Who Can Speak? Authority and Authenticity in Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley

Who Can Speak? Authority and Authenticity in Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley G. Michelle Collins-Sibley We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —— Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”1 It was the primal scene of African-American letters. . . . Phillis Wheatley, a slim, African slave in her late teens, met with eighteen gentlemen so august that they could later allow themselves to be identified publicly “as the most respectable characters in Boston.” The panel had been assembled to verify the authorship of her poems and to answer a much larger question: was a Negro capable of producing literature? — Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley2 Strictly speaking, there is hardly an alternative to creative impersonation for the Western slave. If he wants to lay claim to an acceptable cultural identity, he is forced to do so by way of imitation, no matter whether he wants to identify himself as “African,” “American,” or “English.” That is why he [Equiano] fashions for himself the seemingly paradoxical role of an African who, in turn, slips into the role of a dominant Western subject whenever possible. — Frank Kelleter, “Ethnic Self-Dramatization and Technologies of Travel in The Interesting Narrative . . .”3 “Creative impersonation,” “masking,” “mimicry,” alienation and assimilation versus integrity, legitimacy, reliability, purity and authenticity: these terms have framed debates about African and African-American authorial identity and authority in general —that of Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano specifically —from the earliest days of the Atlantic World to its current, twenty-first century manifestations. Most if not all of these discussions are informed by the logic of oppositional hierarchies in which the self belongs to either one or the other category such that one is either subject or object, human or subhuman, civilized or savage, authentic or inauthentic. The story of enslaved Africans and African Americans caught up in the New World colonial enterprise is in large part that of their struggle to articulate themselves as autonomous subjects against this cultural logic that automatically relegated them to the negative pole. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his recent work The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, imaginatively recreates what he characterizes as a “primal scene of African American letters”: the moment when a young Phillis Wheatley is put to the test. Was she, were Africans, capable of creating literature? As Gates goes on to explain, “[i]f they could . . . then they stood as members of the human family on the Great Chain of Being. If they could not, then the Africans were a species sub-human, more related to the apes than to Europeans.”4 To be human is to be European. Wheatley is either an empty vessel aping her betters as Thomas Jefferson maintained, or, even if her humanity is accepted as a given, she is assumed to have arrived “naked” on the shores of America and “[b]ereft of her African heritage, . . . turned to neoclassical English as a prominent literary discourse available to her as an aspiring poet.”5 Arguing along much the same lines in a recent essay in Early American Literature, Frank Kelleter seems to share eighteenth-century assumptions that assimilation —for him the “bona fide acceptance and reproduction of dominant doctrines and practices by dominated people” —is Olaudah Equiano’s only option.6 It is important to note that this seeming acceptance of eighteenth-century assumptions is predicated on recent evidence suggesting that Equiano may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa —an issue to which I shall return later in this discussion —and thus born into slavery. Regardless of Equiano’s place of birth, assimilation and “creative impersonation” are virtually the only alternatives Kelleter sees for the Western slave since Western culture offers the most “attractive possibility of identification” (74). Kelleter has no problem accepting the idea the Olaudah Equiano, like others who shared his condition, writes himself into Western culture via an autobiographical work in which “he fashions for himself the seemingly paradoxical role of an African who, in turn, slips into the role of a dominant Western subject whenever possible” (74). In this essay I intend to suggest some ways of reading the work of

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Literature · Narrative · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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