Post 5

One of the things that struck me most upon reading Equiano’s memoir was that though he claims to have been born in Guinea, his images of what life was like for those native to that country seemed rather estranged and exoticizing. My first thought was that his descriptions were similar to those that Behn makes of the Surinamese natives in Oroonoko, but with a significant departure: he speaks as an insider, where Behn speaks as an outsider. The fact that Equiano’s narrative corroborates Behn’s exoticized descriptions from around a century earlier, supposedly from an insider’s perspective, is part of a long history of exoticism and imperialism that was very much justified using narratives of foreign lands.

Behn’s descriptions in Oroonoko portray the indigenous people as paragons of innocence and purity. Though this might seem like a positive thing upon first glance, there comes with it an assumption that indigenous people are somehow simpler than travelers and colonizers, and have no complex thought or intelligence, thereby infantilizing and dehumanizing them. Behn writes,

They are extreme modest and bashful, very shy, and nice of being touch’d. And tho’ they are all thus naked, if one lives for ever among ’em, there is not to be seen an indecent Action, or Glance: and being continually us’d to see one another so unadorn’d, so like our first Parents before the Fall… (Behn, 131)

Her initial description of their manner uses words that are rarely associated with adults; their “modest[y],” while perhaps not necessarily a negative characterization, places them in a category of the nonthreatening. Additionally, by comparing them to Adam and Eve “before the Fall,” Behn implies that they are in no way enlightened to a moral code or religion, when in fact they simply have spiritual and moral codes that do not align with her culture’s.

Equiano’s descriptions of the indigenous Guineans is subtler, but still Othering. One of the descriptions that I found most striking was the following:

Our women too were in my eyes at least uncommonly graceful, alert, and modest to a degree of bashfulness; nor do I remember to have ever heard of an instance of incontinence amongst them before marriage. They are also remarkably cheerful. Indeed cheerfulness and affability are two of the leading characteristics of our nation (Equiano).

This passage highlights the kind of oversimplification that Behn used in her writing; to characterize an entire nation of people with the same personality traits is always something that will dilute the complexity of that culture. It seems unlikely that everyone in the nation is so often “cheerful” and “affable,” and specifically, this passage dilutes the experiences of the women of the nation. Between Behn’s broad strokes about the Surinamese and Equiano’s about the Guineans, these narratives encourage uncomplex thought about foreign cultures, and essentialize the specific cultures of which they speak, dehumanizing and exoticizing the people of those cultures.

Works Cited

Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African Written by Himself. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15399/15399-h/15399-h.htm

Behn, Aphra. “The History of the Royal Slave.” Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. 5, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29854/29854-h/29854-h.htm#oroonoko