insofar as life at sea was common for them. Indeed, he was more representative of black mariners than of slaves or of Africans. It now seems surprising that so little attention has been previously paid to Equiano as a seaman. Equiano, the African will be a revelation to readers who have focused on small sections of The Interesting Narrative while missing the oceanic scope of the book. Moreover no one else has approached Carretta in providing Equiano's literary allusions, which are critical to an understanding of his abolitionism and his presentation of an African boyhood.

More of a companion to The Interesting Narrative than a biography of its author—though it is probably the best biography than can be written—Equiano, the African is an ambitious contextualization of Equiano's momentous work. Contextualization was also the method James Walvin chose for his study of Equiano, An African's Life (New York, 2000), but no one has studied Equiano so fully as Carretta and rarely has any scholar contextualized any early black author so thoroughly. In the case of Equiano, the thinness of past scholarship has resulted from the attention paid to one part of the book, the account of his boyhood among the Igbo (a group of peoples inhabiting present-day Nigeria). Though hesitant about the evidence he marshals, Carretta suggests that Equiano was actually born in colonial America, in the Carolinas. Equiano, the African brings forward several records of Equiano's American birth, plus the facts that almost all of his information on West Africa had been previously available in abolitionist publications and that the little that was unique on West Africa in The Interesting Narrative is not only highly improbable but also markedly different in style from Equiano's other prose.

Equiano, the African engages with current fields of scholarship in two important ways. It is a meeting of the minds between the intellectual and literary historians who know Equiano's sources and the Africanist scholars who study the eighteenth-century Igbo. The first set of scholars are aware that notwithstanding Equiano's importance as an abolitionist, his representation of West African life was more likely derived from his reading than from any part of his life spent in Africa, while the second set of scholars allows us to see that his Igbos are unrealistic and almost certainly fabricated. Yet there are significant dissenters, such as Paul Lovejoy, who believe that an argument remains for Equiano's Igbo origins. Carretta's book is also a model for future scholarship. The intertextual elements of the writings of early black authors even up to David Walker (writing in 1829 and 1830) are not presently well appreciated or understood, and a restoration of literary (creative, intellectual, religious) context should in the coming years inform new analyses of early black abolitionism and other kinds of early black writing. Carretta is probably right about Equiano's birthplace, but the more important issues in the study are his role in the history of abolitionism and his self-insertion into Anglophone literature. In fact, the Igbo part of The Interesting Narrative is a strategy of his abolitionism and his literary style, so nothing is lost and everything is gained with a more rigorous analysis of Equiano.

One weakness of Equiano, the African is a small but significant miscasting of the spiritual autobiography, one of the genres that provide a structure for The Interesting Narrative. The spiritual autobiography is written from the convert's point of view, so that the key information it contains is interpretive and rhetorical, pointing to the author...