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

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Katalin Orban

While the evangelical conversion narrative "sanctioned and encouraged self-hatred and the rejection of one's past" (Andrews, "First" 13), Equiano's narrative creatively reconstructs the past. He projects a potential for his present accomplishments back into the past, thereby making the past acceptable for the present on the present's terms. This he needs to do in order to be able to incorporate his African past into his present self and in order to speak for his African brethren as a public spokesman.

Equiano's edenic African home is presented in the first chapter in a way that makes it compatible with, or at least open to, his new Christian values. The description of that home may well be a fictional conflation of several African cultures. The author probably complemented his own memories with information from secondary sources.(3) But even if these charges are legitimate, they do not challenge the overall authenticity of the narrative. And if they are, the presentation of Equiano's Africa tells us even more about the author's general intention, precisely because the presentation diverges from literal truth.

Essaka is a land of plenty with a people advocating simplicity, plainness, cleanliness. Except for polygamy, there is nothing unacceptable to Equiano's new self. The contrast is between the ways of people in Essaka and the behavior of Europeans, which is carefully distinguished from the ideal Christianity Equiano upholds. The values he chooses to focus on, but especially the strong analogy-between the manners and customs of his countrymen and "those of the Jews, before they reached the Land of Promise," are important connections established between the author's past and present (22). He can therefore argue for Benin with his new authority from outside Benin. But however positive his description of Benin might be, it is his acquired Christian authority which he uses when making his argument against slavery: He invokes the Christian God, who created the African "certainly" in his own image, and so deflects all attacks on the African into blasphemous criticisms of God. He also takes good care that his strong critique of the "polished and haughty European" cannot transfer to the God whom that European supposedly worships: ". . . whose wisdom is not our wisdom, neither are our ways his ways" (24).

The second and only other chapter devoted to his early life in Africa ends with a similar exhortation. The voice is that of any hypothetical African ". . . might not an African ask you. . .") who speaks the language of Christianity, and therefore not quite the voice of "outraged innocence," but a curious combination of innocence and learning (Andrews, "First" 20). By the same token, it is also the authentic voice of Equiano, an African who can speak back the word of Christianity those professing it: "O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, |learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?'" (38). What we have here is Equiano quoting any African like him quoting God: It is the Christian God's word that ultimately carries the authority.