In recognition of Black History Month, the Books Blog will highlight important books, plays, poems and contributors to the African-American literary tradition. Of course, a month isn’t long enough, and there is no reason why this will end with this month. But it is a good excuse to highlight important works that help define not only the African-American experience, but what it means to be an American.
Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.
The first book the Books Blog will highlight is also one of the earliest:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789),” (Bedford edition). I was introduced to this book in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh in a class on slave narratives with professor Ronald Judy.
The book is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, first-person slave narratives written by a former slave. The book recounts a life that began in freedom in 1745 in what is now Nigeria and then his being taken captive and sold into slavery as an 11-year-old boy (first in Africa and then through the Middle Passage to Barbados and, eventually, Virginia), being purchased by an Englishman and traveling to Britain, and earning money to buy his freedom.
“The Narrative” was a best-seller in England and later America. As an anti-slavery text, it gave graphic accounts that helped to shore up abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. After writing the book, Equiano traveled extensively to promote it and its ideas. He married an English woman. He died in 1797.
The book is of vital importance for an understanding of the complexities and cruelties of the slave trade.
The introduction to the Equiano section in the “Norton Anthology of African American Literature” says:
Equiano’s Life bequeaths to modern African American literature a prescient and provacative example of what W.E.B. Du Bois would call “double-consciousness” — the African American’s fateful sense of “twoness” born of a bicultural identification with both an African heritage and a European education.
Click “more” for a passage from Equiano’s “Narrative” and for links.
