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5. Speaking as “the African” Olaudah Equiano’s Moral Argument against Slavery
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5. Speaking as “the African” Olaudah Equiano’s Moral Argument against Slavery While engaged with many of the same Enlightenment discourses as Wheatley’s poems, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself 1 makes use of a significantly different politics. Equiano marshals the army of contemporary metaphors at his disposal to make a highly articulate argument against slavery on the basis of Christian morality. In so doing, he weaves a discourse as compelling as any philosophical discourse of his day. His approach has the dual effect of disputing the moral arguments in favor of slavery and serving to demonstrate his own humanity by adopting the cultural pose of philosopher and saint. Indeed, Equiano’s narrative goes so far as to suggest the moral superiority of people of color over whites (an idea that would not achieve fullest articulation until over forty years later, with the publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1831). While most critics of Equiano tend to conflate the distinction between Equiano the author of the narrative and Equiano the subject of the narrative, my reading focuses almost exclusively on Equiano the author and the way in which he styles his narrative testimony. Through a narrative subject persona of innocence that learns from the things that happen to him, Equiano forces on his readers a defamiliarization of what they understand as 120 normative. From the narrative subject’s perspective, then, the reader comes to see the strange quality of the events that the naive narrator takes as given. Consider the following example, when Equiano reports on his capture: The first object that saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship. . . . I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too, differing so much from ours, their long hair,2 and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment , that if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with the meanest slave in my own country. (32–33) From Equiano’s earlier discussion of slavery in his own country and how vastly it differs in character from European slavery, his preference for slavery in Africa here reads all the more poignantly . In this instance, the innocent narrator along with his reader, unlike the experienced author, can be bewildered at the treatment the subject Equiano receives or marvel at the strange customs that appear to be normative among the whites. This establishes a position from which one can make the kind of ironic critique that Equiano perfects in his narrative. My discussion of the Life focuses primarily on chapter 5 of the narrative, the climax of the narrative’s moral argument. Modern-day critics have read Equiano’s narrative in a variety of different ways and toward a variety of different ends. Keith Sandiford and Angelo Costanzo3 both read Equiano’s narrative primarily as spiritual autobiography. Houston A. Baker equates Speaking as “the African” 121 [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:57 GMT) the slave’s emancipation with his mastery of the economics of slavery and claims Equiano’s text as the urtext of African American discourse grounded on economic ideology.4 Joseph Fichtelberg revises Baker’s reading by resisting Baker’s exclusion of all but the economic model, claiming the need to locate Equiano’s narrative in “the context of more comprehensive discursive models.”5 Equiano’s narrative clearly functions as a discursive site that engages the variety of debates and discourses that cohere around the question of slavery. That is, the narrative itself elicits such a variety of critical responses because a “good” slave narrative must respond to a number of different academic debates currently waged around the institution of slavery. Fichtelberg makes precisely this point in his critique of Baker’s reading of Equiano: The problem here involves a conflict between Baker’s essentially static model of discursive formation, derived from Foucault , and his activist need for cultural resistance, derived from Marx...