|
Women to govern men . . . slaves freemen . . . being total
violations and perversions of the laws of nature and
nations. . . .
—Francis Bacon
-
As a strategic intervention in the debate on the
abolition of slavery The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the
African made its author famous, but the full import
of the text is only now beginning to re-emerge.[1]The
text is a complex political performance because, as
Sonia Hofkosh emphasizes, "Equiano enters the political
debate [on slavery] through personal experience. . . .
The Interesting Narrative seeks to influence
('excite') the collective, political body of Parliament
. . . through the vocabulary of sentiment and feeling,
appealing directly to the very hearts of its individual
members" (334). The preface to the 1814 edition of
The Interesting Narrative explicitly states that
the representation of his sufferings is designed to
elicit sympathetic affect in his readers: "Being a true
relation of occurrences which had taken place, and of
sufferings which he had endured, it produced a degree
of humane feelings in men's minds, to excite which the
most animated addresses and the most convincing
reasoning would have laboured in vain" (Qtd. in Hofkosh
334). By suggesting that reason may not provide a
viable political tool in the abolition of slavery,
these prefatory remarks focus the reader's attention on
the body itself—on precisely that which is
commodified in the trade of African slaves. Hofkosh's
appraisal of these remarks draws attention to the
shared bodily existence of slaves and readers:
The book is directed not to the reason, an abstract
quantity, but seeks rather to register its effect in
the very bodies of its readers—at their feet,
in their hearts, and in their minds. It represents
individual experience to them—both the author's
and their own—creating for them an isolate,
intimate space through which they can respond
sympathetically to its argument. It operates from the
inside out, self-referentially, narrowing its focus
in order to universalize its appeal. . . . The
political dimension of the text is thus articulated
in libidinal language; in Equiano's abolitionist
intervention, his life story, the political is
personal. (334-5)
The affect generated by reading about private bodily
suffering is therefore crucial to Equiano's political
mission.
-
However, if this generation of affect is to have
political effects, a series of complex substitutions
needs to unfold.[2]On
the one hand, Equiano's suffering needs to be hollowed
out such that it can exemplify the pain of
commodification as such. His pain needs to
synechdocally stand as part of the whole of slavery's
anguish. This implies a certain cancellation of his
private experience in the service of a generalizable
exemplarity. On the other hand, the reader's pain, that
which allows him or her to be "put into the place of
another," must undergo a similar set of
modulations.[3]
Before this libidinal economy can be harnessed in the
political project of abolishing slavery, the generated
affect has to be simultaneously separated from Equiano
and from the reader so that it may be attached to the
space of commodification. What this means is that the
effectivity of Equiano's text lies in its power to make
the reader experience objecthood. Paradoxically, I
believe that this is achieved by inculcating affective
responses and then extracting that which we associate
most directly with emotion—i.e. its specific
subjective quality. In other words, libidinal language
is deployed to make one understand the horrors that
attend the libido's cancellation thereby founding a
politics from the ground of the object. One of the aims
of this essay is to demonstrate that such a politics is
remarkably volatile and while apparently opening onto
transgressive possibilities also seems prone to
reversion in its specific manifestation in the
discourse network of anti-slavery activism. However, to
achieve such a demonstration requires that we bring
styles of thinking endemic to queer theory to bear on
the historical materialism of much recent work on the
relationship between colonial and metropolitan society
in Romantic studies.[4]
Specifically, this essay inhabits the still
underappreciated period in Foucault's thinking
immediately prior to and following the publication of
La Volonté de savoir in which he
attempted to articulate the relationship between
sexuality, biopower, race and the regulation of the
middle classes.[5]In
accordance with David M. Halperin's recent reminder
that Foucault's project needs to be understood as an
"inquiry into the modalities of human subjectivation,"
this essay historicizes Equiano as a subject of desire
at a particularly vexed moment in the history not only
of British imperialism, but also of circum-Atlantic
subjectivity (88).[6]By
attempting to historicize specific scenes, desires and
sexual acts in Equiano's text, one can discern not only
the intersection of sexual and imperial economies, but
also the largely forgotten libidinal dynamics of
Dissenting religion during the period.[7]
-
This essay examines this problematic by
concentrating on a small episode in The Interesting
Narrative in which Equiano meets a young Musquito
man for whom property is a largely foreign notion. The
interaction between one who was formerly a commodity
and one who does not yet know how commodities circulate
occurs late in The Interesting Narrative. My
contention is that this complex pedagogical scene
constitutes the radical core of Equiano's text and as
such provides a model for understanding the libidinal
exchange between reader and text articulated above.
Furthermore, this scene also involves a specific
historical intervention aimed at teaching the Musquito
prince how to resist the commodification of his people
as their region is colonized. In what I see as a
symptomatic gap in the existing scholarship on this
text, it is never asked who George might be.[8]
Since neither Equiano's eighteenth-century readers, nor
his twentieth-century exegetes seem willing to enquire
after specific Musquito individuals, I want to
establish George's identity and suggest that it may
provide a key for understanding Equiano's textual and
political strategies.
-
Late in 1775, shortly after Equiano undergoes a
Methodist conversion, he is invited by Dr. Charles
Irving to join "a new adventure, in cultivating a
plantation at Jamaica and the Musquito Shore" in
present day Nicaragua (202).[9]
Aside from making money, Equiano's primary desire
during his connection with Dr. Irving is "to be an
instrument, under God, of bringing some poor sinner to
my well beloved master, Jesus Christ" (202). Equiano
concentrates his missionary activities on a young
Musquito prince who is returning to Central America
from an embassy in London. That embassy constitutes a
minor moment in the British attempts to colonize the
Musquito coast.
-
After a series of struggles with the Spanish for
control of the Musquito Shore, "the British bestowed
sovereignty on the Musquito Indians, i.e. on the
hereditary 'king' of the Musquitos, and formed an
alliance with them" (Naylor 46). As Robert Naylor
argues, "the weakness of this particular protectorate
system was that the territory was occupied by scattered
clusters of mesolithic Indians with no formal
conception of territorial domain in the western sense.
. . . Therefore, the British would virtually have had
to create the very [sovereign] entity to which they
were allegedly allied" (46). In the late 1760s and
early 1770s this fictional sovereign body became the
object of intense economic speculation. Eight
merchants, including William Pitt the elder, formed the
Albera Poyer project, which quietly acquired vast
tracts of land in the Black River district from the
Musquito "king" George I, with the hope that Britain
would formally colonize the region in the near future.
Britain's superintendent in the region, Robert Hodgson,
became convinced that the natives "were being cheated
out of their lands and that the Musquito Shore was
becoming 'prey to the rapacity of a few individuals'"
(59). In the interest of maintaining faux-diplomatic
relations with the Musquito and of foiling a land
scheme that did not include him, Hodgson unilaterally
declared his authority over all lands and possessions
of the Musquito Indians and announced that land
transactions involving the Musquito would be regulated
by his office. The ensuing legal crisis is directly
related to Equiano's text, for the members of the
Albera Poyer project sent the Musquito king's son to
London to demand that Hodgson be recalled.
-
When the prince is introduced into Equiano's
narrative, Equiano recognizes but does not elaborate on
his connection to the Albera Poyer land-scheme:
Before I embarked, I found with . . . Doctor [Irving]
four Musquito Indians, who were chiefs in their own
country, and were brought here by some English
traders for some selfish ends. One of them was the
Musquito king's son, a youth of almost eighteen years
of age; and whilst he was here he was baptized by the
name of George. (202-3)
What Equiano does not explain is that George and his
companions have come to London to demand that Hodgson
be recalled on the grounds that he has failed to
prevent the enslavement of natives in the region.
Through George, the project is attempting to obviate
Hodgson's interference by having him recalled on
grounds unrelated to the land scheme.[10]
In other words, anti-slavery arguments are being used
to further the project's plans for colonization. Robert
Naylor is careful to point out the suspicious nature of
this visit by emphasizing first, that the other
interested party in the land transaction is George's
father and second, that the principal agents in the
trade of native slaves were the Musquito Indians
themselves. Bolstered by their allegiance with the
British, the Musquito actively captured and sold their
tribal enemies to English planters.
-
Equiano's temporary reticence regarding this corrupt
deployment of George's anti-slavery position breaks
down when he attempts to give George a double lesson
first in protestant election and later in capitalist
exchange:
In our passage I took all pains that I could to
instruct the Indian prince in the doctrines of
Christianity, of which he was entirely ignorant; and
to my great joy he was quite attentive, and received
with gladness the truths that the Lord enabled me to
set forth to him. I taught him in the compass of
eleven days all the letters, and he could put even
two or three of them together, and spell them. I had
Fox's Martyrology with cuts, and he used to be very
fond of looking into it, and would ask many questions
about the papal cruelties he saw depicted there,
which I explained to him. (203)
In this colonial encounter, the scene of reading is
remarkably similar to the one Equiano stages in The
Interesting Narrative as a whole. In the process of
conversion, Equiano has hailed the Musquito prince, who
has been baptized and given the name George, into an
affective relation with representations of suffering.
Once this affect is generated, Equiano then explains
the proper interpretation of the represented agony.
Equiano subtly intervenes in George's embassy, but the
transcultural lesson works by way of a series of
perverse narratives. Equiano's interaction with George
involves two masochistic scenes—a broad scenario
of Christian masochism with a more specifically
sexualized fantasy at its core—which establish a
series of interlocking political allegories. These
allegories draw parallels between the martyrdom of
Protestant Englishmen, the psycho-sexual dynamics of
shipboard society, and a specific moment in the history
of British colonization. The allegorical dimensions of
The Interesting Narrative speak directly not
only to the construction of racial categories in late
eighteenth-century Britain and America, but also to the
forms of complex political resistance developed by
Anglo-Africans to deal with imperial domination in the
Black Atlantic.
Equiano's Invisible Church
-
Linda Colley has recently reminded us of the
significant role played by Foxe's Book of Martyrs. .
. in the consolidation of British nationalism in
the eighteenth century (25-8). Based on Foxe's Acts
and Monuments of 1563 the book was revived and
circulated in an aggressively patriotic fashion in the
last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Publishers
and patriots alike realized that Foxe's representation
of the agonies of Protestant martyrs during the reign
of Queen Mary had a certain translatability to
contemporary British politics. The burning bodies could
be retroactively cited as evidence not only of their
resolute faith, but also of their future countrymen's
Protestant destiny.What emerges from this specific
imagination of community could be described as a form
of masochistic nationalism—i.e. a nationalism
that coheres in the pain of its annihilated
members.[11]
- Masochistic nationalism may seem counter-intuitive to
our normative understanding of national character since
masochism carries with it the connotation of perversion,
a turning aside from truth or right, and specifically a
turning from pleasure to pain. As the quote from Bacon in
my epigraph indicates the perverse is threatening because
it deviates from the principle of hierarchy—for
Bacon, women should not govern men and slaves should not
rule over masters. Significantly, Colley argues that
Foxe's text has nationalist effects precisely because it
threatens state hierarchy. To understand this we need to
recognize that Equiano and George are poring over a book
that represents two kinds of violence. The violence in
Foxe's Book of Martyrs does not "go all one way."
Richard Helgerson suggests that "the persecution and
martyrdom of those whom Foxe considers members of the
true church of Christ are the book's most persistent
subject but God's punishment of persecutors makes a
strong countertheme" (255). This is important because the
second type of violence allows for a type of nationalism
predicated on the disjunction of nation and state and
hence from the extant governmental strategies of
modernity. Foxe's text contains vivid accounts of Queen
Mary's persecution of Protestant heretics accompanied by
less systematic representations of sudden violence in
which the state sanctioned persecutors are killed by
animals or natural disasters. In the first instance, "The
violence of Antichrist against the true church of Christ
and its members is carried out by willing human agents
occupying offices of great worldly power," whereas "the
violence of God [in the second instance] is either direct
or else mediated by unwitting actors" (258). As Richard
Helgerson states, "God's violence requires no
institutional order. [Beneath these two distinct forms of
punishment] lies a double and potentially divided sense
of communal identity" (258).
-
The way in which these two communities connect is of
crucial historical importance, for "the visible church
of which the king is the head should also be the local
embodiment of Christ's invisible and universal church"
(258). In Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the period
immediately following Wycliffe's vernacular translation
of the Bible constitutes a significant rupture between
the visible and invisible church, between the state and
a less tangible form of religious community. Of this
latter group, Helgerson argues that
Its members are readers who imagine themselves in
invisible fellowship with thousands of other readers,
particularly those who encounter the word in the same
vernacular translation. Like the nation, this
imagined community does not necessarily coincide with
the state. Indeed, the state may frustrate its
ambition to achieve a visible institutional
embodiment of its own, may hunt down and persecute
its members. But where the imagined community does
not coincide with the state, it saps the state's
legitimacy and the legitimacy of the social hierarchy
that constitutes the power structure of the state.
(266)
Within the overall narrative, the accounts of the
suffering of the invisible church are embodied in the
burning Protestant martyrs, but these stories are
counter-balanced by a chronicle history of England in
which worldly and godly institutions exist in harmony.
This balance allows Foxe to figure the period of Queen
Mary's reign as an aberration which once corrected will
allow a re-harmonization of worldly and divine
governance, of state and divinely elect nation.
However, the text in Equiano's hands moves in an
altogether different direction.
-
Significantly, Equiano's primary teaching tool is
not the magisterial 1563 edition of Foxe's Acts and
Monuments, but rather a more portable abridged
version of 1760 with elaborate copper plate
illustrations edited by Martin Madan, a noted and
controversial Wesleyan teacher, entitled The Book of
Martyrs: Containing an Account of the Sufferings and
Death of the Protestants in the Reign of Mary the
First. Illustrated with Copper Plates. Originally
Written by Mr John Fox; And now Revised and Corrected
with a Recommendary Preface by the Revd: Mr:
Madan.[12]
As the title indicates the illustrations are a
significant selling point, but they also fill the space
left by significant elisions. Commenting on the various
editions of Foxe's text, William Haller notes that
eighteenth-century abridgements
are a vulgarization of the original for an
increasingly narrow evangelical Protestant piety.
Foxe's whole account of ecclesiastical and national
history, by which he sought to make his
contemporaries understand what happened in Mary's
reign and its bearing on the situation in which they
found themselves under her successor dropped
completely out. (252)
Without its counter-balancing national history, the
book in Equiano and George's hands establishes, in
Haller's words, "a strongly oppositional identity, an
identity founded on suffering and resistance and
profoundly antithetical to the hierarchical order of
the English state" (268). Standing in place of this
historical critique, the illustrations demand closer
scrutiny.
-
With only a few exceptions the illustrations in
The Book of Martyrs repeat the same
compositional elements (see fig. 1).
Typically, the centre of the engraving is dominated by
the martyr himself who is usually surrounded by a frame
of fire and uttering his final testimonies of faith.
That frame is itself enclosed by a crowd of onlookers
who fill the background of the image. In between the
crowd and the burning martyr one finds two or more
executioners. In light of Kaja Silverman's analysis of
masochism, the illustrations which ostensibly fascinate
George conform to the structural contours of Christian
masochism as described by Theodor Reik in Masochism
in Sex and Society. Reik argues that the psychic
economy of moral masochism has three primary
characteristics—"exhibitionism or
'demonstrativeness,' revolutionary fervor, and
'suspense'" (Silverman 197).[13]
For Reik,
an external audience is a structural necessity [in
Christian masochism], although it may be either
earthly or heavenly. Second, the body is centrally on
display, whether it is being consumed by ants or
roasting over a fire. Finally, behind all these
"scenes" or "exhibits" is the master tableau or group
fantasy—Christ nailed to the cross, head
wreathed in thorns and blood dripping from his
impaled sides. (197)
The illustrations in The Book of
Martyrs contain all of these elements. In figure 1
(detail), the displayed body dominates the centre
of the image, the earthly audience surrounds the
martyr, and key elements of the composition invoke the
crucifixion—the attitude of the martyr's body and
the lance-bearing officers make the link to Christ all
too evident. The body being burned and beaten "is not
so much the body as the 'flesh,' and beyond that sin
itself, and the whole fallen world" (197). As Silverman
argues, this substitution of the flesh for the body
"pits the Christian masochist against the society in
which he or she lives, makes of that figure a rebel, or
even a revolutionary of sorts. In this particular
subspecies of moral masochism there would seem to be a
strong heterocosmic impulse–the desire to remake
the world in another image altogether, to forge a
different cultural order" (197-8). When one applies
that heterocosmic impulse to the realm of anti-slavery
activism, the slave's suffering is retained as the
instantiation not only of the eternal punishment of
those who participated in and perpetuated the slave
trade, but also of a different cultural order beyond
the reach of racial derogation and commodification. It
is this conjunction of vengeance and radical renewal
that characterizes Equiano's largely eschatological
approach to the political in this passage.[14]
-
This threat to the principle of hierarchy gains some
resonance in light of Paul Gilroy's recent decision in
The Black Atlantic to consider diasporic African
identity not in terms of roots but rather "as a process
of movement and mediation that is more appropriately
approached via the homonym routes" (19). If following
Gilroy we recognize "the image of the ship [as] a
living, micro-political system in motion," then
Equiano's invocation of the invisible church through
the act of reading The Book of Martyrs with
George establishes him as part of an oppositional
community that is being persecuted by the ship-board
minions of the English state. As the phantasmatic drama
unfolds, the white sailors of the Morning Star are
initially deployed as the observers in the
illustrations, but, borrowing a phrase from Reik's
analysis of Christian masochism, "the subject [in this
case, Equiano] functions both as the victim and the
victimizer, dispensing with the need for an external
object. Even when the punishment seems to derive from
the external world, it is in fact the result of a
skillful unconscious manipulation of 'adverse
incidents'" (Silverman 196).[15]
If we understand Equiano's invocation of the Marian
martyrs in a thoroughly political fashion, then what is
emerging is a subtle bid for political autonomy in a
limited field of action. As Silverman summarizes, "the
sufferings and defeats of the fantasizing subject are
dramatized in order to make the final victory appear
all the more glorious and triumphant" (196). However,
this demonstrative aspect of Equiano's text involves a
second masochistic scene that is much more overtly
sexualized, yet nonetheless integrally related to the
reading of Foxe.
-
As Equiano continues his account of George's
conversion, he carefully notes that George's act of
praying is not prayer in the proper sense:
I made such progress with this youth, especially in
religion, that when I used to go to bed at different
hours of the night, if he was in his bed, he would
get up on purpose to go to prayer with me, without
any other clothes than his shirt; and before he would
eat any of his meals amongst the gentlemen in the
cabin, he would first come to me and pray, as he
called it. I was well pleased at this, and took
great delight in him, and used much supplication to
God for his conversion.(203)
One could argue that Equiano's perspicuity regarding
the status of prayer is nothing more than a sign of
doctrinal rigor, but such a reading downplays the
extent to which Equiano himself indicates that reading
The Book of Martyrs with George is traversed by
a complex economy of pleasure. This process of
conversion is operating by way of perversion because
Equiano experiences pleasure in spite of the fact that
George's activities deviate from true prayer.[16]
The moment when Equiano indirectly represents George's
use of the word "pray" should give us pause, for there
is a sense of estrangement that enters the text when
Equiano attributes this naming to George—when in
fact it is Equiano who is introducing George to this
ritual. This mis-attribution of Equiano's own actions
and desires to George are an instance of what Reik
calls the manipulation of "adverse incidents." In the
paragraphs below, I argue that Foxe is deployed such
that Equiano becomes phantasmatically abased as the
object of George's desire.
-
If we look closely at the scene of reading we see
that Equiano emphasizes that George "was very fond of
looking into [Fox's Martyrology]" (203). But this
"fondness" has another register in which Equiano
constructs George's desire to join him at bedtime,
scantily clad and ready for "prayer." This double
ascription of desire unfolds into two different
masochistic trajectories.First, George's desire for the
book hails him into an identificatory relation with the
Christian martyrs; and second, George's "readiness for
prayer" figures Equiano as the object of George's
desire. The first textual hailing is aimed at George's
conversion, whereas the second contextual ascription of
desire is aimed at Equiano's abasement. Through this
latter gesture, Equiano has moved beyond political
identification with the represented martyrs in Foxe.He
is now enacting his sexual degradation.The two
masochistic scenarios, the persecution of the invisible
church and the abasement of Equiano, are tied together
by George's name. Since he has been named after the
sovereign, George can figure simultaneously as the
Other and as the King. In this light, George plays a
perverse yet constitutive role in Equiano's
oppositional relation to the ungodly "little world" of
shipboard society.[17]
The textual and contextual trajectories of masochism
are joined by the spectral presence of the sovereign
who acts as the apex or pivot in both triangular
scenarios.
-
Significantly, these two masochistic trajectories
are set in conflict with one another. If George
achieves a full identification with the burning bodies
represented in The Book of Martyrs, he accedes
to his conversion and begins to imagine himself as a
persecuted member of the invisible church. In other
words, conversion will push George towards the same
masochistic practice enacted by Equiano, and thereby
deprive Equiano of his necessary tormentor.[18]
It is not surprising, therefore, when Equiano tells us
that the process of George's conversion is not only
slow, but ultimately unsuccessful:
I was in full hope of seeing daily every appearance
of that change which I could wish; not knowing the
devices of Satan, who had many of his emissaries to
sow his tares as fast as I sowed the good seed, and
pull down as fast as I built up. Thus we went on
nearly four-fifths of our passage, when Satan at last
got the upper hand. (203)
Despite Equiano's desire for George's conversion,
the fact that the whole process unfolds slowly fits a
crucial element of masochistic practice. According to
Reik, the moral masochist develops a series of
strategies to "prolong preparatory detail and ritual at
the expense of climax or consummation. . . . this
implies the endless postponement of the moment at which
suffering yields to reward" (Silverman 199). Silverman
specifies the relationship between suspense and reward
in Christian masochism by focusing on its temporal
aspects:
The Christian...lives his or her life in perpetual
anticipation of the second coming. The figural
meaning which this anticipation implants in present
sufferings makes it possible for them to be savored
as future pleasures, with time folding over itself in
such a way as to permit that retroactivity to be
already experienced now, in a moment prior to its
effectivity. Such is the fundamentally perverse
nature of Christian suspense and the pain it
sanctifies and irradiates. . . .(200)
In other words, Equiano's pleasure in George is
actually displaced pleasure that will be experienced in
the future when he is rewarded by God. Through George's
unachieved "conversion," Equiano is able to savour his
future status in a post-revolutionary state, in a
post-imperial cultural order.
-
But Equiano's oppositionality at this stage in the
narrative is contingent on his continuing relationship
with George. That which separates them directly
interferes with Equiano's heterocosmic fantasies. As
long as Satan "sows his tares as fast as [Equiano] sows
the good seed" the engagement with George seems capable
of infinite extension—a kind of interminable
conversion (203). In a sense, the steady pace of
Satan's obstruction works to Equiano's advantage
because it provides the suspense which is so crucial to
the maximization of pleasure in the masochistic
subject. However, when the white sailors intervene in
George's conversion they instantiate a fundamental
shift in Equiano's masochistic fantasies, not because
they impede George's identification with the invisible
church—that only suspends Equiano's
reward—but because their actions physically,
psychically and politically separate George and
Equiano. This separation pushes Equiano's masochistic
practice into more extreme manifestations whose
specific details allow us to clarify the libidinal
economy which undergirds his political resistance to
ship-board society.
Rape and Liberation
-
The subtle and seemingly innocent account of
George's attempt to pray is linked to a much more
violent masochistic scenario when the white crew
members of the Morning Star are introduced into
the scene:
Some of Satan's messengers, seeing this poor heathen
much advanced in piety, began to ask him whether I
had converted him to Christianity, laughed and made
their jest at him, for which I rebuked them as much
as I could; but this treatment caused the prince to
halt between two opinions. Some of the true sons of
Belial, who did not believe that there was any
hereafter, told him never to fear the devil, for
there was none existing. . . .(203-4)
This passage introduces a remarkable subtext which
re-orients much of the heterocosmic desire we have
encountered thus far. The subtext is coded into
Equiano's attack on the white sailors as "the true sons
of Belial" for the appellation involves the threat of
sodomitical rape. Like many of Equiano's presentations
of evil, he is alluding to Paradise Lost:
.
. .when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
Witness the streets of Sodom, and that night
In Gibeah, when the hospitable door
Exposed a matron to avoid worse rape.(I. 500-5)
Lurking behind both Equiano's and Milton's
invocation of the "sons of Belial" lies the combined
story of sexual violence and national election in
Judges 19-21, whose implications for not only the
represented scene of reading, but also the act of
reading Equiano's text are profound. The shift from
The Book of Martyrs to the book of Judges
occasions a reversal in the flow of sexual violence
that subtends the emergence of a specifically national
fantasy.
-
Adam Potkay's reading of The Interesting
Narrative persuasively argues that Equiano
consistently relates presumably historical events in
the Old Testament to occurrences in his own spiritual
life (Potkay, "Olaudah," 681). This tropological
strategy was far from unusual in Evangelical
self-fashionings, but Potkay demonstrates that
unlike other Puritan spiritual autobiographies,
Equiano's "progress" is not just the
tropological freeing of the soul from the symbolic
Egypt of carnality; rather, his journey proceeds on a
literal as well as an allegorical level. According to
Equiano's telling of his life, he literally
retraces the course of the Bible from patriarchal
mores . . . to captivity in a strange land; and from
deliverance to repratriation in a Beulah land of the
spirit. In short, Equiano literally reenacts the
basic narrative pattern of the books of Genesis and
Exodus, as well as learning, by his conversion or
Christian re-birth, to read Israelite history along
with his own experience as an allegory of spiritual
deliverance (681).[19]
This narrativization of personal experience in terms
of Israelite history blurs the line between spiritual
and political deliverance. This blurring was especially
evident in the early Methodist teachings of George
Whitefield. Equiano attests to having seen Whitefield
speak, and as Potkay argues, "Whitefield's message of
spiritual liberation from the bondage of 'these
depraved natures of ours' sounded to some like a call
for liberation, pure and simple" (Potkay and Burr
9).[20]As
Whitefield states,
Let us consider ourselves . . . as persons travelling
to a long eternity; as rescued by the free grace of
God, in some measure, from our natural Egyptian
bondage, and marching under the conduct of our
spiritual Joshua, through the wilderness of this
world, to the land of our heavenly Canaan. (Quoted in
Potkay and Burr, 10)
Potkay's account of the tropological gestures in
The Interesting Narrative focuses primarily on
how Equiano links Igbo society to the pastoral state of
the Patriarchs in Genesis, and on how he figures his
enslavement, auto-manumission and conversion as an
enactment of the Israelites' escape from captivity in
Exodus.[21]The
Genesis/Exodus allegory animates much anti-slavery
discourse, but Equiano strays to other sections of the
Old Testament. The "sons of Belial" episode under
consideration in this essay rehearses an infamous
passage later in the history of the Israelites which is
much more difficult to understand in terms of
liberation, but which has everything to do with the
consolidation of power in what can only be described as
a national corpus.
- Equiano's invocation of Judges at this late point in
The Interesting Narrative allows us to extend and
deepen Potkay's reading of this tropology.As a historical
text, "the Book of Judges describes the years from the
death of Joshua, Moses' successor, to the time of Samuel,
the first of the great prophets and the herald of the
kingdom of Israel" (Interpreter's
Bible 688). It was a period of fractious
inter-tribal struggle in which the twelve tribes
eventually came to see themselves as a unified people.
According to Jacob M. Myers,
The prime factor in the growing national unity was
the religion of Yahweh. The various national and
tribal lists, and the tribal relationships themselves
[that recur throughout Judges], show the Israelites
were a heterogeneous group held together only by a
more or less common experience and by their devotion
to Yahweh." (684-5)
Judges therefore is an account of national
consolidation based on shared religious belief. In this
context, Equiano understands his struggle with the
sailors on board the Morning Star as a
tropological rehearsal of the war between the tribes of
Israel and the renegade Benjaminites that points to an
allegorical unification not only of Christian
believers, but also of ethnically distinct peoples in
the emergent British nation.
-
Equiano integrates the Book of Judges into his
narrative first, by declaring the sailors "true Sons of
Belial," and second, by staging multiple scenes of
hospitality. The sailors taunt George by telling "him
never to fear the devil, for there was none existing;
and if ever he came to the prince, they desired he may
be sent to them" (204). This taunt obliquely rehearses
Judges 19 in which the Benjaminites, figured by Milton
as the sons of Belial, demand that an old man from
Gibeah break the laws of hospitality and give up his
Levite guest to the lustful mob. The Benjaminites
"beset the house round about, beating on the door, and
they said to . . . the master of the house, 'Bring out
the man who came into your house, that we may know
him'" (19:22). The threat of sodomitical rape unfolds
into a horrifying narrative of sexual violence and
national vengeance which ultimately recoils on
Equiano's political resistance to the institutions and
practices which enslaved him. However, before exploring
this problematic I want to establish the strange way in
which the sailors' taunt impinges on Equiano's
interpellation of George into his masochistic reading
of Foxe.
-
The sailors short circuit Equiano's masochistic
practice by simply telling George that if the Devil
comes to you, send him to us and we'll take care of
him. In other words, the sailors are offering to
protect George from precisely the martyrdom which
drives identification with the invisible church.
However, the sailors' taunt contains a double sign
which fully entraps George. The "sons of Belial" stand
as a figure for Satan in 2 Corinthians 6:15. The
sailors' promise, therefore, forms a loop: if the Devil
comes to you, send him to those who stand in for the
Devil. In this paradoxical scenario George is shunted
from the masochistic scene and hence denied access to
the salvation of the invisible church which Equiano has
linked to freedom from the bonds of colonial
domination. George's acceptance of the sailors places
him in a similar position to those who accepted the
protection of the state during the reign of Queen Mary,
for in Foxe's narrative they too misrecognized the
power of the ungodly state. Equiano's response is
perfectly apposite, for he argues that "if he and these
people went to hell together, their pains would not
make his any lighter" (204). By refusing to seek
pleasure through pain in his lifetime, George is
promised not only political subjugation in this world,
but also an eternity of torment in the next.
-
Because Equiano's identification with the martyred
figures in Fox is guaranteed by his deployment of
George in the position of the King, the sailors' taunt
effectively destroys Equiano's masochistic
identification by depriving him of his
tormentor—of his "sovereign" George. At this
point, Equiano's text takes a deeply unsettling turn
for the masochistic scene which revolves around the
reading of The Book of Martyrs shifts textual
loci. In an extremely subtle manner, Equiano re-stages
his engagement with George using narrative structures
derived from Judges 19-21. This means three things.
First, that the agent of abasement shifts from George
the indigene sovereign to the "Sons of Belial." Second,
that Equiano's phantasmatic abasement becomes more
explicitly sexualized and more overtly violent. And
third, that Equiano's invocation of revenge becomes at
once more pointed and more ambivalent. In order to
understand this latter point we need to return to the
moment of hospitality from the earlier masochistic
scene and examine how it is restructured to allow the
Judges narrative to become tropologically active.
-
At the core of Equiano's attempt to convert George
one finds a moment of hospitality very similar both to
that of Judges 19 and to that of the sailors' taunt,
for it is George who comes to Equiano's cabin in the
middle of the night full of the desire to "pray." I
have already suggested that Equiano's self-construction
as the object of George's desire constitutes the
abasement necessary for Equiano's masochistic
identification with the invisible church. But the
allusion to Judges allows us to be much more specific
about that abasement. In Judges 19 the master of the
house offers his daughter and the Levite's wife as a
way of saving his guest from sodomitical rape. When the
wife is cast out, she is raped to the point of death
and dumped on the threshold of the house. In response,
the Levite cuts the body of his wife into twelve pieces
and sends a piece to each of the tribes of Israel as a
call to arms against the Benjaminites. Mieke Bal
emphasizes that the text is ambiguous about the raped
wife's condition upon her return. As she states, the
text "refrains from stating whether the woman is dead
or alive" (218). This detail is crucial because it
suggests that the Levite may have killed his wife in
order to elicit vengeance. As we will see this
ambiguity has significant ramifications for Equiano's
text.
-
When George comes to Equiano's door, the narrative
immediately establishes a visitor-host relation in
which the shelter Equiano offers is that of the
invisible church posited in The Book of Martyrs.
Significantly, both The Book of Martyrs and the
Book of Judges emphasize that loyalty to God is
necessary to success as a nation. By referring to the
sailors as the "Sons of Belial," Equiano subtly figures
the sailor's threat to George's conversion as the
threat of sodomitical rape. The resolution of that
threat, however, is extremely complex and requires that
one recognize some important constitutive elements of
shipboard society. First, since the ship is an all male
zone, women exist only as "ideas" of
alterity—their bodily difference is nowhere in
evidence. What this means is that the primary corporeal
encoding of difference on the ship is that of race. In
the terms set forth in Judges 19, there is no sexual
other to be offered to the rapacious "Sons of Belial."
In light of the earlier masochistic scenario, could we
not argue that Equiano re-casts himself simultaneously
as the Levite and the Levite's wife in this
phantasmatic scene? After all, he has already figured
himself as the object of George's desire.
-
At this point Equiano's Christian masochism reveals
itself to be integrally connected to a certain
feminization. As Silverman emphasizes,
the exemplary Christian masochist also seeks to
remake him or herself according to the model of the
suffering Christ, the very picture of earthly
divestiture and loss. Insofar as such an
identification implies the complete and utter
negation of all phallic values, Christian masochism
has radically emasculating implications, and is in
its purest forms intrinsically imcompatible with
pretensions of masculinity. And since its primary
exemplar is a male rather than a female subject,
those implications would seem impossible to ignore.
(198)
What I would argue is that the hole left by the
collapse of Equiano's Christian masochism is filled by
newly active feminine masochism. The shift from the
scene derived from Foxe to one defined by Judges 19-21
reveals not only the sexual dynamics which drive
Christian martyrdom, but also the close relation
between femininity and commodification.
-
Equiano's ability to phantasmatically align himself
with both the Levite and his mutilated wife is deeply
connected to Equiano's experience of slavery, for the
Levite owns his wife as property in much the same way
that Equiano owns himself. As Sonia Hofkosh states,
in the moment that he buys his freedom, Equiano's
history might also be seen to literalize the ethos of
possessive individualism, exposing as it does so the
double edge that defines the paradigm of the
entrepeneurial subject: the self as owner depends on
the principle that selves can be owned, freedom on
the possibility of alienation, identity on
difference. (336-7)
What this implies is that auto-manumission is
structurally similar to feminine masochism. If we look
closely at Equiano's account of his manumission this
link between feminization and commodification is
already operative. In his attempt to register the
extent of his "unutterable" bliss at buying his
freedom, Equiano offers a list of comparable moments of
joy:
Heavens, who could do justice to my feelings at this
moment? Not conquering heroes themselves in the midst
of triumph—Not the tender mother who has just
regained her long-lost infant, and presses it to her
heart . . . Not the lover, when he once more embraces
his beloved mistress after she had been ravished from
his arms!—All within my breast was tumult,
wildness, and delirium! (136)
The resting place of this sublime cascade offers a
sexual allegory for the experience of slavery and
self-purchase that resonates with the narrative of
Judges 19. The figure compares the relationship between
purchasing subject and object purchased to the
relationship between male lover and his raped wife. The
comparison is grounded on the double meaning of the
word "ravish" for it signifies the act of rape as well
as the act of violently seizing and carrying away
someone or something. If the passivity inscribed in
femininity can be understood as parallel to
commodification, as Laura Brown suggests, then the act
of commodification hollows out the subject in a fashion
that makes it susceptible to feminization.[22]
The double identification with the Levite and his wife,
therefore, is intimately connected to the experience of
double subjectivity instantiated by the commodification
of bodies.[23]
-
At one level, this feminization reverses one of the
key metaphorics of abolitionist discourse—i.e.
that the sexual commodification of women in marriage is
akin to the commodification of Africans in the
institution of slavery.[24]It
reverses it by aligning femininity with what is
required to extricate oneself from the institution of
slavery.[25]In
this particularly condensed form, Equiano's textual
gesture critiques the fantasy of docility which
underwrites much of the discourse of Christian
abolitionism. But in the context of the Judges
tropology, it also suggests that this same
feminization/commodification will elicit cataclysmic
acts of vengeance aimed at those who install relations
of hierarchy based on gender and/or commodification.
Here Equiano feminizes himself in a fashion that not
only re-establishes his masochistic abasement, but also
marks a crucial similarity between Foxe's, the Levite's
and his own practice of writing. Peggy Kamuf has argued
that the Levite's butchering of the raped wife is an
act of writing, for the severed fragments of her body
are used as letters calling forth vengeance.[26]
Similarly, Acts and Monuments is a collection of
writings, often by the martyrs themselves, that
testifies to persecution in such a way as to demand
revenge in the after life. Equiano's body of writing,
in turn, can be equated with these accounts of
butchering and burning, for in rendering his own life
he has textualized his pain in a fashion aimed at
unleashing a higher vengeance against not only the
white sailors who interrupt his relation with George,
but also against the state which sanctions the
institution of plantation slavery. There is, however, a
complex ambivalence embedded in this tropological
revenge. As noted earlier, the Levite's call for
vengeance via bodily dissection may rely on killing his
wife. In terms of our argument thus far, this suggests
that in producing The Interesting Narrative
Equiano's call for vengeance turns on the annihilation
of his enslaved self. There is a self-mutilation, a
lopping off of historical experience, at the core of
Equiano's textualization of bodily suffering. The
resolution of this problematic requires that we attend
more closely to two distinct moments where revenge
enters into the account of the journey to the Musquito
shore.
Things as They Are
-
The first and most visible moment of vengeance, like
the vengeance of the invisible church in Foxe, suddenly
enters Equiano's text as a direct action of God:
one morning we had a brisk gale of wind, and,
carrying too much sail, the main mast went over the
side. Many people were then all about the deck, and
the yard, masts and rigging, came tumbling about us,
yet there was not one of us in the least hurt,
although some were within a hair's breadth of being
killed. . . .(204)
The fact that this intervention occurs immediately
following George's decision to withdraw not only from
Equiano's masochistic designs, but also from shipboard
society altogether, points to a significant rupture in
Equiano's text. Without George, Equiano's abasement is
without an agent, and therefore his connection to the
invisible church reverts from one of masochistic
practice to one of readerly identification. The gap
between practice and representation is filled in by
God's direct intervention in the social life of the
ship in the shape of a "brisk gale of wind." However,
in contrast to Acts and Monuments the violence
of the gale does not kill anyone. Rather, it marks the
capacity for destruction almost as if a sign of God's
existence was necessary to condemn the sailors' lack of
belief. This resolution of a temporary breakdown in
Equiano's masochistic practice answers the worldly will
to power of the sailors with power of a different
order.[27]
But behind and following this invocation of Godly
vengeance lies a more troubling tropological reading
based not on The Book of Martyrs but rather on
the Book of Judges.
-
The demonstration of the providential hand of God
does not negate Equiano's complex negotiation with
George or with the vengeance narrative in Judges.
Equiano's relation to George from this point on in
The Interesting Narrative can only be fully
understood by considering the full import of revenge in
the Judges narrative. The body of the Levite's
dismembered wife calls forth vengeance on the
Benjaminites, but it also instantiates a series of
repeated sexual crimes. In the war against the
Benjaminites, the tribes of Israel almost wipe out one
of their constituent members. When the tribes realize
that the tribe of Benjamin is on the verge of
extinction, they repeat the Benjaminite's rapes on a
heightened scale. First they kill the male inhabitants
of Jabesh Gilead, ravish four hundred daughters of the
town and present them to Benjamin so that the tribe can
re-populate itself. And second, the tribes make it
possible for the Benjaminites to steal and rape two
hundred more women from Shiloh. Peggy Kamuf's analysis
of the biblical text focuses directly on the
relationship between revenge and repetition:
From this outline of the legend, it is easy to see
the strange turn taken by this vengeance of brother
against brother. When Israel stops short of
annihilating Benjamin, when the extinction of one of
its members by the whole is at last understood as a
form of self-mutilation, it achieves resolution by
twice repeating Benjamin's crime. In the first
repetition, the Israelites act as Benjamin's agents,
stealing the virgins of Jabesh Gilead;[28]
in the second repetition, the Benjaminites are
authorized to steal their wives for themselves and
promised immunity from retribution. Israel thus
averts the threat to its unity and continuity as a
whole by prescribing the crime that it had to avenge
in the first place, by legislating and enacting in an
exceptional manner the contrary of the law as
the law. (193)
This repetition and reversal is resonant for The
Interesting Narrative because Equiano performs
precisely this identification with his oppressors in
his final interaction with George.
-
Following the cessation of George's conversion,
Equiano emphasizes that "[George] became ever after,
during the passage, fond of being alone" (204). With
George living in exile at the edge of shipboard
society, no longer involved in a process of perverse
conversion, Equiano's primary interest in George
becomes inextricably tied to the circulation of
commodities. Equiano narrates one more pedagogical
scene which concretizes much of our discussion thus
far:
One Sunday . . . I took the Musquito prince George,
to church, where he saw the sacrament administered.
When we came out we saw all kinds of people, almost
from the church door for the space of half a mile
down to the water-side, buying and selling all kinds
of commodities: and these acts afforded me great
matter of exhortation to this youth, who was much
astonished. Our vessel being ready to sail for the
Musquito Shore, I went with the Doctor on board a
Guinea-man, to purchase some slaves . . . and I chose
them all of my own countrymen some of whom came from
Lybia. (204-5)
Before analyzing Equiano's exhortations on the
marketplace, it is important to recognize that Equiano
completes the tropological relation to Judges 19-21 by
entering into the slave trade. With Equiano's
masochistic strategies in abeyance, he shifts from
object of abasement to subject of punishment, from
bonded chattle to bondsman. His capacity for this kind
of transition is as Susan Marren has argued the
defining quality of his specific historical
situation.On the face of it this shift appears to be a
reversal in political strategy for Equiano, but I would
like to suggest otherwise. The earlier negotiation with
George was aimed at eliciting vengeance for Equiano's
commodification. The new strategy is aimed less at
compensatory violence than it is at generating a
re-constituted social body. The radical gesture
embedded in Equiano's Christian masochist deployment of
the Judges allegory is his suggestion that these
seemingly opposed strategies—the calling forth of
God's vengeance on those who enslaved him, and his
purchasing of slaves like himself—are in fact
politically continuous. What Kamuf says of Judges is
equally applicable to this segment of The
Interesting Narrative:
The Levite's avengers, after punishing Benjamin, find
themselves forced to identify with the criminals they
have punished and to refuse any demand for
vengeance....The solution requires, in other words,
that the victim—or the victim's
representatives—exchange places with the
victimizer, and that the new 'crimes' be
exceptionally exempted from any right to vengeance.
(193-4)
This obviation of vengeance in Judges is prompted by
a sudden recognition that the entire narrative
constitutes a self-mutilation which threatens the unity
and continuity of the tribes of Israel. Taking the
tropology to its conclusion therefore suggests that
Equiano's actions not only bring his self-mutilation to
close, but do so in order to effect a corresponding
national consolidation based on Christian belief and
capitalist expansion that surfaces more explicitly
elsewhere in the narrative in his advocacy of the
Sierra Leone project.[29]
-
If we return to Equiano's mediation between the
church and the marketplace, we find that his temporary
reticence at the outset of this episode regarding the
corrupt deployment of George's anti-slavery position
for ends defined by the Albera Poyer scheme breaks down
when he attempts to give George a double lesson in
protestant election and capitalist exchange.[30]
These two moments of exchange—the sacrifice of
Christ's body and the purchasing of slaves—
buttressed against one another, are not only the suture
point of everything we have seen thus far, but also the
textual moment when the historical nature of George's
activities for the Albera Poyer project impinge on
Equiano's narrative. In making the anti-slavery
arguments needed to impeach Hodgson, George furthers
the interests of his family as participants in the sale
of land, but it is precisely this move that will
guarantee his family's disappropriation and potential
enslavement at the moment of future colonization.
George is caught in a loop, for his arguments against
the commodification of natives in the region facilitate
the commodification of native land. I would argue that
Equiano casts his critique of this complicitous loop
within the discussion of the sailors' taunt, for that
taunt offers temporary protection in this world that
opens onto eternal damnation in the next. The sailors,
like the members of the Albera Poyer project, deploy
George in a scheme that he does not understand. What is
remarkable about this encrypted critique of George's
relation to the "selfish English traders" is the degree
to which Equiano replicates George's "error." From the
site of commodity exchange Equiano turns and
specifically purchases Africans like himself. If George
and his family have sold out for short term gains in
the scene of colonial conflict, then Equiano is
attempting to generate a reconstituted social
body—a kind of human portfolio, which will accede
to its full surplus value in the longest term
imaginable—eternity.
-
I would like to close by considering this entry into
the slave trade in the terms of the masochistic
fantasies which drive this portion of The
Interesting Narrative. If we read Equiano's
representation of ship-board events as an allegory for
George's involvement with the project, then George's
acceptance of the sailors' deceptive offer registers
his status as an unwitting tool of the Albera Poyer
scheme. George is deceived by the sailors because,
unlike Equiano, he does not yet read like a member of
the invisible church. Similarly, he is deceived by the
English planters because he has not yet internalized
the workings of capital and specifically the logic of
the commodity. As Robert Naylor argues, it is the
non-comprehension of property in the Western sense that
allows George and his family to become tools in a
scheme that eventually will disappropriate them. In
this light, Equiano's attempts to convert George focus
on this double miscomprehension. Just as George does
not understand prayer in a conventional sense, neither
does he comprehend the theological economy in which he
is being manipulated. The sailors, like the Albera
Poyer project, manage to disable George's oppositional
impulses by concealing the fact that they are his worst
enemies. The exchange they are offering will gaurantee
his damnation and the servitude of his people. It is
not surprising therefore that Equiano's exhortations
should pass from the church to the marketplace, for
George needs a lesson in commodification no less than
in protestant election.
-
But how does Equiano's role in purchasing Africans
like himself fit into such a lesson? As mentioned
above, the Musquito were directly engaged in the
enslavement of their tribal enemies. In contrast,
Equiano emphasizes that he explicitly goes about
enslaving those most like himself. It is a rare
assertion of racial community in Equiano's text, one
which he highlights with a footnote that identifies
himself with the biblical followers of "Apher...who
were called Africans" (293). Could it be that in light
of his failure with George he is now building a
community of martyrs more like himself than the Marian
martyrs? If we are willing to think through this
possibility in light of Equiano's religious resistance
to the ship-state, then I think what emerges from this
encounter with the Musquito prince is a politics based
not on freedom, but on slavery—a politics from
the ground of the commodity, rather than the subject of
capitalist exchange. The apocalyptic politics that
Equiano advocates operates through the body of the
commodified being. Equiano signals as much when he
states at the outset that his purpose is to bring "some
poor sinner to my well-beloved master, Jesus Christ"
(202). This apparent acceptance of abasement, of
commodification, of pain and persecution is predicated
on a future act of vengeance which will establish
Equiano and those racially like him as the exclusive
property of God. What remains is the harsh judgement of
unlegitimated and unsublimated complicity, for George
is ultimately not granted access to such an imagined
community in Equiano's narrative.
-
George is consigned to textual oblivion when the
text shifts its attention from the social dynamics of
ship-board society to the economic problems associated
with plantation management. The transition from sea to
land marks a crucial discursive transition in The
Interesting Narrative. The intense presentation of
affective relations between Equiano and George gives
way to the conventional Enlightenment description of
life among a generalized category of native Indians.
This discursive shift enacts a textual repression in
which physical and quasi-anthropological observations
are used to regulate the power of emotion elicited by
rememorative passages that are too volatile to handle.
If we understand the elimination of George in this way
then it is difficult not to read the ensuing
interactions with the Musquito population as revisions
of the political entanglements of ship-board life.
-
As Equiano, Dr. Irving and their cohort establish a
plantation in the Black River region, the indigenous
population become fundamental props in fantasies of
community consolidation that eerily continue the Judges
allegory. In the realm of plantation society, Equiano
constructs himself as the locus of almost omnipotent
power. At one level, this consolidation is a
fundamental premise of the quasi-ethnographic gaze
which now mediates all of Equiano's observations on the
Musquito and the Woolwaw. But his descriptive authority
is superseded by two remarkable demonstrations of power
that we tend to associate with the dominant fantasies
of white supremacy, whether exercised in the realm of
plantation slavery or the history of European imperial
expansion. After describing the Indians' simplicity,
Equiano recounts the failure of Dr. Irving to mediate
between the "Governor"—again, the descriptor
transplants notions of English governance to a context
where governance means another thing entirely—and
one of the local Chiefs who ensure the economic
stability of the Irving plantation. As the conflict
deepens, the Doctor literally disappears and Equiano
emerges as the representative of colonial power. The
conjunction of Equiano's expressed desires at this
moment in the text should give any reader pause:
I was so enraged with the governor, that I could have
wished to have seen him tied fast to a tree, and
flogged for his behaviour; but I had not people
enough to cope with his party. I therefore thought of
a strategem to appease the riot. Recollecting a
passage I had read in the life of Columbus, when he
was amongst the Indians in Jamaica, where, on some
occasion he frightened them, by telling them of
certain events in the heavens, I had recourse to the
same expedient, and it succeeded beyond my most
sanguine expectations.(208)
We have already seen Equiano buying slaves, but here
we find him overcome with the master's desire to beat
the subaltern not simply for reasons of exemplarity,
but for reasons directly related to maintaining the
easy flow of commodities between the settlers and the
neighbouring native populations. In light of our
earlier discussion, it is far too reductive to suggest
that Equiano has simply been seduced by the two-fold
power of capital and imperial expansion, or that he is
simply identifying with his former oppressors. In terms
of the Judges allegory, Equiano exchanges places with
the victimizer to enact the contrary of the law as the
law. And he is doing so in part because the masochistic
nationalism which characterized his ship-board praxis
has transformed into a form of national imagination
grounded not on heterocosmic fantasies, but rather on
fantasies of immanent plenitude. The desire to avenge
the horrors of slavery by remaking the world in an
altogether different image is replaced by a
phantasmatic accession to absolute sovereignty. Like
the sudden shift in Judges from assailing the
Benjaminites to folding them into a fantasy of national
similitude, Equiano's practice shifts from one of
self-mutilation to a performance of imperial
self-consolidation.
-
Equiano himself emphasizes that his desires and
actions in this scene of colonial conflict are
strategic, but he is forced to choose between two
related strategies. The first is a primary tactic in
subordinating fractious slaves in the plantation
economy. Equiano certainly witnessed and may have
experienced precisely this deployment of bodily pain
for the management of slave populations, yet he decides
against this method of violent subordination in spite
of his desire for its enactment. The second strategy is
drawn from the history of imperial expansion and
constitutes a form of symbolic or cultural violence
that does not, in the first instance, have recourse to
bodily pain. It has instead recourse to books.
-
The resonant detail for our discussion is that
Equiano ends the dispute by simply using a bible as a
visual icon of power:
When I had formed my determination, I went in the
midst of them, and taking hold of the governor, I
pointed up to the heavens. I menaced him and the
rest: I told them God lived there, and that he was
angry with them, and they must not quarrel so; that
they were all brothers, and if they did not leave
off, and go away quietly, I would take the book
(pointing to the bible), read, and tell God to
make them dead. This was something like magic. The
clamour immediately ceased . . . after which they
went away peaceably. (208)
The definition of reading has substantially
transformed since the exchange with George over Foxe's
Book of Martyrs. Instead of teaching letters and
words to his indigenous companion, Equiano opts for a
kind of theatrical practice learned ostensibly from
accounts of Columbus's voyages, but perhaps equally
derived from Equiano's own childhood understanding of
the talking book.[31]
Perhaps this is why Equiano no longer talks about being
"an instrument under God, of bringing some poor sinner
to my well-beloved master, Jesus Christ," but focuses
instead on his apparently magical ability to direct
God's actions through successfully talking to the
bible. Unlike Equiano's childhood attempts to talk to
books, this particular scene is not one of alienation,
nor is it one of heterocosmic desire. Instead the bible
acts unequivocally as the disciplinary tool of colonial
domination. The masochistic praxis attendant upon the
earlier engagement with both the text and the
illustrations of Foxe's Book of Martyrs is here
occluded by Equiano's phallic deployment of the bible
as a prop in colonial performance. The experiment in
masochistic nationalism on board the Morning
Star has transformed into a phantasmatic
consolidation whose force is not that of narrative but
rather of visual signification. Significantly,
Equiano's gesture is not grounded on territorial
claims—the English have yet to colonize the
region—but rather on a phantasmatic form of
Christian territoriality which traverses most late
eighteenth-century fantasies of nationhood.
-
However, the resilience of Equiano's earlier
perverse strategies is evident in his final account of
social exchange between the Musquito and the settlers.
As Equiano progressively accedes to positions of
colonial power, the question of sexual exchange between
indigenous and settler peoples, which formerly defined
his masochistic nationalism, becomes a site of intense
anxiety. The anxiety is registered in two different
ways in the following description of a grand feast or
drykbot:
The mirth had begun before we came; and they were
dancing with music: and the musical instruments were
nearly the same as those of any other sable people;
but, as I thought, much less melodious than any other
nation I ever knew. They had many curious gestures in
dancing, and a variety of motions and postures of
their bodies, which to me were in no wise attracting.
The males danced by themselves, and the females also
by themselves, as with us. The Doctor shewed his
people the example, by immediately joining the
women's party, though not by their choice. On
perceiving the women disgusted, he joined the males.
At night there were great illuminations, by setting
fire to many pine-trees, while the drykbot went round
merrily by calabashes or gourds. . . .(209)
This curious passage is worthy of much discussion in
part because it seems to refute point by point the
sexual overtones of the ship-board encounter with
George. Equiano asserts explicitly, in a remarkably
distant voice, that he finds none of the native dancers
desirable, and then seems to evaporate at precisely the
moment that Dr. Irving, in a gesture of exemplarity,
enters the realm of sexual exchange. Equiano carefully
marks both his own repulsion from the bodies of the
Musquito before him, and indicates that the Musquito
women share a similar "disgust" with Dr. Irving's
contravention of supposed ethnic and racial barriers.
However, through the assertion of his own repulsion,
Equiano partakes of the Musquito women's rejection of
interracial sexual practices.[32]
Equiano's earlier self-feminizations are subtly
rehearsed in this identification with the women who
reject Dr. Irving's attempt "to shew his people the
example." The fact that Irving has to lead his people
into relation with the indigenous women can be read as
a tacit assertion of the ethnocentric fear of
miscegenation among his white crew. But such a reading
ignores the fact that interracial sexual relations were
fundamental to both colonial encounter and the
plantation economy—and it neglects the degree to
which Irving's action both asserts and undercuts the
naturalness of heterosexual desire, as does Irving's
subsequent shift from the women's group to the men's.
It is this latter event which prompts a sudden turning
away in the discourse from descriptions of relations
between native and settler people to less
affect-generating descriptions of the physical
environment. It would seem that object choice for
Equiano—whether considered in terms of gender or
ethnicity or both—is by this point a discursively
volatile problematic. The sudden jump away from the
intersubjective altogether may be necessary for Equiano
to contain the earlier heterocosmic desires and to
finally assert that "this merry-making at last ended
without the least discord in any person in the company,
although it was made up of different nations and
complexions" (210).
|
