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

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Katalin Orban

If there is silencing in the slave narratives, there is also a potentially dangerous process of voicing which occurs in current criticism. In certain cases the Equiano criticism projects back some of our current values and assumptions into this 18th-century text. This is quite legitimate as long as one is speaking about what we as 20th-century readers wish to use this narrative for, what it means for us, and what we assume the real person behind the narrative could or should have wanted had he not been psychologically colonized. In other words, when making these arguments, one should admit to speaking at least as much about "us" as about Equiano. Maybe we have to accept that, for however unfortunate historical reasons, certain "realities" can only be suspected, but they cannot be recovered and reappropriated without compromising the seriousness and authenticity of scholarship.

Notes

(1.) William L Andrews mentions some of these in connection with genres which lend themselves easily to certain discourses about the issue of slavery in To Tell a Free Story. (2.) Douglass affirms man's natural generic authority as an authority independent of accomplishments one lost in slavery but regained in an affirmation of self hood and ultimately in freedom. This line of argument is implicit in the profuse animal imagery of the text. Portraying slaveholders as predators and beasts [-human], the text establishes the counter image of the slave as man [ human]. Representing dehumanized slaves in images of domestic animals [-human], the counter-image of a reacquired selfhood [ human) is established. Houston A. Baker writes about this animal imagery in some detail in Long Black Song (75-76). (3.) S. E. Ogude argues that "Equiano's narrative is to a large extent fictional" and that it fuses about Africa published in travel literature and legends about Africa which developed among the African slaves. He bases the argument on similarities between Equiano's text and various available sources in travel literature, which he interprets as Equiano drawing on these sources. As long as th facts are true and the texts not too similar, it seems to me very problematic to decide whether it i case of parallel knowledge or borrowing. On the other hand, it seems to be difficult to refute Ogude argument that Equiano could not have obtained first-hand knowledge about some of the things he describes, because the taboo systems of traditional African societies would not have allowed a boy of his age to have that knowledge.

Works Cited

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