H-Net (East Lansing)
Douglas B. Chambers
17 December 2007
book review
Hattiesburg — In 1961, the literary critic Lionel Trilling bemoaned the then-growing tendency within the academy to distill out of literature the "power of a work of art" by subjecting it to a deadening kind of "university study." He wrote, "Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art, domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard. University study of the right sort can reverse this process and restore to the old work its freshness and force--can, indeed, disclose unguessed-at power."[1] Vincent Carretta's recent biography of Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa, ca.1745-97) does just this--through rigorous "university study of the right sort" and impressive archival research, Carretta has restored "freshness and force" to what had become, in the past generation, merely a classic.
Largely forgotten for 150 years, and then rediscovered in the 1960s, Equiano's "Interesting Narrative" (1789) today is central to the canon of early modern Atlantic literature and history. It is taught in university courses and area studies as widely varying as African, African American, American, Caribbean, and World history/literature, and similar courses in allied disciplines. One may reasonably say that Equiano today is the most famous African, and certainly the most famous self-identified "Eboe" (Igbo), in the early modern Atlantic world, or, at the least, in the era of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a publicity blurb for the back cover, Equiano is "the most important black man in the eighteenth century." And yet, to be honest (and I write as someone who has used Equiano extensively in my own work, if perhaps rather uncritically), the canonical status of Equiano's narrative as a classic has all too often rendered it, in Trilling's words, "an object of merely habitual regard." In contrast, Carretta's Equiano forces us to consider both the man and his story in a fresh light.
Carretta, a professor of English, is the editor of the definitive modern edition of Equiano's narrative, "The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings" (2003), as well as "Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century" (2004), among other works.[2] Surprisingly, given his importance, Equiano has attracted only a handful of serious biographers. One work, a literary biography by Angelo Costanza, "Surprising Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography" (1987), was published two decades ago, and another, a rather uncritical but still useful historical biography by James Walvin, "An African's Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797", was published in 1998. And of course, the "Narrative" has been endlessly excerpted and anthologized.
Carretta presents Equiano essentially as a "self-made man." Evoking his own training and earlier research as a literary historian of eighteenth-century British satirists, Carretta implicitly compares Equiano to that most famous of contemporary self-made men, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), whose posthumous autobiography was published in 1793.[3] As Carretta writes in the book's preface, in remembering how he personally discovered Equiano in the early 1990s, "rather than considering Equiano an African American Franklin we would more accurately call Franklin an Anglo-American Equiano" (p. xiii). Indeed, in Equiano's own account, there was a moment in his life, in early 1759, when he first felt, not satirically but earnestly, "almost an Englishman."[4] In Carretta's account, he could just as well substitute, in current academic parlance, "almost an Atlantic creole"(pp. xiii-xiv).
In fourteen chapters, and reflecting meticulous research following the 1995 edition he so ably edited, Carretta follows Equiano through his story of enslavement, transportation, maritime slavery in a time of European war (and Christian baptism), kidnapping a second time into slavery (from London to Montserrat), his travels, and his freedom, winding up back in London in 1767, when he was about twenty-two years old. Carretta then discusses his adventures at sea through the 1773 Arctic Expedition on the royal navy ship the "Racehorse", and his rebirth as an ardent Anglican, which ironically was followed by participating in a scheme to create a slave-based plantation on the Miskito Coast (Caribbean Central America). In the end, Equiano (universally still known as Vassa) turned to anti-slave trade agitation, living as he did in England in the mid-1780s, which led to his official service in the 1786-87 effort to "repatriate" (perhaps better thought of as to deport) Africans in Britain to Sierra Leone, a royal service that made him a controversial public figure. Equiano clearly was inspired by his activism to write and publish and popularize the "interesting narrative" of his life. As Carretta takes pains to emphasize, it is a powerful story and one with many internal contradictions and inconsistencies, a work as much of politicized memory as of personal history.
Carretta's rendering of the details of Equiano's life--details that Equiano often only evokes and that Carretta then is able to bring to vivid life precisely because they are so manifestly documentable--and the personal, regional, imperial, and political contexts of so much of Equiano's life, even those with which Carretta comes into dispute, make this a richly documented and comprehensively considered interpretive history of a written life. Certainly the extraordinary level of detail is this work's greatest success. As such, Carretta's telling of Equiano's life is a signal achievement.
The problem, however, is that Carretta thinks (or at least strongly suspects) that Equiano was actually a liar, and one perhaps rising to being a notable fraud. In his archival research, Carretta discovered two separate documents: Equiano's 1759 London baptismal record and the 1773 royal navy's ship muster list for the famed "Racehorse", both of which state that Vassa was born in (South) Carolina.[5] And on the basis of these two documents, albeit two as interesting and problematic as these are for complicating an already busy life, Carretta has called into question Equiano's putative African origins, and therefore the credibility, reliability, and authenticity of Equiano as an enslaved African. Based on these two documents, Carretta goes so far as to judge that Equiano's accounts of his early life--and all the interpretive weight they are now given as a kind of substitute for ethnographic-historical material on what he called "Eboan Africa," as well as his wrenching description of being enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, his extended and harrowing Middle Passage--are all "probably fictitious" (p. xvi). As one might expect, Carretta's use of these two anomalous sources, and his consequent contention of Equiano's possible birth not in Africa but in North America, have garnered the most notice and disputation.
In fact, Carretta wants to have it both ways in his telling of Equiano's life, and this is what makes this book so maddening and, potentially, so interesting. Certainly Carretta is correct in calling attention to the two documents claiming a South Carolina birth for Equiano, as they do exist. But as Paul E. Lovejoy has pointed out, given the preponderance of other evidence, even though it too is mixed or at least muddled, which suggests that Equiano was truthful about his origins and early experiences (augmented as his story was by his acquaintance with other Africans and by his readings), why should we privilege two anomalous written documents over a preponderance of other, essentially oral, sources? Might the documents not be anomalous? Or, at least, explainable?[6] In his post-publication debate over historical sources and their interpretation, and to counter Lovejoy's criticism, Carretta has applied the test of Occam's Razor--that the simplest explanation for something is the one most likely to be true.[7]
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