[In the following essay, Samuels contends that Olaudah Equiano's intention in his Narrative, which is to point out the miseries of the slave trade, is enhanced by the use of a disguised voice, through which the author takes control of his audience and holds their attention, outwitting and flattering his white readers while simultaneously revealing that they are unscrupulous and uncaring.]

I.

The author of the slave narrative confronted the difficult task of reporting his lived experiences during slavery to an audience which did not recognize him as a member of its society and, in fact, viewed him “as an alien whose assertion of common humanity and civil rights conflicted with some of its basic beliefs,” including the institutionalization of theories of the racial superiority of whites and the inferiority of African slaves.¹ This difficulty was further compounded in certain cases by the former slave, who addressed the question of abolishing slavery, an institution to which members of his audience were often inextricably bound, because, economically speaking, their prosperity was ensured by the slave trade. Consequently, although the narrator often sought, on the one hand, to garner support and sympathy for the abolition of slavery, he recognized, on the other hand, that the very act of writing his narrative or the simplest error on his part could not only be viewed as insolence, but could alienate the very audience that he needed if he were to accomplish his goal.

The already difficult task of not alienating the audience became especially complex for Olaudah Equiano, an Ibo who, after being kidnapped at age eleven and experiencing ten years of slavery, published his two-volume narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself in 1789.² To be sure, the condescending tone of the review which appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine reveals the dilemma of the slave narrator in general and specifically of Equiano. According to the reviewer, “These memoirs, written in very unequal style, place the writer on a par with the general mass of men in the subordinate stations of civilized society, and so prove that there is no general rule without an exception.”³

That Equiano had in the foreground of his interest the objective of attracting an audience whose power and voice could, if it decided to act, strike a meaningful blow against the slave trade and slavery is, I believe, suggested in the overtly stated purpose which Equiano couches in the humblest language and tone at the beginning of Chapter I:

I am not so foolishly vain as to expect from it [his narrative] either immortality or literary reputation. If it affords any satisfaction to my numerous friends, at whose request it has been written, or in the smallest degree promotes the interest of humanity, the ends for which it was undertaken will be fully attained, and every wish of my heart gratified. (1:8)

Equiano further reveals his anticipation of some negative response as well as his awareness of the importance of audience when he declares that, in order to avoid censure, he has chosen not to “aspire to praise” (1:8). In fact, Equiano, one might argue, purposely designs a narrative that is as much about travel in the Mediterranean as it is about slavery in the New World to assure his audience that his purpose throughout is not to offend or alienate.⁴

Yet a common error is made by the critic who, taking Equiano's announced purpose at face value, fails to see his creation of a self whose muted voice veils covert intentions that lie hidden behind the facade—the mask, with which he disguises himself from the very opening lines of the work. For example, Frances Foster Smith incorrectly concludes that “Equiano rarely alters the dispassionate and modest tone of his prefatory remarks. … His denial of personal involvement beyond the desire to please friends and to make a small contribution to ‘the interest of humanity’ is in accordance with accepted standards of gentlemanly humanitarianism.”⁵

Although it is indeed correct that Equiano was interested in “gentlemanly humanitarianism,” it can be argued that Equiano's posture here allows us to see the control that he seeks to establish over his narrative from the beginning, for as Robert Stepto tells us, the letters, introductions, prefaces, appendices, and other such documents that formed authenticating auxiliary voices in the slave narratives dictated who, in the final analysis, had control: the former slave or his white guarantor.⁶

Thus, more important than Equiano's announced purpose in Chapter I, one might argue, is the significance of an introductory document, in the form of a letter written by him, which begins the narrative. In it, Equiano's voice emerges, cogently though humbly, to address “the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, the Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain”:

My Lords and Gentlemen,

Permit me, with the greatest deference and respect to lay at your feet the following genuine Narrative, the chief design of which is to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender connexions that were naturally dear to my heart; but these, through the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought regard as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature.

I am sensible I ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a work so wholly devoid of literary merit; but, as the production of an unlettered African, who is actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the relief of his suffering countrymen, I trust that such a man, pleading in such a cause, will be acquitted of boldness and presumption.

May the God of heaven inspire your heart with peculiar benevolence on that important day when the question of Abolition is to be discussed, when thousands in consequence of your Determination, are to look for Happiness or Misery!

                                                                                          I am,
          My Lords and Gentlemen,
                              Your most obedient,
And devoted humble Servant,
OLAUDAH EQUIANO
                                                                                                              or
GUSTAVUS VASSA (I:iii-v)

Clearly, Equiano, in his introductory letter, takes an overt posture that someone interested in operating from a basic logic of humility would assume. He accomplishes this with such carefully chosen phrases as “greatest deference,” “respect,” and “august assemblies”; and by his flattering description of Great Britain as “liberal” and humane and as a nation whose government knew “glorious freedom.” Although the “chief design” of his narrative might not be obvious, the result is; for with this stance, Equiano—a Black and a former slave, by definition a pariah to some of his eighteenth-century readers⁷—captures the attention of his white audience. He succeeds in establishing what Mary Louis Pratt calls an “affective relation” with his audience, one that reduces hostility and gets attention without being offensive.⁸ Simultaneously, he gains the upper hand, and from the beginning he succeeds in establishing a power relation in which he takes control. Like a champion chess player who, after making certain instrumental moves, castles his king for safeguarding while he uses his queen to wreak havoc on his opponent, Equiano, by assuming this position, is able to race across the pages of his narrative like a powerful monarch in a “game” that sees him overtly genuflecting and groveling but covertly, and primarily through language, slashing away at his oppressors. Indeed, his use of irony in his opening letter reveals this, for how can a nation known for its liberal sentiments, humanity, and the glorious freedom of its government directly or indirectly justify its involvement in a slave trade that, in its horror, would tear an individual, especially a child, “from all the tender connexions that were naturally dear to [his] heart”?

Equiano's letter, coupled with a frontispiece that features him poised with Bible in hand, pages of errata, and a table of contents, listing exciting chapter-by-chapter captions of the author's adventures, served to present the author's point of view as that of an inoffensive African who wishes to describe his “interesting” experiences to his reading audience. Moreover, his inclusion of an impressive list of subscribers—headed by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, but also including the names of England's top dignitaries, Members of Parliament, esquires, barristers, and clergymen, from the Duke of Bedford and the Bishop of Banghor to the Duke of Northumberland and Lord Mulgrave, Granville Sharp, Esq., and the Reverend Mr. John Wesley—serve only to crystallize this idea for his audience.⁹ Also, by publishing his narrative on August first, the “Queen's Birthday,” Equiano enhances this perception, for the sacred manner with which her subjects view the Queen would have led them to see the Narrative's appearance as an activity in her honor.¹⁰ Finally, that Equiano's portrait was engraved by Daniel Orme, who, as Historical Engraver to the Prince of Wales, was responsible for engraving the chief heroes of the time,¹¹ only served to further reduce any possibly negative perception by his audience.

Thus, from the beginning, Equaino's intentions are enhanced by his disguises. With his posture, Equiano catches the interest and imagination of the populace; and with an impressive list of subscribers, which not only suggested that these individuals contributed financially by purchasing copies (some as many as six), but also that they supported and approved of the work, he is able to ensure himself of an audience. Equiano's success in this regard is suggested in the review his narrative received in the prestigious Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal, in which, ironically, the reviewer claims that “the narrative wears an honest face.”¹²

In presenting these images of himself, Equiano reminds us of the African folk trickster hero Anansi. For like Anansi, who, though small, is able to outwit and overpower the larger animals, often leading to their destruction,¹³ Equiano, the powerless former slave, outsmarts, with his tricks, his British audience. By donning the mask of the docile slave, he outwits his audience and simultaneously reveals that its members are unscrupulous and uncaring.

What remains important, however, is that each factor comes together to solidify the control which Equiano maintains from the beginning over his two-volume work: There are no auxiliary voices, no mitigating voices stealing the thrust of his words. Equiano organizes, coordinates, lays out, writes, and publishes his narrative, regardless of who else might assist. What we are left with, then, is what for Pierre Macherey is a “literary production,”¹⁴ for we can see that Equiano is conscious of his purpose and the power of the written word.

II.

Because we are able to find in the narrative's structure the author's strong association with Africa, both suggested and stated, it is possible to argue that Equiano's muted voice camouflages what one might deem the single most important purpose of his narrative: the recreation of a “single self” which is related to an idealized African identity that Equiano wishes to claim as his legacy.

In the light of my contention, Equiano's narrative can be best understood if we make a distinction between the actual sequence of events of the text (l'histoire) and the presentation of these events (recit).¹⁵ I don't mean to suggest here, of course, that Equiano, at forty-five years of age, was not interested in historicity, in the events that identified his outer self. His interest in the dynamics of his early life in Africa, ten years of slavery in the New World, maritime experiences which included participation in the Seven Years' War and travel to the Arctic, involvement in British culture during the eighteenth century, in the Abolitionist Movement and the colonization of Sierra Leone—historical events in which he participated actively or inactively—is clear. However, it becomes equally clear that what concerns him more than what he has done is who he has or has not become as a result of these events. In short, his feelings and thoughts, the “inner man,” remain salient to him. In what must be viewed as his careful self-study, Equiano in his Interesting Narrative of the Life seems anxious to know, in the words of Carlyle: “In God's name, what art thou?”¹⁶ Consequently, what ultimately concerns us here is related to a question of intentionality: What, in the final analysis, did Equiano intend?

It is in the interpretation or “the construction of textual meaning,” to borrow a phrase from E. D. Hirsch, that one might find deeper insights into the meaning of Equiano's text. For Hirsch the critic's first task is the construction of textual meaning: One must interpret the text correctly. This is to be done, he further argues, by identifying the “Intentional Object” of the narrator's awareness as well as the “Intentional Act,” the mode by which the narrator becomes aware of the object. Through these, the critic can ascertain the verbal meaning of the text and gain insight into its explicit meaning, which is shared by all. Furthermore, to distinguish what a text implies from what it does not imply, Hirsch argues, the critic must posit, insofar as it is possible, the “horizon” of the text, or “a system of typical expectations and probabilities,” to unravel its total meaning. And to specify horizon, the interpreter must familiarize him- or herself with the “typical meaning of the author's mental and experiential world.”¹⁷ In spite of what must be clearly designated the inaccessibility of the author's intention, Hirsch's argument is particularly useful.

From what I have suggested thus far, it is possible to conclude that Equiano's narrative is the “intentional act” through which he becomes aware of his intentional object: slavery. However, in the prefatory remarks of Chapter II, Equiano lists an implied and perhaps more important intentional object, one that—because he wishes to avoid censure, as he tells us at the beginning of Chapter I—he subverts with the question of slavery. Apologizing for what some might have considered boldness on his part in sharing with his readers in Chapter I an account of the manners and customs of his African community, Equiano declares that “… whether the love of one[']s country be real or imaginary, or a lesson or reason, or an instinct of nature, I still look back with pleasure on the first scenes of my life, though that pleasure has been for the most part mingled with sorrow” (I:30; my emphasis). Equiano's use of the present tense here is important, for it connotes a contemporaneous act; there is, in other words, a sense of “now-ness” to his act of “looking back with pleasure” over his earlier life; and there are further implications that the desire to do so is continuous. In the present tense verb look is found Equiano's point of view, which embodies implications and irony, for his discourse conceals his simultaneous activity: He will not only be relating his experiences in slavery, whose abolition would enhance, as he says, “the interest of humanity,” but concurrently recalling a past life which remains, without a doubt, more meaningful to him with each passing day.¹⁸

We can better understand the development, discovery, and creation of identity, which for Equiano remains salient, as well as come to grips with his experiences as a slave, which came in direct conflict with this identity, by adopting Hirsch's hermeneutics, which would lead us to unravel the meaning of the text in what we might call the “horizon” of Equiano's experiences. Interestingly enough, the very images that lead us to perceive Equiano as a subservient and passive former slave also embody the very complex characterization of him that we find in the narrative. Perhaps no other image offers a clearer example than the one that emerges from his treatment of his participation in the Seven Years' War.

III.

In 1757, when Equiano arrived in England with Captain Michael Henry Pascal, his master, Great Britain was engaged in a full-fledged war with her colonial rival, France, which she then faced in North America, the West Indies, India, and Africa in an encounter that would lead to her first imperial war. Although the war had been informally in progress since 1748, the escalation which took place in 1756 had brought Great Britain serious defeats, preeminently the loss of Minorca; international embarassment, with the retreat of Admiral John Byng; and personal disgust and despair, with the news of the “Black Hole” deaths in Calcutta. But from a despair that led Horace Walpole to declare that England should “slip her own cables, and float away into some unknown ocean,”¹⁹ Great Britain went on to be victorious in what many historians and critics consider “the most rousing war” in her history. By 1757, under the able leadership of the “Great Commoner,” William Pitt, who reluctantly had been appointed to the cabinet by King George II as Secretary of War, the British forces were carefully reorganized, and England succeeded in turning around the events of war in such a manner that 1759 was deemed a “Year of Victories.”²⁰

Ironically, in this very war that was fought to gain dominance over a part of West Africa that was not very far from his own homeland, and to control such “commodities” as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and Black African slaves, Equiano found an avenue for rising above the “blood-stained gates of slavery,” to find meaning, dignity, and honor while still enslaved. Equiano wants his readers to believe that he was able to find in the Seven Years' War an avenue for regaining the power, valor, honor, and respect—in short, the humanity—of which he had been robbed by his abduction into slavery.

In the same manner that his documentations throughout the narrative are more than random inclusions of unrelated voices, the lengthy descriptions of Equiano's experiences at sea contain more than scattered and isolated incidents for the sake of rambling. They, too, reveal an Equiano who in his own tale successfully fashions himself as a protagonist who, in his traditional African experiences, could easily have risen to heroic stature. If, as he seems to suggest throughout his narrative, traditional African communal life must be associated with that which is heroic and ideal, then the Equiano we see in his implied characterization epitomizes the traditional African man, who would manifestly have been the great traditional warrior and title bearer. Consequently, the enigma that characterizes his narrative must be carefully examined when found in his tales about his experiences at sea with his master, Captain Pascal of the Royal Navy, especially those involving Pascal's service under Admiral Boscawen during the Seven Years' War.

On the surface, in his narration of the war Equiano serves as an eyewitness—as an on-the-scene correspondent, reporting with precision the land and sea engagements between the British and the French. But he seems especially aware of those battles in which Boscawen's gallant feats were accomplished when the Namur, the vessel on which Equiano along with his master-captain is sailing, is Boscawen's flagship. Perhaps no battle was more important to Boscawen (and, indeed, to Equiano) than the one at Gibraltar in August 1759. A firsthand eyewitness and participant, Equiano carefully details the events of the encounter. He dramatically and suspensefuly reports the August battle:

The engagement now commenced with great fury on both sides. The Ocean immediately returned our fire, and we continued engaged with each other for some time, during which I was frequently stunned with the thundering of the great guns, whose dreadful contents hurried many of my companions into awful eternity. At last the French line was entirely broken, and we obtained the victory, which was immediately proclaimed with loud huzzas and acclamations. We took three prizes, La Modeste, of sixty-four guns, and Le Temeraire and Centair, of seventy-four guns each. The rest of the French ships took to flight with all the sail they could crowd. (I:83-84)

To be sure, Equiano, by creating an image of the war, is able to catch the unique moment in history and to reproduce it for his British audience, who must have been dazzled by the former slave's careful and detailed reporting, his enviable knowledge of naval vessels, and his apparent sense of nationalism.

Although his tale of the engagement ends, Equiano continues by explaining to the reader his assigned role during the battle, making it clear that his role as active participant cannot be gainsaid. Indeed, unlike Robinson Crusoe's Friday or the servant in the plantation literature of Thomas Page, who goes to war with his master to polish his boots and care for his horse, Equiano reveals that he functioned as more than a personal servant during the engagement. He was a fighter:

My station during the engagement was on the middle deck, where I was quartered with another boy, to bring powder to the aftermost gun; and here I was witness of the dreadful fate of many of my companions, who, in the twinkling of an eye, were dashed in pieces, and launched into eternity. Happily I escaped unhurt, though the shot and splinters flew thick about me during the whole fight. Towards the latter part of it, my master was wounded, and I saw him carried down to the surgeon; but though I was much alarmed for him, and wished to assist him, I dared not leave my post. At this station, my gun-mate (a partner in bringing powder for the same gun) and I ran a very risk, for more than half an hour, of blowing up the ship. For, when we had taken the cartridges out of the boxes, the bottoms of many of them proving rotten, the powder ran all about the deck, near the match tub; we scarcely had water enough at the last to throw on it. We were also, from our employment, very much exposed to the enemy's shots; for we had to go through nearly the whole length of the ship to bring the powder. I expected, therefore, every minute to be my last especially when I saw our men fall so thick about me; but, wishing to guard as much against the dangers as possible, at first I thought would be safest not to go for the powder till the Frenchmen had fired their broadside. … But immediately afterwards I thought this caution was fruitless; and cheering myself with the reflection that there was time allotted for me to die, as well as to be born, I instantly cast off all fear or thought whatever of death, and went through the whole of my duty with alacrity. (I:84-85)

Here Equiano again resembles the African folk trickster Anansi, who is sometimes caught in the traps that he sets for others, for although he undoubtedly is aware of the possibly indignant reaction of his audience to his work were they to conclude that he had overstepped the bounds of his assured social role, Equiano can be found unmasked for a brief moment when we peer behind the facade. We find in the above passage not the subservient or passive slave, but instead an Equiano who has covertly assumed the role of the chivalrous warrior from the very beginning. And, again, we are made aware that Equiano is saying more in his discourse than what immediately stands before us.

Unlike Admiral Byng, whose retreat jeopardized Great Britain's safety and cost him his life, Equiano, a man of action, “casts off all fear” and rises to the occasion. Though his human instincts cause him to be slow in reacting at first, he, responding with bravery, answers the call of duty nevertheless. Indeed, by telling us that he fearlessly carried the gun powder that was used to send the solid cannon balls splitting over the vast ocean, in spite of the immediate danger, Equiano, one might even be led to conclude, wants his reader to believe that this historical battle could not have been won without the brave Ibo's role and the chivalrous manner in which he met his duties during these pre-armored-warship days when Britain's wooden naval vessels gained control of the ocean.

One cannot help but notice that the humility with which Equiano generally garbs himself seems to have been completely stripped away here, as he calls attention to his heroic performance, and the shift from the observing eye in the “I” of the narration to the “I” of the action becomes important because it moves the focus inward, taking Equiano beyond the explicit meaning that his activities may have conveyed to his British audience. Equiano is in fact saying, I believe: This is not only a world that I objectively experienced, but one that I, through my intrepid acts, helped to create.

To be sure, through his exciting narration and careful choice of words of action and through his functional use of the first-person plural “we,” he allows his British readers to participate in the battle, and he gives them a reason for celebration. Here in his narrative they could find yet another record of their undaunting strength and power; here they could find yet another testimony to the masterful skills of their beloved Admiral Boscawen; and here they had evidence of their ability to overcome the enemy, France. Thus, at the explicit level of his narrative, he succeeds in giving his audience both the romance and the drama that it might have associated with naval battle and encounter, a fact that was undoubtedly heightened by the knowledge that this was “Pitt's War,” and he boosted their pride in their maritime war for maritime empire, providing rejuvenation after the universal disgrace they had suffered with Byng's defeat.

Equally important, however, is what might be perceived as Equiano's effort to guide his readers' response towards his abolitionist concerns, for with his description and powerful rhetoric he indirectly forces his audience to confront the question of the injustice of slavery and, indeed, to find validation in his argument against this inhuman system that had enslaved an individual of his caliber, one whose personal qualities, dignity, and values represented the highest ideals of British culture. His audience, one might even believe, might somehow have become infuriated by their own participation, direct or indirect, in this heinous system, and with Equiano, they might have concluded that slavery “depresses the mind and extinguishes all its fire and every noble sentiment” (I:29). Equiano's success in capturing and controlling his audience, and his personal account of one of England's finest hours, undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of his narrative, which was to undergo more than fifteen editions.

What remains of paramount importance, however, are the implications of Equiano's text, because throughout his reported acts he places himself firmly in the middle of this “world wide struggle in which the main lines of the British Empire were finally laid down.”²¹ Rather than hide, escape, or skirt responsibilities, although armorless, Equiano, the African, girds his loins and resolves to meet head on his task, no matter what the required sacrifice, danger, or outcome. A mere lad of fourteen at the time of the battle, he here assumes, he wants us to believe, the role of leader. Overcoming his initial fears and showing tremendous discipline, Equiano in the final analysis emerges as one who had risen to the status that would have been his in Essaka, where the male youth's self-understanding was firmly grounded in the conceptual metaphor “man is warrior” and “warrior is a person of honour, action, and bravery.” Consequently, the horizon of Equiano's experience, the conscious and unconscious meanings that are present in his discourse, must be unraveled before the full meaning of his text can be ascertained. The horizon would inevitably include his African past.

The son of a village elder, Equiano retrospectively views his childhood in Africa as his “former happy state,” during which he basked in the warmth of his mother's love, was cradled in an awareness of his aristocratic father's wealth and prestige, and was nourished by the knowledge that his parents were committed to securing for him a place within their community through which he, too, would gain the mark of grandeur and distinction that was borne by his father and brother. In preparing him for his destined role as a communal leader, Equiano's mother, unaware, of course, of the tragic future that awaited her favorite child, dressed him “with the emblems, after the manner of our greatest warrior.” He tells us that, before being kidnapped, he was “trained up in the earliest years in the art of war: my daily exercise was shooting and throwing javelins” (I:31).

Implied in Equiano's text here is the suggestion that the personal history of a pariah, which had been carved out in the wasteland of Western slavery and culture, is not his sole interest. Present also is the notion that the Ibo wants to confront questions related to the loss of personal legacy that this history has wrought. He tells us that slavery did not divert him from the course on which he had been set by a mother who dressed him after the manner of the great Ibo warriors. In fact, in his own traditional world, he would have crossed the threshold into manhood after such dauntless actions, and, indeed, he could have danced to the drum beat reserved for the great warriors.

Finding no warrior's circle in which to dance proudly, finding no marketplace in which to display his war trophies, although he had brought home the “enemies'” head in the form of the ships taken as prizes, Equiano finds, in his narrative-autobiography, not only an avenue for celebrating his valorous act, but also a means of claiming the achievement of his identity and thereby assuming the social role that was rightfully his as an Ibo, Essakan, and African. Equiano thus weaves into his narrative an important “metaphor of self,” which, as James Olney tells us, is used by the autobiographer to grasp and understand the unique self that he is—“to grasp the unknown for the known.”²² Equiano's “metaphor of self” is one that makes him the African traditional warrior-man.

Given Hume's contention that the mind is a theater which “parades a variety of posture and situation,” one finds it difficult not to agree with Sir Victor Pritchett, who claimed that what the autobiographer is faced with in the final analysis is a decision of “what play [he is] putting on, what its theme is and what postures fit into it.” Pritchett tells us: “The play is not ‘the truth’ but ‘a truth’ of ‘our truth.’”²³ In other words, it is possible to argue that the historicity and veracity of Equiano's tale about his role in the Seven Years' War is, in a sense, unimportant. What ultimately is important is the metaphor of self that he has chosen in relating the events. Thus, although the explicit “posture” he assumes for his audience, that of the abolitionist, is one that we continuously see, it is the implicit posture, grounded in the signification of warriorhood to his traditional African community, that eventually presents the represented self that he has chosen to amplify in the hidden purpose of his narrative.

Consequently, although he succeeds through narration and description in recreating for his readers a sense of the slave trade during the eighteenth century, Equiano ends up recreating what Roy Pascal, in a related context, terms “a part of [his] life in the actual circumstance in which it was lived.” In the final analysis, what we get is closer to autobiography, in which, as Pascal tells us, “The centre of interest is the self, not the outside world, though necessarily the outside world must appear so that the personality can find its particular shape.”²⁴

What we learn from Equiano's autobiographical acts, I believe, is that he can only find in his retrospective assessment of slavery an excruciating severance and senseless extirpation: As he came to realize, slavery meant physical separation from the community and culture which offered reciprocity during the first eleven years of his life. Whereas Essaka meant bonding, security, and aggregation, slavery meant separation, alienation, and liminality. It was for him a void to be transcended, an overpowering force that threatened to dash him into a world of eternal meaninglessness, an experience from which, through the narrative, he would seek a sense of wholeness and being.

Deeply embedded in Equiano's discourse, specifically in its ironics and implications, is the conflict which resulted from conflict between the idealized African self, which he as a member of his Essakan community and as an Ibo accepts as his legacy, and the harsh reality that, having served as a slave in a foreign land, away from family and culture, he had not been able fully to realize this self. The act of writing the narrative becomes not only a process, then, of taking a retrospective glance over the primary experiences that served to form Equiano's historical self, but perhaps more importantly, it functions as praxis, for it allows him to explore his life and at the same time create, develop, and extract from it the meaning which to him remains important. Equiano's self-portraiture contains ironic and metaphoric values which upon examination reveal the dual nature of the thematics and characterization of his narrative. Fundamentally, it reveals that in his efforts to build subjectivity in a world of reification, Equiano reclaims his voice by masking and disguising it. Indirectly, he teaches us to not only listen to the explicit voice of Gustavus Vassa, the person created by the Western enslavers who gave him this name, but also to the voice of Olaudah Equiano, the would-be warrior, whose name means ‘fortunate’ and ‘favored.’

Notes

1. Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 6.

2. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, 2 vols. (London: Entered at Stationer's Hall, 1789). Specific references will be to this edition and will appear in the text.

3. The Gentleman's Magazine, 59 (1789), 539.

4. Equiano's eighteenth-century British world treasured travel and adventure narratives whose appeal, as Louis B. Wright tells us, cut across class and group (see Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1958], p. 508).

5. Witnessing Slavery, p. 18.

6. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 3-31.

7. For the eighteenth-century European views of Blacks, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 3-43.

8. “Ideology of Speech Act Theory,” Century Series, I (1981), 5-18.

9. That Equiano was conscious of the importance of his list of subscribers is suggested by his careful changing of each list with each new edition. Regional editions bore names of importance to that region. For example, the Dublin edition has a list of Irish subscribers.

10. This is the legal holiday on which the British celebrate the Queen's birthday. It was a common practice to introduce new and important social items, for example fashions, on this day. This was viewed as a form of loyalty. (See Anne Beck, Dress in 18th Century England [New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979].)

11. Print Collector's Quarterly, July 1927, p. 250.

12. 80 (Jan.-June 1789), 551.

13. See Harold Courlander, A Treasure of African Folklore (New York: Crown, 1975), pp. 135-36.

14. A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 66-78.

15. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 170-71; see also Girard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), passim.

16. Quoted in Wayne Schumaker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials and Forms (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1954), p. 58.

17. “Objective Interpretation,” in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 209-44.

18. See Robin Lakoff, “Tense and Its Relation to Participant,” Language, 46 (1979), 841. According to Lakoff, “the choice of tense is based in part on the subjective factor or how the speaker feels himself related to the event.”

19. W. E. Lunt, History of England, 4th ed. (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 521.

20. For a thorough discussion of England's role in the war, see Julian S. Corbett, England and the Seven Years War (London: Longman, Green and Company, 1918), vols. I-II. See also Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire. 1740-1763 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), passim; and Lunt, pp. 485-550.

21. Corbet, I: 7.

22. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 3-50.

23. Autobiography (London: The English Association, 1977), p. 4.

24. Design and Truth in the Autobiography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 8, 9.