THOMAS DOHERTY
579
tory. Yet no matter how useful or intelligent or Christian he makes himself,
race excludes
him
from the American dream.
The equivocation of the subtitle--the hated slave moniker "Gustavus
Vassa" in tandem with the defiant assertion "the African"-bespeaks the dual–
ity in his character. In the opening chapter, recalling his African boyhood, his
very language is conflicted. Shifting narrative guises, he alternates between the
tone of the sophisticated English traveller instructing his fellow Europeans
about an exotic people, and the voice of the African tribesman, proud and
committed, sharing again in his race's victories, longing for the lost world. The
balance of literary evidence holds the account to be derivative and inauthen–
tic, less a rose-colored memory of a prelapsarian Africa than a cut-and-paste
compilation of observations culled from contemporary travel books. In one
culturally schizophrenic passage, he trips over his pronouns, stumbling from
the first to third-person possessive in the very same sentence. Significantly, he
is describing slaves, them and us, thee and me: "With us they do no more work
than other members of the community, even their masters; their food, cloth–
ing, and lodging were nearly the same as theirs."
The identity confusion about who he is never extends to what he is
about: to abolish African slavery and defy European racism. In bringing the
abolitionist word to the infidels, Equiano used whatever argument was at
hand-appeals to reason, calls to Christian conscience, and promises of mer–
cantile profit. His white reformist audience is ever uppermost in mind and
he was not above flattering his Anglo-Protestant readers with a dollop of
anti-Catholicism. But no matter the tactic, the campaign against slavery called
for a double-barreled strategy targeting
both
the institution and the ideology,
the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-European racism that upheld it. In a
closed, self-sus taining circle, slavery fos tered the inferiori ty that in turn justi–
fied slavery.
By 1789, though, the closed circle was being punctured by declarations of
human equality and other self-evident truths. The promise of the Age of
Enlightenment and the American Revolution, the seeds of liberation embed–
ded in the thinking ofJohn Locke and Thomas Jefferson, prepared the ground
for the
Interesting Na"ative-and
the narrative itself enriched the soil. Published
the same year as Thomas Paine's
The Rights
if
Man
and the outbreak of the
French Revolution, the
Interesting Na"ative
is infused with the philosophy of
its time. Slavery, proclaims Equiano in aJeffersonian flourish, "violates that first
natural right of mankind, equality, and independency; and gives one man a
dominion over his fellows which God could never intend!" Conversely,
Jefferson's rhetoric against George III in 1776 sounds like Equiano in full dud–
geon: "He has waged a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never
offended
him,
captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemi-
