The Role Of Narrative In Olaudah Equiano's Journey

Equiano’s journey begins as a child where he is kidnapped from his village along with his sister, Equiano’s childhood naivety is emphasized from the beginning of this narrative and is hinted at throughout, reflecting on the childish wonder of the young Equiano and making for an even more shocking narrative as a result of the European culture shock he faced along with the European treatment of slaves. Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity Vincent Carretta argues the birthplace of Olaudah Equiano, arguing that the author may not have been born in Africa but moreover born into slavery in South Carolina. Equiano himself states in The Interesting Narrative, a scholarly firestorm erupted over the

question of this former slave’s place of birth. This is not the first time Equiano’s origins have been questioned. Equiano himself sought to refute claims published in late eighteenth-century English periodicals that he had been born in the West Indies. Such claims were, as Equiano he knew, aimed at discrediting his narrative and, in the process, the abolition movement with which that narrative was associated. Carretta’s essay, on the other hand, called our attention to evidentiary matters that involve questions of interpretive theory. Given the fact that Equiano’s narrative plays a crucial role in our understanding of a variety of historical, cultural, and literary issues, and given the fact that where you begin a story helps determine what you can say about that story and what work that story can do, holding this question in great significance and yet one in which we will not know the answer to.

Equiano’s cultural child-like innocence is further highlighted through the mistaking of everyday European items as being “magical”. Not because they are magical but rather because they were objects Equiano as well as most slaves had never encountered before, this became a large reason in the justification of slavery, as the idea was held that the West were merely attempting to humanize what they believed to be unhuman animals just because they were unfamiliar with objects such as these, yet when we examine the first part of Equiano’s narration, we see the opposite of “animals” but rather a different culture, thriving within Africa. Volume I opens with a description of Equiano's native African culture, including customs associated with clothing, food, and religious practices. He likens the inhabitants of Eboe to the early Jews, and offers a theory that dark African skin is a result of exposure to the hot, tropical

climates. In so doing, Equiano hints that Africans may be the indirect relatives of Christian Europeans through their Jewish ancestry and argues against slavery as an affront to all humans: "Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous. Did Nature make them inferior to their sons? and should they too have been made slaves? Every rational mind answers, No" (p. 43). When describing the picture, he explains how to him it “appeared constantly to look at me, I was still more affrighted...” because something so “normal” to Europeans was something Africans had never come across, it was a different cultural aspect for Equiano which he was forced to adapt to.