Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives

Finding a Home for Equiano

Finding a Home for Equiano Tess Chakkalakal What is the appropriate context to teach Equiano?1 Part of the challenge and joy of reading and teaching the Narrative lies in finding the right course for it. i have taught or studied Equiano in a number of different courses, from romantic Autobiography , introduction to Africana Studies, Eighteenth-Century Black British Writing, Postcolonial literature to African American literature, the Slave Narrative , and Early American literature. Equiano finds a home in all these courses, but students often struggle with the text’s cosmopolitanism. The Narrative, as the subsequent sections of this essay illustrate, speaks to multiple genres and disciplines . While students are often excited by the text’s multiplicity, that excitement soon turns to frustration when they realize that Equiano does not conform to their generic or racial expectations. Part of their frustration lies, i think, in Equiano’s departures from the familiarity of the conventions of the African American slave narrative. his freedom is acquired by purchase rather than escape. This fact alone suggests that Equiano accepted the terms of his enslavement. As this essay argues, Equiano’s protest against the conventions of his time operate more subtly, asking students to come to terms with the rhetorical strategies embedded in the Narrative . in my experience teaching the Narrative, i have found in its rhetoric of marriage—as a social, political, and racial institution—a way of understanding the structure of Equiano’s protest, a protest that artfully resists the racial, generic, and national categories upholding the institution of slavery. When Olaudah Equiano first published the story of his life in 1789 under the title, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, it received considerable attention from English reading audiences.2 read as spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, travel book, adventure tale, narrative of slavery, economic treatise and apologia, the 96 Tess Chakkalakal Narrative appealed to various tastes and consequently was a bestseller in its day.3 A key difference, however, between Equiano’s Narrative and those by later, more familiar slave authors such as frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown is its internationalist—rather than nationalist—perspective. introducing Equiano to students in literature classes requires them to come to terms with the text’s “foreign” identity. That it is a text premised on the paradoxical experience of “foreign citizenship” is made clear when Equiano refers to himself as “almost an Englishman” (77) and recognizes his difference from the Europeans among whom he lives throughout the text. Equiano asserts that difference when he begins his narrative as “an unlettered African” (7) and considers Africans—not Europeans—to be his countrymen. To help them understand the stakes of the text’s identity, i have students engage with the critical controversy surrounding Equiano’s Narrative. A number of the Narrative’s twentieth-century readers have commented upon the implications of its author’s dual identity. S. E. Ogude, for instance, questions Equiano’s claim to an African identity; he contends that Equiano’s British sources for his description of Africa make the place a virtual fiction. Carretta’s more recent groundbreaking historical research extends Ogude’s claims by suggesting that Equiano “was born in South Carolina [and] constructed an African identity to support the British one he embraced as a free man” (“Defining” 386). Carretta’s evidence effectively challenges Wilfred D. Samuels’s, Paul Edwards’s, and Dwight McBride’s readings of the Narrative, which are predicated upon Equiano’s beginning in Africa and, in McBride’s words, “presenting himself in the narrative as living proof of the African’s ability to reason and to master European forms of philosophy and cultural production” (135). The tension between the identities (European versus African) raises a number of interpretive problems. Most important, it raises the problem of classifying Equiano’s Narrative and being attentive both to history and to the author’s intentions. While most critics attempt to solve the problem Equiano’s Narrative raises by looking outside the text, i encourage students to perform a close reading of the Narrative to discover for themselves the rhetorical strategies its author employed. Genre and Identity The Narrative differs from, for instance, sentimental, spiritual, and autobiographical narratives. While those genres can elide the difference between the author and reader in order to achieve a union or identification, Equiano’s Narrative retains a finding a home for Equiano 97...