On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

2. The Future Perfect King:Olaudah Equiano and thePoetics of Experience

t w o The Future Perfect King: Olaudah Equiano and the Poetics of Experience Is a life after death possible for Oroonoko, Aphra Behn’s royal slave? He shows no interest at all in Christian conceptions of an afterlife. To be honest , Behn herself does not show much interest in the issue either, but at one point the narrator tries to do her duty with regard to Imoinda, ‘‘endeavouring to bring her to the knowledge of the true God’’ (45). But we are told that ‘‘of all the discourses,’’ Oroonoko ‘‘liked that the worst’’ (45). For Oroonoko, it seems, the only conceivable afterlife would be one of honor and reputation, and such an immortality can be secured only in the context of a society ready to receive and sustain such a reputation for glory. But Oroonoko’s end is ‘‘inglorious’’ (5), as Behn admits, and thus does heroic romance run aground in the new world. Behn does not save Oroonoko’s life, nor does she secure his immortal fame according to conventional measures , but she does tap into what I argued in the last chapter was a strange ‘‘power to preserve’’ (5) specific to the new world, as well as its fateful conjunction of race and a deterritorialized sovereignty. For despite the severity 50 Equiano and the Poetics of Experience 51 of Oroonoko’s end, despite his absolute abandonment by both home and host cultures, despite his dismissal of any Christian principle of immortality, Oroonoko does have an extensive afterlife—as a character or type. The influence of Behn’s hero on subsequent European literature— especially in England and in France—has long been recognized.1 But what is its specificity? After all, as Barry Weller has pointed out, the ‘‘conjunction of noble birth and social abjection dates back at least as far as Homer.’’2 Numerous other African nobles and royal slaves followed in Oroonoko’s wake, whose stories were meant to affirm an older, romance-like recognition —all the more powerful for being cross-racial—of certain essential character traits associated with ‘‘noble’’ status.3 But these are not, I submit, Oroonoko’s most significant heirs. It is an odd fact that despite Oroonoko’s equivocal message about both slavery and Christianity, ‘‘the historical fate of the text was emancipationist’’ (Weller 68). It is in the context of the Christian emancipationist discourse of the latter eighteenth century that the most profound implications of Behn’s treatment of race and sovereignty are revealed and extended. The writers of the black Atlantic—John Marrant, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and above all Olaudah Equiano—take up the conjunction of sovereignty and slavery, noble birth and social abjection , within a Christian, especially Pauline, idiom. These writers’ status as hyperbolically deterritorialized subjects—abducted, transported, itinerant —makes them especially sensitive to the ambiguities of Paul’s metaphorics of slavery and salvation. The explorations of the rootless sovereign self offered by these Christian writers reveal new configurations of event and experience, facticity and historicity, in modernity. Weller surmises that Oroonoko’s influence has finally to do with historicity , or with the desire for historicity, what he calls a ‘‘prestige of origins’’: ‘‘It seems possible,’’ he writes, ‘‘that this prestige of origins inflects our reading of Equiano and later African-American narratives as the tradition of the ‘royal slave’ affected that of his contemporaries. Is it not, in particular, tempting to accord a special value to Equiano’s representation of his African past as marking the success of his autobiographical enterprise?’’ (69). If, as Weller suggests, we read and value Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in ways that mimic how Equiano and his contemporaries read and valued Oroonoko, this may well have to do with a probabilistic attitude toward historical truth: Oroonoko and texts that followed caused readers to be ‘‘sufficiently persuaded that a slave could be royal to make fictions which exploited this 52 Equiano and the Poetics of Experience premise acceptable and even attractive’’ (66). It was this ‘‘sufficiently persuasive ’’ historicity that Equiano borrowed from the example of Behn’s text, Weller argues, and to which we still respond today.4 Behn’s text mobilizes a ‘‘prestige of origins’’ not only in Oroonoko’s African, and innate, nobility, but also in her own firsthand experience in Surinam (the feather headdress worn by Anne Bracegirdle in The Indian Queen, she tells us, was brought...