[In the following essay, Benito and Manzanas examine the concept of the “other” in Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, pointing out that Equiano viewed the white man as the “other” against whom he struggled, while at the same time he sought to adopt white culture. According to the critics, this “crisscrossing of identities” creates an “uneasy balance in the authorial voice” of the work.]

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European travelers in remote regions of the world easily found new subjects for the position of “the other,” that elusive and mobile entity that constitutes the opposite of self. “The other” becomes a discursive concept upon which the so-called “civilized” imagination projects its fantasies and anxieties. Nowhere did travelers blend fact and fiction in their accounts as much as in their description of Africa. The tradition went back to classical historians such as Herodotus and Pliny, who had already peopled Africa with monstrous wonders such as beings without heads and with mouth and eyes in their breasts.¹ These monstrous “others,” along with Acridophagi (insect eaters), Ichthyophagi (fish eaters), Ilophagi (wood eaters), Spermatophagi (seed eaters), and the common Anthropophagi as described by classical writers, were to fertilize the Elizabethan imagination, thirsty as it was for the details of savage life, which the Elizabethans located in the newly opened world overseas.²

Travel literature in the eighteenth century confirms and refutes the previous accounts with facts and supposed eyewitness reports. Discussions about the monstrous “other” who inhabited Africa heightened in the debate about the legitimacy of slavery. New explorations reached the most unknown parts of Africa in search for the “Noble Negro” and therefore offered new material for antislavery writings like John Atkins's Voyage to Guinea (1735). Other accounts, such as William Snelgrave's New Account of Guinea (1734), provided the familiar description of the Africans as lascivious, anthropophagous pagans given to the worship of snakes.

Deeply influenced by the works of antislavery writers such as Benezet and his Some Historical Account of Guinea (1770), which Equiano credits in two footnotes,³ Equiano creates in his Narrative an account that contrasts African primitivism with the barbarity of Western civilization. His autobiography can be considered a peculiar kind of travel literature that works as an ironic counterpoint as it subverts the categories the Europeans established in their encounters with the unenlightened or uncivilized. For Equiano, as an accidental tourist or traveler taken into a world of wonders, the white man is “the other.”

Slavery, as we read in the Narrative, was already known and practiced in Africa. There were “orthodox” ways of obtaining slaves, who were “prisoners of wars,”⁴ and “unorthodox” ways through abduction. But these slaves within Africa do not seem to fit the category of “the other,” of the opposite of the self, which Equiano presents in his descriptions of the whites. The line that separated a slave from a free man was indeed very tenuous, and any African could become a slave to the rest of the community if he committed a serious crime. In Africa, slavery would imply moral corruption and a state of degeneracy. The slaves caught in wars would approximate the concept of “otherness” since, as Jordan explains, “warfare was usually waged against another people”⁵ and captives were usually foreigners or strangers to the community. But in any case, a slave's situation in Africa was radically different from his condition in the West Indies. Equiano explains that “they do no more work than other members of the community” and that “some of these slaves have even slaves under them, as their own property, and for their own use” (19). As described by Equiano, slavery in Africa seems to represent a relationship of service rather than one based on power. Slavery refers to a social status but does not deprive the slave of his status as a human being. Loss of freedom was not viewed as loss of humanity. The term “slave” was therefore rather circumstantial and did not seem to qualify the bearer as “the other” in African society.

Equiano's first intuition of whiteness (as associated with otherness) is a brief reference in chapter 1 mentioning light-colored children within his community who were seen as deformed.⁶ Equiano's view of white complexions as a sign of deformity confirms the impressions of an English traveler, Sir John Mandeville, who in the fourteenth century already noted that the people of Egypt “are black in color, and they consider that a great beauty, and the blacker they are the fairer they seem to each other. And they say that if they were to paint an angel and a devil, they would paint the angel black and the devil white.”⁷ The category of “the other” as the ontologically different appears when Equiano first encounters the white crew of a slave ship in chapter 2. When Equiano sees the white crew, he does not think of the Europeans as “deformed men”; they are not only not human but spirits with evil tendencies. Tossed and handled by the crew, Equiano is persuaded he had “got into a world of bad spirits” (33). The features Equiano emphasizes render the Europeans as a homogeneous, indistinguishable “other,” deprived of individual qualities. Interestingly enough, like the Europeans when they came into contact with Africans, Equiano uses color, together with the whites' long hair, to categorize them. Subtly, Equiano reminds the reader that, for the African, the white man is “the other.” The white man automatically embodies in Equiano's imagination savage tendencies, as he confirms when he “saw a large furnace or copper boiling and a multitude of black people” (33), a clear indication for Equiano that he was going to be eaten by these white spirits.

Clearly, Equiano demonstrates his limited comprehension of his new situation as a slave. The narrator can give a subjective account of his perceptions but knows nothing of causality.⁸ Equiano's naïveté and his lack of knowledge of the workings of the slave trade are, at the same time, a subtle deconstruction of one of the key tenets of proslavery theoreticians such as William Snelgrave: that Africans had degenerated into cannibalism. In fact, the image of Africans as anthropophagi occurred frequently in the accounts of classical historians such as Pliny. The association of slaves and the anthropophagi is clear in the revealing title of G. Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters. Fitzhugh's book reminds the reader of the Africans' natural tendencies and the necessity to keep them under slavery. Perhaps aware of numerous eyewitness reports and proslavery literature, which maintained that Africans eat each other, either alive or dead, with the same casualness with which Europeans eat beef or mutton,⁹ Equiano subverts one of the practices that in the Europeans' eyes made Africans Wild Men. In Equiano's eyes, “those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair” (33) are the degenerate and wild “other,” the feared anthropophagi.¹⁰

Gradually, Equiano forges the image of the white man as “the other,” the obverse of the travel books' idea of the Negro as “the other.” Like an accidental and involuntary traveler, Equiano notes the “irrationality” that rules the world of the white “spirits.” Equiano observes how “the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water, when they liked, in order to stop the vessel” (35). Astonished at the vision of whites on horseback, Equiano claims “these people [were] full of nothing but magical arts” (37). The naive and uninitiated voice of the young slave wonders at the so-called “civilized” ways of the whites but also subtly reminds the reader that only the eye of the beholder determines what is magic or irrational and what is perfectly logical and rational. Equiano subverts the common belief that Africans were all inveterate conjurers given to the study of black magic, as they appear in Herodotus's account,¹¹ and projects it onto “the other,” thus implying that the European travelers who emphasized the irrationality of the Africans revealed only their own misconceptions and their own ignorance about the ways of “the other.” In Equiano's Narrative, the accounts that presented the ultimate “otherness” of the Africans undergo Bakhtinian “dialogization” as they are relativized and parodied. As Equiano writes his own travel book, the subjectivity and the relativism implicit in the authoritative discourse peculiar to proslavery travel tales are laid bare.¹²

Yet Equiano starts to deconstruct his initial image of the whites on his way to England and after he is purchased by a new master, Henry Pascal. If the people to be “othered” are always homogenized, the individuation of one of them paves the way for the dissolution of the category of “the other.” In the Narrative an individual, Richard Baker, appears in whom, we read, Equiano finds a faithful companion and friend. Moreover, Equiano seems to forget that whiteness for the African equates “otherness” and harbors, at least unconsciously, the desire to become white: “I therefore tried oftentimes myself if I could not by washing make my face of the same colour as my little play-mate, Mary, but it was all in vain; and I then began to be mortified at the difference in our complexions” (44). This anecdote, situated in the Narrative at a moment when Equiano is about to convert to cultural whiteness, appears quite symbolic. Convinced of the impossibility of “washing an Ethiop white,” Equiano seems to realize that his Africanness and blackness are there to stay. Three years after he was taken to England, Equiano completed the deconstruction of his previous vision of whites as spirits. Whites are not strangers anymore, as Equiano explains: “I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the strongest desire to resemble them” (51-52). Equiano can turn into the perfect mimic man¹³ as he imitates the English customs and mores. However, as he is unable to erase his blackness, his identification with the English, with the colonizer and slave holder, will never be complete.

White spirits turn into men, thus erasing the insurmountable difference—of kind—between white (spirits) and black (men). The only difference Equiano now perceives is a difference of degree, a quantitative differentiation because white men are superior. This new perception of what used to be “the other” as superior involves a new perception of the self as inferior or incomplete. Disturbing as this new category—superior/inferior—may sound, it reveals how Equiano, perhaps conditioned by the fluid barriers in African slavery, views the border between free men and slaves as tenuous, permeable enough to disappear in three years or, more astonishing, in a few pages. It seems on the one hand that Equiano feels the need to soften his ways and his perceptions of Englishmen once he is living among them. On the other hand, Equiano's fascination with European culture and morality reveals more than blind imitation. His admiration for English culture works as a critique of the uses and abuses it was put to by a majority of Europeans who, as we see throughout the Narrative, failed to live up to their own standards. Further, Equiano's understanding and admiration for the ways of the Europeans only confirm his qualities as a perceptive traveler on a foreign ground who is well trained in cultural relativism. Unlike some of the travelers who ventured into Africa and looked at Africans from a “literary” distance—as established by their predecessors' accounts—Equiano illustrates the notion that once one immerses oneself in the ways of “the other,” barriers are removed. That might be one reason why Equiano finds that whites, contrary to his first intuition, were not spirits; neither did they live in a world of magic. Away from the horrific scenes he witnessed in the slave ship during the Middle Passage, Equiano seems to “convert” to whiteness. The barrier between the self and “the other” is therefore “blurred.” Equiano has absorbed the principles and the language of “the other” and describes himself in the terms set by the English. In just two chapters Equiano has constructed and deconstructed a myth of whiteness, thus creating two contrasting voices that will blend in the remainder of the Narrative.

But this deconstruction of “the other” is far from definite in Equiano's Narrative. The alleged superiority of the whites is compromised when, against Equiano's expectations, his “benign” master, Henry Farmer, sells him to Captain Doran. At that moment and during his crossing of the Atlantic on his way to the West Indies, Equiano finds out that even though he had been baptized and “by the laws of the land” no man had a right to sell him, he was still will-less merchandise in the eyes of the whites. Even though Equiano considers himself an Englishman, Englishmen “proper” do not consider him an Englishman. If heathenism were a fundamental “defect” that set Africans—and Equiano—apart from Englishmen, the conversion of Africans to Christianity did not imply they had become civilized and were the same kind of men. Being a Christian, as Jordan explains, “was not merely a matter of subscribing to certain doctrines; it was a quality inherent in oneself and in one's society” (24), a quality intimately related to racial issues. Although a Christian, Equiano finds out that he does not participate in the “unity of man” and the continuity of mankind the Christian faith postulated. Despite being a Christian, he was still “the other” in white society. Equiano's conversion does not eradicate the difference that separated him from the whites. Equiano realizes that, even though he has traveled “transatlantic distances” to convert to the Christian faith, he is not fully accepted as a Christian. Further, as he states in the Narrative, he finds that “otherness” is a mobile category that encompasses other peoples like the Indians and changes according to the interests of the white majority, always including Negroes. What remains stable and fixed is that insuperable barrier or difference that separated slaves and masters and gives, in Equiano's words, “one man a dominion over his fellows which God could never intend” (80).¹⁴ Instead of erasing differences, slave masters intensify and perpetuate them by denying the slave access to education, thus fixing him as irreversibly other, as Equiano denounces. Equiano's Narrative advocates the removal of racial and religious barriers in the inscription on the title page of the abolitionist slogan: “Am I not a Man and a brother.”

Sailing back to the West Indies with his new master implies his return to the “land of bondage” and, accordingly, his reconstruction of whites as the deceitful, uncivilized “other.” Even though Equiano is bought by another benign master, Mr King, who does not treat him “as a common slave” (71), Equiano always maintains a detached and ambivalent position toward whites, as Paul Edwards has demonstrated.¹⁵ As the Narrative progresses, Equiano still fixes whites in the category of “the other,” but as he learns their ways and their language, his discourse becomes visibly influenced by the white perspective. This double position is illustrated in Equiano's indirect participation in the economics of slavery, as an overseer on Dr. Irving's estate who managed to keep Negroes cheerful and healthy (76) and as an assistant on slave ships in numerous Middle Passages: “After we had discharged our cargo there, we took in a live cargo, as we call a cargo of slaves” (98). Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of this kind of statement (which appears repeatedly, pp. 90, 107) is the inclusion of Equiano within the “we.” Striking as well is Equiano's detachment when he refers to “a cargo of slaves” as “live cargo” without further comment. Equiano is clarifying his position, which is closer to the whites—to whom he is linked through the inclusive “we”—and remains more distant from his fellow slaves, who are referred to in the third person. In addition, the references to slaves (not to “Africans”) are followed by completely different subjects, as if Equiano intended to delete from his narration further engagement with other slaves and at the same time emphasize his perfect knowledge of the workings of slavery. It seems that when Equiano accepts the language and roles of the more “civilized” culture, he frequently runs the risk of adopting the distorting stereotypes inherent in that language.

The Narrative keeps an uneasy balance between Equiano's desire for personal freedom and his forced passivity when he witnesses the abuses committed against other Negroes during many Middle Passages. On such occasions Equiano carries out a superb exercise in negotiation between his silence and his role as critical witness to the sexual abuses perpetrated against female slaves. His silence and passivity are compensated for years later by his exposure of the atrocities of slavery in his Narrative. Equiano's African name—meaning “one favoured, and having a loud voice and well spoken” (20)—endows him with a natural gift for eloquence. His mastery of words proves decisive in negotiating between his “two souls” as a European and as an African and between his indirect acquiescence to a dominant ideology—as exemplified in the economic and religious voice that predominates in the Narrative—and his larger commitment to the abolition of slavery and his race. It seems that Equiano has to incorporate “the other” as part of the self if he wants to preserve that very self. This double perspective is noticeable from the opening of the autobiography in Equiano's dedication, when he first ponders his predicament since his abduction from Africa and finally justifies the horrors of slavery by his initiation into the Christian doctrine. In a way, both Equiano and Wheatley (among other writers such as Jupiter Hammon) echo the alleged positive effects of slavery vaunted by slavery supporters such as William Grayson, John C. Calhoun, or Howell Cobb, among many others. Although Africa remains in Equiano's mind and he is linked to it through “tender connections,” Equiano distances himself from the characters in African American folktales for whom Africa is the paradise away from the white man.

As a slave planning to escape from the West Indies, Equiano never thinks of Africa as his final destination but chooses to return to England. Although his decision sounds paradoxical, it may imply that for Equiano, as for Martin Luther King many years later, a man's return to Africa would imply avoiding a problem. For King, as for Equiano, the fight against slavery first, and segregation later, demanded a courageous decision to claim full American or—in Equiano's case—English citizenship. When Equiano intends to return to Africa, he does so in the capacity of a missionary of the Church of England and later as a commissary on the Sierra Leone expedition. In both attempts he tried not to recover his Africanness or the simplicity of his old African religion but to convert his countrymen to the Gospel faith. When he decides to return to Africa, he is not planning to return merely as an African but as an African European committed both to the Negro cause and to the spreading of the culture of the West. Equiano clearly measures the power of such disruptive forces as Christianity and imperialist economics and sees no radical escape to a primitive and undisrupted African past. He is conscious that this “past” (the Africa he evoked in the first two chapters of his Narrative) is no longer there after the African encounter with the white man. Consequently, he adopts the role of a knowledgeable mediator. He seems aware that the clash between African and European value systems and religious beliefs is more dramatic when it emanates from different ethnic and racial groups, but rather less significant when it comes from individuals within the same ethnic group, as he acknowledges in his letter to the Lord Bishop of London.

Equiano's dual identity as an African and a European is clear as well in his encounters with the Musquito Indians. Although there are common ties between Equiano and the Indians (both were part of the category of “the other” in the Caribbean colonies), Equiano adopts the position of the mediator who introduces the Indians to the Holy Word. Unlike the figure of the colonizer, who would impose the new religion on the savage, Equiano is willing to acknowledge the moral superiority and religious fervor of the Indians. Equiano finds in the natural religion of the Musquito Indians echoes of his own African religion (neither has places for worship or is acquainted with swearing), and he considers these unenlightened Indians more enlightened than many Christians. However, in his fluid role as intermediary, he crisscrosses the line between both religious practices as he personally transcended the barriers separating the white man and the black other. He tries to bring the Indians to the Holy Word, but his attitude is not that of imposition as much as of persuasion. Even if Equiano is instrumental in the conversion of the pagan and unenlightened to the Christian faith, his suspicions about the so-called Christians are present throughout the Narrative. Very characteristic of his style is the ironic usage of “christian” when he wants to emphasize a master's special cruelty. He finds as well that there are Christians, like the Assembly of Barbadoes, who rather deserve the appellation of “savages and brutes.” Also ironic, Equiano—a convert—takes the liberty of teaching or reminding old Christians of some excerpts from the Bible they frequently forget: “I told him [Mr. D—] that the Christian doctrine taught us ‘to do unto others as we would that others should do unto us’” (74-75).¹⁶

Equiano's commitment and questioning—“dialogization”—of white ideology and culture “from within” is present as well in the economic voice with which he closes the Narrative. As Houston Baker has demonstrated in his analysis of Equiano's Narrative in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, Equiano appropriates the mercantile and calculating voice of the white man, the same voice that quantified and translated the African's life into economic terms. Although Equiano denounces a system that establishes the value of the African in purely economic terms, as stated by the Assembly of Barbadoes, he is fully aware that he needs to master the economic mechanisms of slavery in order to ameliorate and alter his status as property.¹⁷ When he records his initial commercial transactions with the diligence of a trader's secular diary in chapter 7, Equiano is not passively mirroring or imitating white mercantilism but subverting the economics of slavery to effect the “ironic transformation of property by property into humanity.”¹⁸ Equiano's economic voice disrupts the economic mechanisms and the language of slavery from within, through the knowledge he has acquired as marketable property. Once Equiano manages to buy his freedom from Dr. King, his mastery of mercantilism is finally stated in the theory of trade that would replace the slave trade with “a commercial intercourse with Africa.” Fully aware of British economic interests and at the same time devoted to the abolitionist cause, Equiano transforms African slaves into African customers, who would “insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c.” (176) and therefore perpetuate their condition as dependents or colonial subjects. Equiano's margin of negotiation when he makes this abolitionist appeal is indeed very narrow. He seems aware of the impossibility that Africans aspire to absolute freedom and, very cautiously, suggests a compromise for both Europeans and Africans.

Equiano's crisscrossing of the Atlantic takes him to a crisscrossing of identities. Equiano oscillates between his Africanness, with his vision of whites as “the other,” and his desire to become part of that other and convert his countrymen to the superior white culture and religion. This crisscrossing of identities constitutes Equiano's “double consciousness,” to use Du Bois's words. Equiano manifests his peculiar “twoness,” “two souls, two thoughts,”¹⁹ but his strivings are intricately interwoven and reconciled in his Narrative. “The other” crisscrosses the self and the self crisscrosses “the other” to create a difficult and uneasy balance in the authorial voice. Equiano's ultimate exercise of negotiation, the utopian commercial imperialism, which runs parallel to his Christian utopia that he advocates in the conclusion of the Narrative, stands as his ultimate compromise. This utopian commercialism would indeed end slavery—and therefore show the fruitful results of Equiano's infiltration in the world of “the other”—but would perpetuate the infiltration of “the other” in Africa, for it would also make the African settle for a new kind of servitude, and thus satisfy “the other” in him.

Notes

1. Pliny, quoted in Eldred D. Jones, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Amherst: Folger Books, 1971), p. 5.

2. See Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 25.

3. For a detailed comparative analysis of Benezet's Some Historical Account of Guinea and Equiano's Narrative, see Angelo Costanzo, Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).

4. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, in Henry Louis Gates, ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 17. All subsequent references to this edition appear parenthesized in the text.

5. See Jordan, White over Black, p. 55.

6. Deformity as a quality associated with whiteness appears clearly in Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1959).

7. Sir John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1983), p. 64.

8. Susan Willis, “Crushed Geraniums: Juan Francisco Manzano and the Language of Slavery,” in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave's Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 202.

9. See Jordan, White over Black, p. 25.

10. For the captive Allmuseri in Johnson's Middle Passage (New York: Plume Book, 1991), white men were “barbarians shipping them to America to be eaten.” The Allmuseri, like Equiano, saw the white men as “savages,” p. 65.

11. See Jones, Elizabethan Image, p. 4. In Shakespeare's Othello, Brabantio accuses Othello of having corrupted his daughter “By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks,” I.iii.v, 61.

12. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 342-343, 412-414.

13. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85-92, for the importance of “mimicry” in colonial discourse.

14. Perpetuity is indeed a very characteristic aspect of slavery in America. See Jordan, White over Black, pp. 52-53.

15. Paul Edwards, “The West African Writers of the 1780s,” in Davis and Gates, eds., Slave's Narrative, pp. 187-195.

16. See Katalin Orban, “Dominant and Submerged Discourses in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa?),” African-American Review 27 (1993): 655-664.

17. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 34-35.

18. Baker, Blues, p. 36.

19. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 3.