White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery by Vincent L. Wimbush (review)

“. . . There’s a whole heap of them kinda by-words . . . They all got a hidden meanin’, just like de Bible. Everybody can’t understand what they mean. Most people is thin-brained. They’s born wid they feet under the moon. Some folks is born wid they feet on the sun and they kin seek out de inside meanin’ of words.”

—Zora Neale Hurston, qtd. in Wimbush, Magic, 1 (italics in original)

Without question, books are full of Zora Neale Hurston’s “by-words”: those coded signs. And, as printed works consisting of bound-together pages, they are in fact a type of by-word within themselves. For well over four hundred years, books have represented a significant cornerstone in the development of the West. Since the invention of the Gutenberg press, words on paper have signified culture and civilization. The ability to read and write was identified with knowledge, power, and reason: books as avatars of art and science. By contrast, those nations without bookish traditions were deemed isolated and inarticulate, backward and primitive. Those who lacked literature and did not have letters of their own were considered people devoid of human ethos. In this setting, Vincent L. Wimbush’s White Men’s Magic revisits The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), excavating in Equiano’s by-words, his coded text, a complex “spiritual story” in which the self-professed Ibo man wrote himself into being while exposing the hypocrisy of those who had once held him as a slave (9). (A recent study by Vincent Carretta has raised some doubts about whether or not Equiano was an actual native of Africa or of South Carolina; see “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20 [Dec. 1999]: 96–105).

The story recovered by Wimbush, Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute of Signifying Scriptures at Claremont University, is a nuanced and compelling one. Based largely on a close reading of the primary and secondary record, Wimbush’s analysis uncovers in Equiano’s life story a text full of by-words in which the African author critiques the faith of his masters and denounces them as insincere. That insincerity, Wimbush explains, began long before Equiano was born, starting with the West’s exploitation of the Bible as a tool to justify a deep-seated racial bias. With the discovery of the New World, Europeans whitewashed the Scriptures as they struggled to determine to whom Christianity belonged: its Oriental forebears or its contemporary followers? In this process, the Bible became a fetish of power and Western ethnic nationalism. Within this new interpretation, all Europeans become homogenously white; all Africans were thought savage brutes (see 48–49; 59; 80–81; 107–8). Within this worldview—or, as Wimbush dubs it, “semiosphere”—reading books was mistaken as a form of a magic by Equiano and others who were unfamiliar with the Western technology; accordingly, writing represented a powerful symbol for determining one’s humanity. Identified with oral traditions, Africans and other ethnically different peoples were written out of culture—erased from the pages of the book (70–71).

In this precarious environment, Olaudah Equiano learned not only how to read the book, but also how to write one of his own. In addition to writing himself into existence, to making the Western book speak back, Equiano used the Bible to frame his life story. (For a fuller account of the trope of the talking book, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism [1988], chap. 4, and his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self [1987], chaps. 1–2.) In this appropriation, a literary strategy Wimbush characterizes as “scripturalization,” Equiano achieved two goals at once. First, he celebrated the presence of the African in the Western Bible, highlighting the cultural similarities between his...