Dominant and submerged discourses in 'The Life of Olaudah Equiano' ? - or Gustavus Vassa

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Katalin Orban

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"There colour is a diabolic dye."

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train. (Wheatley 18)

The Life of Olaudazh Equiano describes the enslavement of an African who eventually embraces Christianity and Englishness. The current critical consensus, however, questions the seriousness of the conversion and acculturation rhetoric deployed in the narrative. Several contemporary critics, such as Valerie Smith, Chinosole, and Wilfred D. Samuels, see the Christian rhetoric as disguise, Equiano's affirmations of his acculturation as tongue-in-cheek comments, his pride in his achievements as the pride of the African warrior, and, if none of the above are true, his whole narrative as a sad example of mental colonization. I am going to question these readings which tend to downplay the importance of the conversion discourse, because they seem to be too shaped by our current values, and considerably undermine Equiano's already troubled narrative authority. Although Equiano's embrace of Christianity and Englishness is certainly not whole-hearted, it should be taken more seriously than the current critical debate seems to allow.

The slave narrative is no less peculiar a kind of autobiography than the institution from which, though antagonistically, it emerged. In his seminal essay on the conditions and limits of autobiography Georges Gusdorf asserts, "The concern, which seems so natural to us, to turn back on one's own past, to recollect one's life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal" (29). The authors of slave narratives certainly had more reason to engage in this activity than most. The public assertion of the self, to some extent a luxury for most of us, was a matter of life and death for the ex-slave, whose previous social status was in itself a denial of his selfhood.

On the other hand, in spite of their more obvious motivation, the authors of slave narratives were inevitably in more problematic positions than the average autobiographer. Their authorial freedom was complicated by a number of special concerns, such as their serious responsibilities to a community or the expectations of a likely audience. The most important complication is related to the fictional liberties the authors of slave narratives are (not) allowed to take.

Autobiographies are never purely factual, since human memory is seldom perfect and our experience is by definition subjective. In the slave narratives, however, as James Olney points out, reflections on this subjectivity had to be rigorously suppressed, lest they further undermine the already contested authenticity and authority of the text ("|I Was Born'"). The most important reason for the fictional element in autobiography is, after all, the nature of the enterprise: the author's attempt at "reconstructing the unity of a life across time" (Gusdorf 37). The problems involved in the creation of this unified vision were quite different for the ex-slave narrators film they are for the mainstream autobiographer. Since normally the vantage point of the autobiography is somewhat arbitrary, the author, in order to establish the coherence of the story and the significance of the destination, has to project a linearity onto the path which leads to the moment of writing. This problem is virtually non-existent in the slave narrative, for the simple reason that the path obviously leads from slavery to freedom, and the moment of significance is the acquisition (or reacquisition) of selfhood. Yet there is diversity and sometimes incongruity which have to be unified in the slave narratives, which are not so much in the "pathways" of the "authors" lives, but rather in the available discourses, the lines of argument for and against slavery.

The discourses which the authors of the narratives deploy in their polemic texts are indeed numerous. The most frequently used ones are Christianity (as an ideal system of beliefs and behavior, and as general practice), the possibilities and values of acculturation (including the specific issue of literacy), social and individual responsibility for actions, the degradation of slaveholders by slavery, the redemptive value of suffering and the (im)possibility of communicating knowledge and experience.(1) In order to create what Olney calls a "coherent pattern," the authors of the slave narratives had to put the primary emphasis on one of the available discourses and submerge the others to some extent (Metaphors 45).

In most narratives, a number of discourses appear in the course of the whole narrative. Sometimes an argument--often an underlying assumption affirmed without being explicitly referred to--appears in a single paragraph of a particular narrative, and enlightens the issue of slavery from a new perspective in the text. However, this argument, a solitary example in one narrative, may be the organizing theme of another narrative, in which some other equally useful arguments are submerged. For example, as I intend to argue on the following pages, the organizing discourse of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African is the "conversion as acculturation" discourse. To take some other examples, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederck Douglass, an African Slave. Written by Himself very powerfully deploys the human-subhuman discourse both in its arguments and its inlagery, submerging or embedding all other argumentation in the highlighted discourse.(2) Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself focuses on the discourse of suffering and knowledge. In each case, the basis and location of the respective claims to narrative authority are different--that difference determined by the choice of the organizing discourse. The narrative authority in Equiano's narrative, for instance, can be classified as a teleological authority, as opposed to Douglass's original generic authority or Jacobs's acquired personal authority.