Review of The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano

*The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings* by Olaudah Equiano (1789). Published by Penguin Books.

At the time of writing this, I am a graduate student in my second and final year of my master’s program. This semester, I had the pleasure of taking a course called The Traveler, which is on forced migration and the slave trade through the lens of diaspora and literature written by and about slaves throughout several moments in history.

There are many different kinds of books and styles we’re reading throughout the course of the semester, but one of the many books we’ve picked up is Equiano’s.

I will admit, I had no idea who Equiano was or that his writings had caused so much a stir in English society. There are also so many qualms and debates about who he was as a person that led us to debate the book in class, but despite his invented ideas and potentially going through different names in order to come through with a new perspective on life, this is such an important text.

Granted, like many other texts we read, this isn’t a simple one either. Before I go on and ramble too much about the preliminary thoughts I’m having, let’s dive deeper into it and start the review.

Equiano recalls his journey of becoming a freed man in England.

The beginning of this text is about Equiano’s early life, or how he claims it is. There is potential evidence that he might not have been born in Africa, but all of this is inconclusive. As you see throughout this book, each owner pretty much gives him an entirely new name and so when he was in the Americas, which he is claimed to have been born in at times, he was given a specific name that might’ve matched up with someone else who was also unfortunate enough to have that name given to him, rather than the name his parents and community gave them.

Anyways, Equiano describes his early life in Nigeria, but he was a young boy, he was kidnapped with his sister. They were separated and taken to be sold off as slaves, and while he does meet her again at one point in his journey, the rest of their lives are doomed to be never seeing each other again, just like the family they were forced to leave behind. Equiano is sent across the Middle Passage for the first of many times, kickstarting a story in which he describes the great lengths he went through in slavery.

Obviously, this is an abolitionist text and is meant to describe the horrors of slavery in a way that isn’t going to completely turn off the white audience who this text was ultimately sold to. I don’t want to recall them here, as I think that would be a dishonor to restate what he went through in a mere review—I want people to read these kinds of texts and reflect.

There are an incredible amount of passages, ones that honestly bored me to death when I was reading the book to class, about Equiano’s eventual baptism, as he was introduced to religion through the many times he was brought back and forth between new masters, as well as how he became really talented in the art of ships and being a naval man.

As I mentioned before, one of the more interesting parts we were really picking apart in class was the fact he ended up having his names changes so many time, and the fact that names hold power.

Equiano does ultimately end up in England, where he becomes a freed man after purchasing his own freedom and scraping togethe rthe funds to do so. He does somehow end up an Arctic exploration somewhere along the way, and upon writing this memoir, becomes a prominent abolitionist because of how this became a symbol for his—and so many other people’s—struggles.

Overall Thoughts

I think Equiano’s narrative is a good one to read, but not if you’re getting started with this kind of work.Whether it’s true or not, he’s someone who didn’t have the typical field experience when he was a slave, and he was taught religion, reading, and writing. Most people did not get that graciousness (if we can call it that, but he expresses it in this way) when they were enslaved.

He also was able to purchase his own freedom, then have this narrative published. There are major privileges here that he had. Anyways, I think this text is important, but a bit tough to get through. His writing style isn’t exactly the most engaging.

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