BRIEF SUMMARY OF EQUIANO'S STORY
"A member of the Ibo nation [like Chinua Achebe], Equiano was born in the interior of Nigeria. When he was eleven, he and his sister were captured by slave traders and sold to British slavers bound for North America. A ship's steward, he served under several Mediterranean commanders and Caribbean traders. Having been brought to Virginia when he was sold to Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the Royal Navy, he was renamed Gustavas Vassa, after a sixteenth-century Swedish monarch. After many maritime adventures and a harsh human betrayal, the determined, highly literate Equiano purchased his freedom in 1766 and continued traveling throughout the Caribbean and the American colonies. Fearing harassment and recapture, he relocated to England where he worked for Dr. Charles Irving, a scientist experimenting with salt-water purification. Equiano then traveled to Italy, Turkey, Portugal, and the Arctic, and studied opera and architecture. First published in two volumes, his autobiography entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), is hailed as one of the finest slave narratives," in which Equiano recounts "his experiences aboard the slave ship, chronicles his mastery of navigation, his naval service in Canada during General Wolfe's campaign, and his labor in the Mediterranean as a gunpowder carrier, this is learning to be a barber while continuing as a sailor to many countries. With his diverse and unsurpassed talents, he emerged as one of the first community leaders and intellectuals of the age. Equiano's two-volume autobiography has remained a classic of the slave narrative genre, as well as in the global genre of autobiography" (Ferguson 240-241; emphasis added).
SLAVE NARRATIVE: "A type of narrative written by a former African . . . slave that typically recounts that individual's life and how he or she managed to escape from . . . [slavery]. Although autobiographical, slave narratives were chiefly intended to convince the reader that slavery needed to be abolished because of its devastating impact on human lives and the human spirit. Given this overriding social and moral purpose, scholars have debated the extent to which these narratives were strictly autobiographical. Many have maintained that numerous characters, events, and anecdotes, though based in truth, were often represented in a manner designed to achieve the the most persuasive impact on the reader. For instance, events could be relayed out of their proper chronological time, and some characters were composites or even based on stereotypes. The first slave narrative was published in 1760, but the genre was most prominent [in the United States] in the thirty years leading up to the [U.S.] Civil War (1861 - 65), after which slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment" (Murfin and Ray 449).
