The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African

Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) is the author of The Interesting Narrative. His work is significant because it is one of the founding examples of the slave narrative. The work, published in part to support efforts to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain in the late 18th century, serves as testimony not only to Equiano’s resilience in the face of extreme forms of abuse during his enslavement but also reflects his use of his literacy to write himself into several important parts of Anglo-American literary culture. Debates about the veracity of the text complicate how modern readers see Equiano’s effort at self-representation.

Equiano’s voice throughout the text is one that reflects the influence of exemplary figures in the literary culture of the day. Equiano takes care to present himself as a hardworking, thrifty, enterprising man who uses every opportunity to better himself. Just like memoir writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Equiano uses the text to catalog his character blemishes and describe how he addressed these character defects. In Equiano’s case, baptism, the sisters Guerin, and then conversion to Christianity are the events that put him on the road to a more moral life. The Interesting Narrative has many competing purposes and audiences, but the increasing frequency of Bible verses and his interpretation of events in his life through the lens of providence (God’s hand in his fate) underscore the influence of Christian conversion narratives on how Equiano conceives of his life by the end of the narrative.

Another significant element of how Equiano represents himself is his effort to balance representing the interesting experiences in his life with the overarching abolitionist purpose of the narrative, which is to provide testimony about the horrors of slavery. As he recounts his early life among the Igbo and the Middle Passage, Equiano is both able to include these episodes both as experiences that generally are absent from slave narratives and also to document the terrors he shares with his fellow captives.

In later portions, he sometimes struggles to strike the balance; these moments are marked by his comments on his decisions to include or exclude material depending on how interesting it is or whether it might bore or further horrify the reader. One specific instance of this struggle appears at the start of Chapter 12, where he moves from describing the skin color of the children of a white-presenting Black woman to the origin of his interest in serving as a missionary in Africa. This passage has no transition between the novel fact and his life story, making the narrative a little disjointed. For the most part, Equiano has a sure hand when it comes to storytelling, but such moments in the text show the difficulty of navigating the multiple identities and purposes of an Afro-British man writing to tell both his own story and that of an entire category of people.

These tensions are not resolved in the text. In the last paragraph of the Interesting Narrative, Equiano begs the reader’s pardon for perhaps boring the reader, but he also suggests that “scarcely any book or incident [is] so trifling that does not afford some profit” (242) to people interested in living a more moral life. In the end, Equiano presents himself as a writer whose moral cause trumps his pretensions to literary success.

There is some debate over whether Equiano was born in what became Nigeria or in South Carolina, in which case his account of his early life is fabricated. This debate on the one hand poses serious challenges to his representation of himself as an honest informant about many of his early experiences, especially his account of the Middle Passage. If his early narrative is authentic, his later movement from these African origins to his vision of himself as Afro-British is an early example of people of color who fashion identities rooted in multiple cultures because of enforced migration.

If the Interesting Narrative is a fiction, the document remains notable as one man’s vision of how African experiences and the Middle Passage could be used to call the British empire to task for its complicitly in the cruelties of the slave trade. One of the implicit agreements a memoirist makes with their reader is to tell the truth about themselves. If his early narrative is a fabrication, Equiano’s decision to break that contract with the reader can be seen as evidence of how the desire to testify about the reality of slavery outweighed Equiano’s desire to tell a true story about his life.