The Poetics of Belonging in the Age of Enlightenment: Spiritual Metaphors of Being in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Olaudah Equiano's classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, uses what this study identifies as spiritual metaphors of being—figurative, theological expressions of one's sense of self that carry philosophical (ontological) undercurrents. The spiritual metaphors of being that Equiano crafted emerged from his sense of himself as a modern subject living inexorably on the edge of the many precipices of modern life and existence. In this essay I read these fluid spaces of contiguity as characteristic of the metaphors of being that indelibly mark Equiano's autobiography. Equiano's Narrative teaches us that the parallel development ofWestern nation-states and empires should not be assessed without due consideration of the continuing influence of ontotheological precepts on individual thought, in spite of the eighteenth-century decline of the church as a far-reaching, powerful institution. Equiano uses spiritual metaphors of being to resist the politics of empire, a politics that ensured that polities could never smoothly transition from empires to states, that upheaval and shifting allegiances would consistently characterize an individual's existence, and that the character of modern human being would always be of a fractured but navigable nature.