THOMAS DOHERTY
Olaudah Equiano 's Journeys:
The Geography of a Slave N arrative
"I
believe there are a few events in my life which have not happened to many;'
Olaudah Equiano remarks at the beginning of a memoir that promises only to
be "interesting." Such calculated modesty is typical of a certain kind of eigh–
teenth-century literature that invites a lowering of the guard scant sentences
before a sucker punch to the sensibilities. After lulling the unwary by a recita–
tion of mundane matters in a sedate tone, the Gende Reader is suddenly
launched into a swirling tempest of brash melodrama and thrilling adventure.
At times Equiano's story seems the product of an overactive imagination with
a total disregard for the laws of narrative probability-not to say contempt for
a protagonist bounced scattershot about the globe and beset by a Homeric
inventory of wildly implausible escapades. Kidnapped, enslaved, shipwrecked,
imprisoned; in turn a sailor, bookkeeper, merchant, musician, hairdresser, and
writer; the target of gunfire, artillery barrage, and random assaults; the engineer
of hairbreadth escapes blessed by divine providence and effected by the skin of
his teeth-0laudah Equiano seems a picaresque hero caught on the cusp of
the English novel between Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne. That the inter–
esting narrative is all too true and the narrator and the author allegedly one
and the same is all the more reason to proceed with caution.
First published in London in 1789,
The Interesting Narrative
of
the life
oj
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African
is officially deemed a "slave nar–
rative;' perhaps the first fully realized example of the genre. Yet the librarian's
classification system fails to chart the coordinates of Equiano's life or the
scope of his vision. Any single standard of measurement seems promising but
incomplete. A stylized re-creation of experience in well-wrought prose, it
warrants a purely literary appreciation. An eyewitness testimony to a rich
sampling of eighteenth-century affairs, it stands as an invaluable historical
record. A passionate plea for social justice, it registers as a timely political doc–
ument. Of course, like its author-a premature multi-hyphenate
Anglo-African-American-the work is less the sum of its parts than an
expression of the tension among them.
Whatever tack taken on the
Interesting Narrative,
the imaginative leap to
Equiano's eighteenth-century world is no greater than the distance through
geographical and cultural space traversed by the man himself. Born around
