Rivers and Bogs: Slow Protests in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko

Abstract

In Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko, the title character owns enslaved people when he is in Africa and is himself enslaved and forced to migrate to and labor in the Suriname River watershed. The narrator praises his European-ness and denies the value of his African-ness, framing the failure of his shipboard and plantation protests as the fate of a tragic romance hero. But the narrator’s perspective on Oroonoko is only one dimension of this story: the narrative weaves and folds and digresses like a river winding down to the sea, moving through locations that are neither fully wet nor dry, salt nor fresh. Both formally and scenically, Behn challenges readers to move slowly, to resist the desire for narrative and environmental control, to embrace the uncertainty, danger, and shifting, undefined nature of the coastal ecotone. She holds before us the deeply violent consequences of European heroic romance as it drives Oroonoko’s and the narrator’s actions in the Atlantic world and invites us to imagine environments and circuitous logics that protest that violence. Attending to the novel’s coastal-ness enables resistance to dominant English seventeenth-century ideologies about racial, gendered, and species mastery.