Goodbye, Equiano, the African

Abstract

10 Historically Speaking January/February 2006 Goodbye, Equiano, the African Trevor Burnard • ne of the interesting narratives in political and intellectual life in the last decade has been the reappearance of old-fashioned concerns about the importance of being truthful and the irretrievable damage that being caught in a lie does to a person's character. Whatever Bill Clinton did as president is overshadowed by his lie about his encounters with an intern that led him to falsely claim that "I did not have sex with that woman." Tony Blair's distinguished record is diminished for many Britons who, like me, believed him when he said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In intellectual life, proponents of postmodernism suffered grievous blows when the postmodernist literary theorist Paul de Man was exposed as having obscured portions of his earlier life and suffered again when Alan Sokal, a physicist, submitted successfully a deliberately ridiculous article to a leading postmodernistjournal. Periodic controversies about people assuming identities that were fabricated keep on emerging , such as when the distinguished scholar of early America Joseph Ellis was alleged to have invented a story about himself as a Vietnam War veteran. What is significant in all these cases is that the lie mattered, even in the last instance, where the lie was not related to what Ellis did. No one has suggested that Ellis writes untruths in his published work. Yet his rather harmless fabrication ofa war past led to public humiliation. Questions about lying have also become increasingly important in understanding the past, dramatically so in early American history , especially in the history of slavery. The biggest controversy has surrounded Thomas Jefferson, who has been shown, pretty much conclusively, to have fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemmings.1 Less well publicized but of as much moment has been Michael Johnson's devastating demolition ofa century-long scholarship that presumed that Denmark Vesey was the leader of a putative slave revolt in Charleston in 1822.2 Another controversy has surrounded the discovery by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of a novel, The Bondswoman's Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, which Gates claimed as the only surviving novel about slavery written by an American female ex-slave. The problem here is that conclusive proofthat the author was an ex-slave is missing. Although it probably shouldn't matter when evaluating literary excellence, whether Crafts was black or not makes all the difference in the world. As Gates notes in the case of Emma Dunham Kelly-Hawkins, a writer once thought to be black, and now known to be white, when black writers are redefined as white, "people won't write about her any more," because what is important is discovering black voices not interesting new white writers.3 To my mind, the most intriguing discovery that a fundamental text in African-American writing is not what it seems has been made by Vincent Carretta about Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative. Carretta has discovered evidence—not conclusive but compelling enough for him to consider it more likely to be true than to be false—that Equiano was not an African but was probably born as a slave in South Carolina. Thus his vivid recollections of his childhood in Africa, his enslavement and transportation to the coast, and the trauma of the Middle Passage are inventions, "combinations of printed sources, memory, and imagination ." Equiano was unable to resist, Carretta implies, the siren lure of becoming an authentic African voice describing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade at a time when the abolitionist movement most needed such a voice. In market terms (and Equiano was acutely attuned to marketplace concerns—his construction of an Igbo identity was not a disinterested intellectual act but brought him sizeable financial benefits), Equiano saw a market need for a firsthand account of how Africans experienced the Middle Passage and proceeded to supply that voice, creating in the process an Igbo identity that probably did not exist at the time. If we accept Carretta's contention that Equiano was actually an American slave who had never lived in Africa, then Equiano is guilty of perpetrating two lies. He pretended to be offering an authentic account...