Authors
Olaudah Equiano (1745?-1797)
Bibliography
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
In the chronological sequence of NAAL, Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) gives us a new perspective on life in the American colonies. Written within the context of the late colonial and federal history of America, this text provides a rare and stirring firsthand account of life in Africa, the internal African slave trade (Equiano's own father owned slaves), and conditions on the slave ships themselves. Equiano's prose style is powerful, remarkable even in a time of high eloquence. In many ways, Equiano was composing his story in a complex personal and historical moment: he wrote both as an outsider to the culture and as a man of accomplishments within it; as a man who, in his professional and personal life, was sometimes free and sometimes a slave; and as a fellow Christian in a world of white Christians who did not regard him as an equal, and sometimes not even as a human being.
1. Choose one or two paragraphs from The Interesting Life, and discuss the ways in which Equiano selects his vocabulary, structures his sentences, and chooses his analogies. At times, his prose is highly formal, even ornate. What effect does this formality have on you as a reader? How might Equiano's style reflect his situation, or predicament, as a writer?
2. In some of the most remarkable passages in The Interesting Narrative, Equiano remembers his life in Africa and describes his first encounters with Europeans, focusing particularly on the awe which they and their culture inspired in him. How do these early descriptions of encounter contrast with observations later in The Interesting Narrative? How does Equiano's view of Euro-American culture change during the course of his autobiography?
3. In chapter VI, Equiano says that he "was from early years a predestinarian. I thought whatever fate had determined must ever come to pass; and therefore, if it were ever my lot to be freed, nothing could prevent me. . . ." Comment on the beliefs that you see expressed here, beliefs central to Equiano's identity. Where has he learned them? Why does he continue to accept them in the face of adversity and hypocrisy? Do his beliefs cause you to see him as a Calvinist? As a figure of the American Enlightenment? As a new or different American self?
4. How does Equiano simultaneously work within and resist the traditions of white autobiography and of Enlightenment-era English prose?