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PARTISAN REVIEW
sheep torn by wolves," she wrote, her prose steeped in the imagination of
damnation, "all of them stripped naked by a company of hell hounds, roam–
ing, singing, ranting, and insulting, as
if
they would have torn our very hearts
out."
Against this convention, Equiano forced a confrontation with another
perspective and coaxed a realignment of instinctive allegiances: "The white
people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never
seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty." Sununoning up
himself as a boy on the African seacoast-bewildered and besieged, gazing
upward at the monumental vessels of the Europeans, caught "in a world of
bad spirits"-he locks the reader into an eye-opening identification and a rad–
ically new perspective, that of a desperately forlorn African, a no-Ionger-alien
Other, afraid of being cannibalized by white savages.
That literary achievement is itself an expression of freedom, but for this
born teller of tales it is also a release from the silence that smothered his ear–
liest aspirations.
As
a young boy enduring the middle passage, Equiano cannot
give voice to his confusion or make sense of the cacophony of barbarian
tongues. Again and again, the inability to communicate is his unspeakable ter–
ror. No wonder he remains linguistically superstitious for the rest of his life
and retains a magician's faith in the transforming power of the uttered word.
Characteristically, it is blasphemy that offends most deeply this man for whom
language was the way out of slavery and the best weapon for its abolition, for
whom the Europeans' curses and insults stung like a whip. He tells a parable
about a swearing sailor, who damns his eyes and in turn has his eyes "damned"
by blindness. Of the Mosquito Indians he can give no greater praise than to
observe that their tongue includes no oaths or slurs.
Knowing the power of words to cut, Equiano knows too that words can
cut both ways. For Enlightened readers of the eighteenth century the typeset
word was holy writ. The medium of print
was
invested with an almost sacred
aura, its mastery the way to communion with God and immortality among
men. The Christian Protestant saw it as the road to personal salvation; the sec–
ular democrat as visible proof of rights secured and bound by contract. The
pathbreaking subtitle of the
Interesting
Narrativ~"written
by hirnself"–
asserts more than authorship. In an age that equated literacy with humanity,
the ability to manipulate language in print and render experience through the
prism of articulate prose was a broadside rebuff to racist expectations.
Through prose, creatures become creators. Quotations from Milton,
Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, contemporary historians, and above all the
Bible, not only filter Equiano's experience but underscore the erudition of this
self-taught writer. To grant speech is to grant human consciousness, to
acknowledge interior depth and intellectual faculty in the brute. Equiano's
glib mastery of the English tongue extricates
him
from more than one tough
