Equiano's "Loud Voice": Witnessing the Performance of The Interesting Narrative

Speech acts of all forms—praying, swearing, cursing, and so forth—burst unremitting from the page in black Atlantic writing of the eighteenth century.¹ For evidence of this claim, one may turn to virtually any page in the autobiographical narratives of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1776), John Marrant (1785), and Olaudah Equiano (1789), but let me highlight a few instances. For Gronniosaw, exposure to excessive cursing is a crucial part of his entrance into white culture:

. . . the servants used to curse and swear surprisingly; which I learnt faster than any thing, 'twas almost the first English I could speak. If any of them affronted me, I was sure to call upon God to damn them immediately; but I was broke of it all at once, occasioned by the correction of an old black servant that liv'd in the family—One day I had just clean'd the knives for dinner, when one of the maids took one to cut bread and butter with; I was very angry with her, and called upon God to damn her; when this old black man told me I must not say so. I asked him why? He replied that there was a wicked man call'd the Devil, that liv'd in hell, and would take all who said these words, and put them in the fire, and burn them.—This terrified me greatly, and I was entirely broke of swearing.²

While the young Gronniosaw is frightened of the power that words command, Marrant learns that words in the form of prayers act like a valuable resource, saving him more than once:

I was in the sea a third time about eight minutes, and several sharks came round me; one of an enormous size, that could easily have taken me into his mouth at once, passed and rubbed against my side. I then cried more earnestly to the Lord than I had done for some time, and he who heard Jonah's prayer, did not shut out mine, for I was thrown aboard again; these were the means the Lord used to revive me, and I began now to set out afresh.³

Speech acts contain a vibrancy, a pseudo-magical quality, for these early black writers that appears to be far less potent among the white community. While words possess the ability to bring about felicitous actions forGronniosaw and Marrant—summoning the Devil or enlisting God's aid—whites (and blacks who have long been indoctrinated into the white community) typically use words casually or even abusively; in speech-act parlance we might say that such casual usage is "parasitical," containing the external signs of a speech act but lacking the requisite locutionary force.

Combining a sensitivity to the spoken word, the product of an African oral culture, with an absorption of Biblical mythology, the product of a Western literate culture, the incantational power of the speech act arises as a product of the dual identity of the speaker. For Equiano, recall, words had been prized in his native Essaka; as he writes in his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), "I remember we never polluted the name of the object of our adoration; on the contrary, it was always mentioned with the greatest reverence; and we were totally unacquainted with swearing, and all those terms of abuse and reproach which find the way so readily and copiously into the languages of more civilized people." ⁴ Words and names signify quite heavily in Equiano's native culture. When the narrator tells us that his name "Olaudah" means "vicissitude, or fortunate," the moment offers more than a bit of foreshadowing; it is, in his own words, rather a "fancied foreboding" (41), as though the very pronouncement of the syllables...