![]()
II
Reading the Poetics of Black Being Before and After Du Bois
![]()
3
Being and Becoming
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
There are two remarkable and strikingly contrasting pieces—one visual and one inscribed, a duality of imagery and writing—that serve as equally significant paratexts to the 1789 classic, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, a memoir that is widely considered to be a founding text of the African American literary tradition. Equiano stands at the wellspring of this tradition not simply because his narrative represents a finely wrought modern subjectivity in a way that makes clear its relation to the formation of modern nation-states, but also for the powerful metaphorics with which he negotiates the competing discourses of church and state. From the opening pages of his text, Equiano informs the reader that his own being is forcibly formed in the crucible of such tensions, and that it is out of this abyss that his own sense of modern being must make itself known.
Indeed, Equiano uses what I have called metaphors of being in order to conceptualize his own existence with respect to the historical era during which he lived and, equally important, the agency he sought to foster and maintain. In this chapter, I consider Equiano’s Narrative as the conceptual object he intended it to be. As I point out in chapter 2, the catalyst behind my approach may be located in Hortense Spillers’s clarion call to black creative intellectuals.
In “The Idea of Black Culture,” Spillers urges black intellectuals to reinvigorate their creative and critical practices with renewed attention to the vital details of black existence documented in what she calls the “auto-bios-graphe” of the black writer. I intend to analyze Equiano’s Narrative as the sort of “conceptual object” and “practical devise [sic] toward the achievement of social transformation” that Spillers deems the necessary focus of a useful and impactful critical discourse. Equiano’s Narrative is located at that site where the traces of black culture have, over the past four decades, become more clearly legible to the theorist and historian. Thus it is with Equiano that I begin this study’s analysis of the experience of black being as it is expressed through conceptual metaphors in African American literature.
As we shall see, the sort of metaphorical expression Equiano favors may be best described as onto-theological. At once secular and sacred in nature, Equiano’s metaphors draw upon Biblical tropology even as he quite astutely expresses his sense of being-in-the-world as a modern man whose blackness enforces a perceptible distinction in his discourse. Here I am concerned, to borrow once again Nahum Chandler’s instructive phrasing, to name the “transformative pressure” Equiano’s metaphors of black being bring to bear upon modern “philosophical concepts, categories, and methods” (qtd. Moten 205ff3). Ingeniously, Equiano’s use of the onto-theological in his metaphors of being emerges not through words alone, but also through visual culture. As Spillers might likewise say, such metaphorical expression as is exemplified in Equiano’s work establishes the highly textured background so necessary to the contemporary black intellectual’s work. It provides the context for Lewis Gordon’s invaluable maxim that a “slave’s situation can only be understood, for instance, through recognizing the fact that a slave experiences it; it is to regard the slave as a perspective in the world” (10). And certainly, as I have argued, the metaphorics that are so central to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk fully appreciate texts such as Equiano’s as sites of intellection capable of inquiring into ontological and existential questions.
The ontological and existential questions between the secular and the sacred that characterize not only Equiano’s era, but also his narrative are palpable even in his autobiography’s prefatory material. For instance, Equiano makes his initial communication through his portrait, which serves as the frontispiece of his Narrative. He sits erect, his body turned slightly. He looks at us directly, but without, it seems, arrogance or hostility. His attire is that of an English gentleman, rather than an African: he sports a high-collar jacket, ruffled shirt, and fitted waistcoat. And his reading material bespeaks the status of one not only lettered, that is, literate, but also one who is a Christian. In his hand, he holds a Bible, open, fittingly, to the Book of Acts, which chronicles the adventures of the Apostles after Christ’s death, just as Equiano’s own book chronicles his exploits after the trauma of the Middle Passage.
In a compelling letter that follows this portrait and serves as both introduction to the text and as apology for faults the reader might find with his work, Equiano addresses the Lords and Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain:
[The] chief design [of this Narrative] is to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender connexions that were naturally dear to my heart; but these, through the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature. I am sensible I ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a work so wholly devoid of literary merit; but, as the production of an unlettered African, who is actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the relief of his suffering countrymen, I trust that such a man, pleading in such a cause, will be acquitted of boldness and presumption. (italics in original, xxi)
The differences between the two pieces are both obvious and telling. While in the visual image, Equiano represents himself as a cultured African who, but for the color of his skin, closely resembles an Englishman, in his missive he describes himself as an “unlettered African” working simply to relieve the “suffering” of “his countrymen.” Interesting also is Equiano’s phrasing in his epistolary appeal to Parliament. He states that he was torn from his home and family by the horrors of the slave trade, and concludes that he “ought” to regard these “horrors” as “more than compensated” by his newfound knowledge of England and her culture (both her national character and her religious practice). Yet he does not state forthrightly and in an unequivocal manner that such culture is adequate compensation. Indeed, he allows that he “ought” to beg pardon for producing a work “so wholly devoid of literary merit,” but he does not actually do so; he has no doubt—he “trusts”—that he “will be acquitted of boldness and presumption.”
Equiano’s phrasing in this letter is significant because it depends for its import and intent upon sedimented, metaphorical meanings at play in the English language, even as it reveals concepts of the moral and the ethical that are seminal not only to his own thought, but also to the thought of his time. Eighteenth-century usage of the verb “ought,” for example, combined the preterite-present tense of the verb “owe,” referring often to monetary indebtedness, with a sense of moral obligation. In using this verb, Equiano plumbs the depths of language—strategically, it seems to me, so as not to alienate his readers even as he challenges them—in an effort to refer simultaneously to the constraints of personal debt, and, by extension, human bondage—at the same time that he references the morality generally attributed to humanistic freedom by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The sedimented meanings at work in the verb “owe”—along with Equiano’s broader, sophisticated use throughout the Narrative of metaphorical language drawn largely from the Bible—allow him to contend with prevailing social and political precepts that he cites openly in his letter to Parliament: morality, religion, liberalism, freedom, humanism, and knowledge. These meanings sedimented in the verb “ought” are essentially dead metaphor that give the appearance of direct language, but that, nonetheless, impact the figurative sense of the language Equiano uses through their projection forward into his contemporary situation, one of bondage (indebtedness) and, eventually, freedom.
Theories of language that prevailed during Equiano’s day called for direct and simple language of the sort that he only ostensibly employs in his letter, a language that eschewed gratuitous metaphorical flourishes even as it manifested complex layers of signification. Eighteenth-century views on figurative speech drew largely upon the sixteenth-century perspectives of the philosopher and rhetorician Peter Ramus. The “Ramist revolution,” as it came to be called, required metaphorical constructions to function as arguments, as aspects of logic that shied away from esoteric signification. As Terence Hawkes1 points out, the Ramist perspective demanded a shift from the “oral modes of drama” that obtained in Elizabethan literature, to the “literate mode of the printed book.” Such could be seen as analogous to the shift from “an ancient world” to the “recognizably modern one” (30) Equiano inhabited and, to a good extent, exemplified. (Equiano’s use of portraiture, of course, stood as an equally modern mode of expression, a point to which I return shortly in this section.) Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), in contrast, Hawkes reminds us, stopped just short of defining metaphorical flourishes as “an abuse of language”; metaphorical expression could exhibit “ ‘a great excellence in style,’ ” Dr. Johnson wrote, but it was, nonetheless, an ornamental aftereffect in the process of composition. It was, then, considered an excess of meaning, an embellishment of thought (32).
Rather than exhibit superfluous flourish, eighteenth-century modern expression was to be concise; since it was thought to serve as the outward appearance or costume of thought, it was generally required to be sober, modest, rational—as certainly befit language intended to represent the thought of the Age of Enlightenment—and, one cannot help but think, morally good. Meaning was not to be clouded by virtue of its performance in speech; it was not to be conveyed through individual speech acts, but through universally sanctioned repositories of knowledge, such as the dictionary and, ironically, the Bible. Certainly the Age of Reason was characterized in good measure by the rise of science, among other disciplines, and scholars generally agree that the rise of the nation-state during this era displaced the Church (Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant alike) as the foremost institutional organizing force in society. Yet the Church had not fully ceded its role as a pre-eminent guiding force at this point in Western history, and was still viewed by many as an institution whose doctrines put forward universally valid truths. In light of the contending forces at work between the church and the state, metaphors employed in eighteenth-century British literary and social discourse were required to deal in what was considered generally and universally acceptable to one, the other, or both institutions.
Terence Hawkes points out that such metaphors as these would “need no audience to ‘complete’ them, to respond to or join in with any thought-process that springs” (33) from the center of a culture that formed itself around ideals of national unity and Christian morality. Equiano exemplifies many aspects of this convention of metaphor in of his Narrative, so much so that a number of his reviewers commented on the sobriety of his prose even as they remarked the “interesting” picaresque nature of his life story and its narrative of spiritual conversion.2 David Punter, in his 2007 book Metaphor, goes so far as to claim that eighteenth-century reception of Equiano’s text was rooted not in Equiano’s own crafted and purposeful metaphorical prose, but in the text itself as “a kind of metaphor” that accorded with currents in contemporary eighteenth-century social discourse, such as Christianity and freedom. He begins by wondering:
One might ask why the word ‘interesting’ needs to be in [the title of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative]: is it, perhaps, because otherwise the life of an ex-slave might indeed be deemed uninteresting? Is it indeed because the readership might have misgivings about the ability of an African to write a narrative, to give an account of himself, in any way that might be interesting to a white reader? The whole structure of Equiano’s book is itself a kind of metaphor, because in it, he both recounts his life as a slave and gives some account of the circumstances under which he obtained his freedom, and of what followed from that; but it is simultaneously, in a way which may remind us of the four levels of classical Biblical interpretation, an account of his discovery of God, of his adoption of Christianity. We might then call this a narrative of redemption, which assumes a mythic or metaphorical structure taken over precisely from the culture of those masters whom Equiano is trying to evade….3
Of course, the phrase “interesting narrative” appears in a number of titles that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic.4 In adopting it, Equiano follows a tropological convention of memoir and autobiography that has less to do with his racial identity (that is, whether a book written by a black man could be of interest to white readers, as Punter suggests), than with his intention to attract an intelligent and sympathetic audience to his text by way of a titular phrase well known to a transatlantic readership. It seems equally untenable that Equiano’s entire text should be read as a metaphor because, in Punter’s words, it “both recounts his life as a slave and gives some account of the circumstances under which he obtained his freedom.” Equiano certainly accomplishes both of these goals in his autobiography, yet, complex though they may be, neither of these narrative strategies translates into metaphor at the level of discourse. And while I agree that Equiano’s use of Biblical discourse, which I expound at length in the second section of this chapter, gets him closest to the hermeneutics of scriptural narration, I argue that Equiano’s use of metaphor goes well beyond the narrative of redemption Punter underscores here.
This is so because although Equiano upholds the conventions of eighteenth-century narrative by adopting a plot structure that approximates secular myth and epic as well as the narrative strategies of Biblical texts—a point I take to be of inestimable importance to understanding Equiano’s Narrative, as I discuss at length in the final section of this chapter—he also breaks these conventions when he essentially metaphorizes himself, not simply his text. As Equiano makes clear in his letter to Parliament, he clings to the hope that positive recognition of the meaning at play in his Narrative would, in his words, serve to “actuate” him, both as an individual—a subject in the modern world—and as a transfigured symbolic representation of Africans everywhere in the Old and New Worlds, for it is toward their freedom that he hopes to be an instrument. Equiano’s faith in the power of writing to right social and moral wrongs impels him toward the public sphere via the medium of metaphor. Equiano writes that he believes his text to be “wholly devoid of literary merit” (xxi), yet this sort of modesty is itself a well-noted eighteenth-century convention. Equiano is concerned, through writing and specifically through sophisticated, complex metaphorical constructions that are both discursive and imagistic, with the disclosing of a subjectivity that is not self-doubting but self-assured, and that contends at once with the national and the spiritual in an effort to emerge as the embodiment of freedom.
From this perspective, I am interested in describing how Equiano accomplishes the disclosure of his being by devising a metaphorical discourse that interrogates the limits of his national identity, even as he takes advantage of a metaphorical, onto-theological language of the spiritual and the personal. Much has been made of Equiano’s insistence upon literacy, his well-known trope of the talking book, and his activities as a slave overseer. Scholars have engaged in sustained debates over Equiano’s origins and the possibilities for national belonging available to him during his era. What I am concerned to examine in greater detail is how Equiano profits from the intricacies of metaphorical language in his quest to give expression to his being, to make his being known to his readership. His language shows that he has inherited ways of thinking about and revealing or conveying being from two chief sources: Biblical discourse and a philosophical discourse on national belonging. In both Biblical language and nationalist theory (that is, philosophies and discourses on the nation-state that were taking shape during the era in which Equiano wrote), Equiano finds metaphors of being. In both the spiritual and the secular, he reveals the seeds of a polysemy that is driven by tropological constructions that served, to a great degree, as the motivity behind what it meant to be a modern subject in the late eighteenth century.
I grant that these notions of modernity are not always our own. However, the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century thought of many philosophers of the nation-state and national identity who were Equiano’s contemporaries, and against whose theories of subjectivity and racial oppression Equiano wrote, was substantiated, often contrary to their own explicitly stated intentions, by a language that could be read as that of a secular Christianity (this is especially so in the work of Immanuel Kant and Georg W. F. Hegel), or, at the very least, a secular morality (e.g., the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele). Thus, the collocation of spiritual and nationalist metaphors at work in Equiano’s text is not as oddly “pre-modern” as it might first appear. Spiritual metaphorical discourse is not senseless, as is sometimes assumed, and it is worthwhile to analyze this discourse in relation to philosophical metaphors of the nation because the sacred discourse Equiano champions lays claims to meaningfulness, to an ontological revelation of being and truth, and, importantly, to an ethics of moral humanistic action. My intention is to clarify the relation between the metaphorical discourse Equiano employs, and the referential dimension of his text, which serves to project his sense of being into the world about him. Equiano...
