The Black Messiah : Writing Equiano

Abstract

In this essay, Nigerian author Chika Unigwe discusses the challenges involved in writing the biographical novel The Black Messiah (currently published only in Dutch translation as De zwarte messias), which imaginatively retraces the life of Olaudah Equiano. Unigwe’s first attempt to reimagine Equiano took the form of a children’s book in the late 1990s. This project immediately drew her attention to the two primary, antithetical difficulties of writing biographical fiction: on the one hand, one needs to rely on historical information to recreate the past accurately but, on the other, fiction — being art — cannot impart a great deal of such information without becoming too didactic.

Unigwe abandoned this early project but eventually took it up again in the form of an adult novel. Some of her creative choices in writing this book were guided by the imaginative spaces left in Equiano’s autobiography — for example, he hardly mentions his white wife and remains vague about his time as a plantation overseer. This prompted a series of questions for Unigwe to explore: how did a black man experience an interracial marriage in the eighteenth century? How did Equiano handle “stubborn” slaves as an overseer? How could a twenty-first century writer recreate Equiano’s state of mind without judging him by contemporary standards? There were additional challenges too. One pertained to the type of language to be used to recount Equiano’s story, another to the constraints involved in writing about a real figure, many aspects of whose life and death are on the historical record. Ultimately, Unigwe tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, history and imagination, so as to highlight the magnitude of Equiano’s accomplishments, while also exploring him as a human being whose story remains particularly relevant today.

First, a disclaimer and some sort of confession: in the years since writing my novel The Black Messiah (2012), built around the figure of Olaudah Equiano (and so far published only in Dutch translation as De Zwarte Messias, 2013), I have started to struggle with both the term historical fiction and with historical fiction itself. In the wake of a US administration with tremendous apathy towards truth, an administration that has popularized (and validated) “alternative facts”, one that is arguably hostile towards truth, I have sometimes wondered if writing fiction itself even matters. There seemed to me — for a while, especially in the days immediately after the election on November 8, 2016 — a certain futility and perhaps even irresponsibility to be writing fiction at such a moment. It was more important surely, I told myself, to be out there, protesting. And if one did any kind of writing, that writing must not leave room for ambiguity, which historical fiction does, and which fiction by its very nature of being a work of imagination certainly does. Of course writing matters, and perhaps matters more at a time like this than at any other. The same way happiness and laughter and hope do, at the time when finding joy and laughing and hoping seem in themselves like subversive acts of resistance. Think of the negro spirituals which enslaved Africans pioneered. Or people giving birth in the face of war as if to revert the course of history.

I first encountered Olaudah Equiano, the figure around whom The Black Messiah is built, in an English class in high school. A few paragraphs excerpted from his autobiography, a few lines about how he was abducted and sold off, after which we had to answer a few basic questions on whether Equiano was male or female; what part of Africa he had come from; and at what age he had been abducted. Both the passage and the questions afterwards seemed at worst like an afterthought and at best like a token nod to African/Nigerian history in a textbook of English comprehension texts meant for freshmen in Nigerian high schools. These were students who, up until then, had learned mostly about Mungo Park and Livingstone and Lord Lugard and his Lady Lugard, who was his girlfriend when she named Nigeria. That dominant history of Africa as a whole, populated by girlfriends who had the power to name an entire region — probably post coitum — and European adventurers who waded into Africa “discovering” rivers and “saving” souls and “bringing light” to the “heart of darkness”. That single story of history could not abide more than a few paragraphs on Equiano, and so we flipped the page over and Equiano was never raised again.

However, the seed of intrigue had been planted in me. Up until that point, the transatlantic slave trade had never — to my knowledge — been mentioned in our classrooms. The closest that I had come to that history, before then, was via Alex Haley’s Roots (1976). Between 1980 and the 1990s, both the mini-series which had appeared years before in the US and the book itself occupied a huge space in Nigeria’s cultural landscape. My parents — like many of my friends’ parents — had a copy of the book. I remember being intimidated by the sheer weight and size of it. A book, which like a god, had to be lifted with two hands. The VHS tape of Roots (1977) was in almost every middle-class home, and had pride of place right next to the other staples: The King and I, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, at least one Indian movie and, if you were Christian, Jesus of Nazareth (parts 1 to 4). It somehow, incredibly, never occurred to us — or to me — that Roots told a story that was ours too, that the area now known as Nigeria had been affected by the transatlantic slave trade. As far as we were concerned, slaves came from areas where people had names like Kunta Kinte and had funny accents. The experience was so far removed from ours that I remember that the name itself, Kunta Kinte, was sometimes bandied around as an insult. We mocked his accent even as we winced to see him lashed. Watching the movie without context and going to a “good” school where to even speak in one’s local language was a punishable offence, I suspect that we wondered why Kunta Kinte was obstinate about keeping his African name when he could so easily have replaced it with a “normal” Western name. This was, after all, also the period in my life when many young people I knew with non-Western first names — myself included — harboured silent (and sometimes not so silent) resentments against our parents for not giving us names that sounded like those of the children we encountered in story books by Enid Blyton (whose books were also a staple in our homes). An aside: I remember my envy at a classmate whose first name Judy and last name Brown was so Blytonesque that I wanted her family history to be mine. Judy’s father had started off with an Igbo last name but officially changed it to Brown when he went to college in the UK to better fit in. Kunta Kinte’s Africa and his Africanness was not one we could identify with, and therefore we could not identify with his journey either. Nor did we even want to. I watched Roots, memorized lines from it, and banished the transatlantic slave trade from memory until that day in class when Mr Ezema, my high school English teacher, assigned us the passage on Equiano. The discovery was a shock. But it also planted a seed. Not satisfied with the few paragraphs we read in class, I wanted to find out more about him. The story of Equiano humanized Kunta Kinte for me.

Perhaps I am remembering it wrongly and it was only much later, living in Europe, confronting my blackness in a way I never had any need to before then, that the desire to find out more about Equiano (and to write about him) became an obsession. I bought and read Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (2001/1789). I remember feeling both cheated and upset that it had taken me an Atlantic crossing to read what I consider still to be one of the most important autobiographies to have ever been written, and I wondered why his story was not well known outside of the academy.

In 1997 or 1998, I sent a manuscript of folktales to Macmillan books. Completely unsolicited. Someone there was kind enough to write back to me. I still remember lines from the letter: Dear Ms Unigwe, thank you for sending us your work blah blah blah. This was obviously a labour of love blah blah blah. Sadly, this doesn’t fit into our current publishing needs BUT we are launching Readers for a young audience blah blah blah. I was asked to send in proposals. I sent in three, all of which were accepted: “A Rainbow for Dinner”, “Ije at School”, and “Olaudah Equiano”. I wrote the first two — they have since been published — but the third was never written.

Writing so-called “historical fiction” is tricky. Its two primary difficulties are antithetical: one needs to have more historical information than makes it into the book but the fiction that arises from it must never seem like it has that much information. It is a delicate balance to tread. I no longer recall whose idea it was to pair me with a history expert to make sure that my story was accurate but not bogged down with too much historical detail. It was the job of the history editor to read the final draft. However, I understood only after two years — during which the history expert I was paired with for the project died — that trying to mix fiction and history was an arduous task, especially when writing for children where the story has to be both compelling and pedagogically responsible. Would it be responsible to mention that Equiano had worked as an overseer, for example?

It would be a few more years before I took up the project again, this time as an adult novel. An adult novel, I reasoned, would give me a chance to normalize Equiano, to humanize him without being burdened by the anxiety of responsibility. It would also give me much more space to create that character and tell his story. But writing an adult novel on Equiano came with its own peculiar challenges.

Naming, for one. Which of his names should I use in the novel? Consensus in the academy is split. There are those who believe that since Equiano referred to himself as Gustavus Vassa, after the King of Sweden who liberated Sweden from Denmark, he should be called by that name. And then there are those — with whom I side — who think that he should be referred to by his African name (even if he mangled the spelling of what we think the name is) as an act of respect. I cannot imagine that in renaming him Gustavus Vassa, the man to whom he “belonged” then was not being sarcastic. How much more sarcastic is naming a slave after a liberator king? His “master” was not being prophetic. However, in Igbo cultures, names have a potency of their own. They have the ability to make or mar one’s fortune. This is the reason why, in traditional Igbo cultures, a child was not named for days after birth and certainly not while still in the womb. A child came out, you observed it, and you gave it a name that fitted both its nature and articulated your dreams for it. A little anecdote: my grandmother had a daughter called Kathy. My grandmother had not wanted for her daughter to be given this name — and not because it was a foreign name, for her other children had foreign names — but I suspect she knew a Kathy or had heard of a Kathy whom she did not think was a good role model. My grandfather named his daughter and all through her life, Kathy was a millstone around the family’s neck. My grandmother blamed her daughter’s perceived waywardness on the name. Equiano’s father had given him a name which meant — as he himself implies in his narratives — “When you speak, people will listen”. That was the sort of man he hoped his son would grow up to be, his prayer to the gods; he was guiding them on how to shape his son’s life. It would be a dishonour, I felt, to ignore that and use a slave name for Equiano.

One could argue that Equiano appropriated the name Gustavus Vassa. My argument is that for him, it probably came down to pragmatism. He had to make a practical choice. I cannot imagine that he was not, even for one short second, unaware of the irony. A man who bought his freedom and who fought for slavery to be abolished could not so easily and without compunction choose to completely erase such an important marker of his identity. And even if I was wrong and he did not mind, I was going to exercise my authorial authority and not contribute to that erasure.

Having settled on a name I was sure would appease his ancestor spirit, I began to think about the story I wanted to tell. I did not want to write the biography of Equiano as he had done it well himself in his autobiography. The story I wanted to tell could only be fictionalized. But how to navigate truth and fiction? Luckily, Equiano leaves space in his narrative for imagination to creep in. He hardly ever mentions his wife or his marriage. Three centuries after Equiano, interracial marriages are still not normalized. Racial tension is still a real and, sadly, growing problem; slavery has taken on new forms. If these problems still plague us today, how much more in Equiano’s days? I find it understandable but not acceptable that Equiano, for example, completely ignores the inner struggles he would have had to overcome to marry a white woman in that day and age; or his wife’s family’s reaction to him. No matter what else he was, he was a black man, an African, an ex-slave who under other circumstances might have been bought as a gift for his wife’s family. If I found it morally questionable that an ex-slave could willingly work as an overseer to keep other slaves in check, if I struggled with it, how much more the man himself? What did he have to do to ensure that his authority as an overseer was not undermined by fellow Africans? How did he handle “stubborn” slaves? Did he whip them? Lacerating their backs to remind them of who was boss? By all accounts he was an effective overseer keeping the plantation running smoothly, an overseer who was so kind that “[a]ll my poor countrymen, the slaves, when they heard of my leaving them, were very sorry, as I had always treated them with care and affection, and did every thing I could to comfort the poor creatures, and render their condition easy” (2001/1789: 227). However, apart from the lines I just quoted, which mention why he took up the job and why he quit (the former to be an “instrument under God, of bringing some poor sinner to my well beloved master, Jesus Christ” [2001/1789: 218] and the latter because “our mode of procedure and living in this heathenish form was very irksome to me” [2001/1789: 226], including working on Sundays), he does not dwell on this period of his life at all.

I wanted to explore the man beyond the idea that was Equiano, a man who was a slave, who worked — of his own volition — as an overseer before dedicating himself to the abolitionist cause, a man who chose to keep a slave name even when he no longer had to. But there was no record of that man; I had to invent those undocumented areas of his life, away from the public stage.

I fortified myself with supplementary reading, books on London in the eighteenth century, and documents from the library of archives in Kent. I filled my notebooks with every historical detail that I could find. Doing the research was only the first task. And as it turned out, it was the easier task. Trying to whittle Equiano from an ideal or an idea into a human being seemed almost like an exercise in futility. I was constantly aware that whatever flaws I imbued him with were flaws that had the ability to diminish his legacy if not handled well. I had to keep my conscience clean. I suppose this is a struggle that writers of historical fiction struggle with when writing about existing figures. While it is possible to know from record what a person/character did and when, it is not often that motives are provided. How to write the why without doing a disservice to the character and the real person on whom it is based was the task ahead of me.

Linked to this directly, I had to be sensitive to the fact of when Equiano lived, the circumstances under which he lived, and the very real brainwashing that was part of the twin evils of the slave trade and colonization. A relation of events in the past by its nature brings you up against mentalities and sometimes events that contemporary readers would find disturbing. Hilary Mantel once said that in writing historical fiction, “the danger you have to negotiate is not the dimpled coyness of the past — it is its obscenity” (2009: n.p.). With Equiano, I was dealing with a character who seemed at times to be disapproving of his African culture, almost to the extent of — like Phillis Wheatley — being borderline grateful for a chance to be “civilized”. I was writing a character who was often disparaging of his ancestors’ mode of worship. He venerated Christianity — even though those who enslaved him often used Christianity to subjugate him, he judged others on how good a Christian they were or not. He writes that, about two or three years after arriving in England,

I […] began to consider myself as happily situated; for my master treated me always exceedingly well; and my attachment and gratitude to him were very great. From the various scenes I had beheld on ship-board, I soon grew a stranger to terror of every kind, and was, in that respect at least, almost an Englishman. […] I could now speak English tolerably well, and I […] relished their society and manners. I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners […]. (2001/1789: 92–93)

It was difficult to read certain passages but I had to constantly remind myself not to judge him with the privilege of twenty-first century eyes. But I also had to be careful not to be ambiguous about some of the positions that Equiano took. The challenge was in writing a character that was true to the man but in such a way that he did not come out of it — to a twenty-first century reader — difficult to relate to and worse, difficult to like.

I wanted to, I suppose, make sure my readers understood exactly why he was such an iconic figure, why his story remains relevant today; but I had to be wary not to make his real and invented flaws overshadow everything else. In this day and age when intellectual discussions are sometimes limited to 140 characters (now 280) or fewer on Twitter; when those 140/280 characters are enough to make or break a reputation, I wanted the focus to remain on Equiano’s massive accomplishment while still creating a character human enough for readers to sympathize and empathize with. A mere mortal doing extraordinary work is a much more compelling narrative than a saint doing the exact same thing.

Even if I found a way to achieve that balance, there was still the issue of language to contend with. Contemporary English seemed too dashy, too glib almost to the point of disrespect, and eighteenth-century language sounded unnatural. While certain writers manage to pull off historical fiction in contemporary language (Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe [2001], written in some sort of contemporary, lyrical urban-speak, comes to mind), contemporary language did not suit the narrative I was grappling with. I had to devise an in-between language. A language that sounded neither forced nor unnatural but at the same time sounded authentic enough.

Perhaps more difficult than finding the right language was writing a narrative with very little room for me, as a writer, to be surprised. I am not a structured writer. I do not meticulously plan what my characters do upfront before they do so. I am very often one foot behind them, stumbling into their plans, watching them try to mess with the narrative plot I have in my head, and sometimes they succeed so well that I have to change the plot to contain these messy, bossy characters. But I do not mind because one of the things I really enjoy about writing is that ability of my characters to surprise me. I get great satisfaction from seeing them take their lives into their own hands and decide how they want to live it. Frustrating sometimes but always satisfying. Up until when Sisi died in the first draft of On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), for instance, I didn’t know she was going to die. When I put her on the plane to Belgium, when I sent her to the Madam in whose brothel she was going to work as a prostitute, I had not planned death for her. Yet, by the time the first draft was done, Sisi had demanded her own death. And neither of us saw who would be responsible for her murder. I remember discovering who and thinking, “You son of a gun!” It is this spontaneity by the characters which makes writing fun. However with Equiano, the story was more or less already told. I knew aspects of the novel already. No matter how much tension I created, Equiano’s fate was already sealed. And anyone who knew Equiano’s history knew that too. He would be kidnapped, he would marry a white woman, he would become an important abolitionist advocate. In other words, the fun was already taken from me even before I could begin the writing. It was like someone handed me a box of delicious chocolates but had removed every single chocolate so that what I had left was an empty box.

Directly linked to that is that also as a writer, a creator of worlds and words, my authority to redirect the path of my protagonist was taken from me. I could not decide to keep him with his family. I had limited power, which, as a writer of fiction, is a difficult thing to accept. I could do no more than bear witness to his life. There were times I was tempted to be subversive. To write his life in the way I would do any other fictional character. Of course I didn’t because for that I would have to write a different novel. Naturally.

There were times I did not think I could pull it off: the writing of The Black Messiah. At the end of it, I felt as if I had been through some difficult initiation rites for some esoteric sect and come out successful. While my distrust for the term remains, I am adamant that historical fiction’s importance cannot be overemphasized. It brings history to life and reminds us that we are in constant conversation with the past. The past is never gone. And that in itself is an important lesson to learn. Especially now.