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Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa's Interesting Narrative
Alexander X. Byrd
| ONCE again the natal origins of Gustavus Vassa, the African, are a matter for debate. In the early 1790s, short pieces in two British papers questioned whether the author of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano was indeed, as he claimed in his memoir, a native of Africa. The articles in question, unburdened by evidence, asserted that Vassa had been born in the Danish West Indies. Vassa considered the charge a scurrilous one and quickly mobilized friends and allies to quash it. The editor of the most judicious and useful modern edition of The Interesting Narrative has raised similar questions concerning Vassa's birthplace. This time, however, the questions are based firmly in the documentary record. Calling explicit attention to a too-long neglected portion of Vassa's baptismal record and pointing to an uncovered ship muster—both of which list South Carolina as Vassa's birthplace—Vincent Carretta has offered the following puzzle concerning the now canonical author: "we must ask why, if he had indeed been born Olaudah Equiano in Africa, he chose to suppress these facts."1 |
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Carretta's charge is a reasonable one and it deserves a reasonable response, yet queries concerning the origins of Vassa also naturally lead to larger and more pressing questions concerning not simply Vassa's origins, but the origins of his memoir. Questions concerning Vassa's place of birth are mostly pressing because they affect the light in which his Interesting Narrative is viewed and interpreted. Accordingly, Carretta has pointed out that "from the available evidence, one could argue that the author of The Interesting Narrative invented an African identity rather than reclaimed one. If so," Carretta continues, "Equiano's literary achievements have been underestimated."2 |
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Examining a literary aspect of Vassa's Interesting Narrative can help address questions concerning the author, his book, and the place of both in the ongoing study of the African diaspora. The ways that Vassa wrote about his ethnic origins and racial identity in his memoir—the ethnographic language of The Interesting Narrative—introduce important evidence into the debate about the origins of Equiano and speak powerfully to related questions concerning the sources of his recollections. |
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Vassa, a close study of his narrative makes clear, wrote about "Eboe" (his eighteenth-century spelling) and about his Igboness in an ambiguous, indecisive, and sometimes quite confused manner. But rather than indicating an unfamiliarity with being Igbo, Vassa's apparently incomplete grasp and enigmatic expression of his Igboness actually suggests someone deeply familiar with and in some way affected by the social and political geography of the Biafran interior.3 Further, Vassa's discourse on his racial Africanness almost perfectly captures and expresses a black transatlantic perspective of someone whose life was framed by the kind of transoceanic migration that was the slave trade. Whatever Vassa's origins, the ethnographic language of his memoir supplies good internal evidence that the origins of The Interesting Narrative lie decidedly in the Biafran interior and were profoundly African. These conclusions are not without consequence as far as the question of Vassa's birthplace is concerned. They also inform, in the end, a set of caveats concerning a current trend in American slavery studies: the scholarly inclination to write about African slaves as members of various African countries or nations such as Vassa's Eboe. |
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