After many years of almost reading it, I finally sat down with The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, expecting a book that was didactic and rather grim but finding a rather rollicking tale of adventures on the high-seas instead.
One of the first things I found out from the introduction, is that the name Olaudah Equiano was a name only used in this text and that he went under the name Gustavus Vassa in all his daily interactions and other publications. It seems he used the name for this account, along with his slave name of Gustavus Vassa, as a way of claiming the dual identity as an African man, a captured slave - and then his third identity as a freeman. There are claims that he wasn’t born in Africa at all, but America, and the whole first section of the text is either completely made up or someone else’s history retold. I’m inclined to believe he was originally an African, as those early sections do have the hazy quality of memory and his point of view remains consistent with someone brought out of childhood freedom and into an adulthood of slavery.
It’s interesting how he paints his African life, as a member of the Igbo and the son of an important man.He portrays life in Africa as simple, honest and good. There is mention of famine, but largely the land provides well, the villages and families all work together and work hard, there isn’t any idleness nor unwarranted luxuries and there isn’t any weird sexual stuff. He links the circumcision and ritual cleansing of the village to the practice of Jews. It’s clear that he’s trying to replace the image white readers will have of Africa as a place of superstition and unreason with something they could support and feel sympathy when it is torn apart.
The only negative thing in Vassa’s life are the gangs of slavers. These are so frequent, that children going out playing together need bodyguards to look out for them. However, this system can’t work every time and Vassa and his sister are captured. It’s heartbreaking when he informs the reader that a certain moment is the last time he saw his sister, and his speculation about the form of life she may have led since.
He’s captured by black slavers and become a slave to black families. He’s a slave, but it’s still among cultures he knows and languages he understands. He still feels part of the family, not property, even in his enslaved state. Yet, he gets moved further and further from home, then to black families not part of his language group and finally into the hands of white traders. He finds these people horrifying, not only the genuine horrors he experiences from them, but the utter culture shock they present to him.
The passage is an awful thing, with the cramped, sick and dying bodies of people around him. Slaves being taken on deck for air try to jump off the ship to their deaths, but a netted cage is put around it to catch them, so they are punished and stuffed back in the hold. It’s a nightmarish scenario and hard to imagine. There’s also the fact that the position of slave seems different to how it’s been presented before. In the black households, slaves were compelled to work for their masters, but were still people, now he is de-personed altogether. This starts a consistent theme that although the whites are given the teachings of Jesus, and ought to be the most humane, they are frequently less humane than infidels and barbarians.
After a brief time in the West Indies, where he is bought and sees a slave-woman in a scold’s bridle, he is given to a naval Lieutenant and set to follow him onto Royal Navy ships. At this point the book becomes a set of naval tales, featuring battles and storms and all other common tropes of the sea narrative. Vassa’s place as a slave is less noticeable on a ship as all the sailors have to haul and sweat to keep the ship together. It’s only at the end of this time, when he expects his master to free him and give him his pay and prize money that his status as a slave becomes relevant again. It’s like a shower of cold water as the master, who seems to have been a pretty decent person up till now, says that all Vassa’s wages and prize money go to him as the master and, what’s more, he’s going to sell him into the West Indies.
Of all the many countries Vassa visits through his life, there is no place worse than the West Indies (withe the possible exception of Georgia in the US). He almost sees the place as a moral disease and, the closer a person gets to it, the worse their morals become. He’s lucky in that he’s sold to a ‘kind’ master (a Quaker of all things) who sets him as a clerk, then hires his services out as a first mate on a ship. Vassa uses these trips to run little side-hustles, in which he builds the wealth he needs to buy his own freedom. This was the most frustrating part of the book. Not only did the ships suffer frequent wreckings - there’s one whole set-piece where he’s on four ships wrecked in a row, including the ship sent to pick up those wrecked. But as a slave (and even later as a freed slave, but a black person) he has no legal redress by law. This means that people who don’t want to pay him can simply not. They can even whip him, chain him and abuse him for the temerity of asking them to pay and agreed price.
Eventually, after many set backs, he buys his freedom. He has a few more voyages around the West Indies before heading off to England, because he’s tired of people trying to re-kidnap him. In England, he learns to be a hairdresser, but finds that life on land simply doesn’t pay and goes back to sea,
The most interesting voyage is the one for the Northern passage, where he goes into the Arctic. There he didn’t find Polar Bear as tasty as others, yet finds manatee like a tender beef. He also had to fight off walrus’s, which is an action scene I’d love to see. Other trips take him back to the West Indies, where a madman called Captain Baker threatens to explode his own ship and dozens and dozens of white men break promises to him.
The biggest thread of the post emancipation part of the story is his religious journey. He’s been tracing his faith through his life, ultimately seeing his capture and enslavement as part of God’s plan to drawn Vassa to Him. It’s funny, Vassa describes being a slave as ‘irksome’, he’s annoyed at all the white people trying to kidnap or cheat him, what brings him to the brink of suicide is Calvinist theology. Predetermination, the doctrine that God has pre-chosen who is saved and who isn’t, and good actions won’t change a thing, is a belief that causes him huge mental distresses till he finds himself in a life-and-death struggle and simply understands that he must be one of those pre-chosen people.
There are many life-and-death struggles in this book. I’ve seen it described as a slave narrative and as a protestant spiritual memoir - and I think both are influential, but only in the sense that they influenced Daniel Defoe, who I think is the main influence on this book. There’s something of Defoe’s accountant tone, with Vassa’s descriptions of the cargos he took on his voyages sounding a lot like the accounts of pickpocketing in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. The adventures of ships in storms and with creatures are very Defoe, and the spiritual wrangling remind me a lot of the religious journey taken by Robinson Crusoe. With his experiences in many places, as slave and freeman, Vassa is a real life Defoe protagonist.
His life and narrative are certainly ‘interesting’ all right.
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