Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass

I have enjoyed reading Olaudah Equiano and Frederic Douglass. While both narratives are about slavery, I find the difference interesting.

I read Equiano, I felt that he was taking me though a very thorough odyssey. He starts at the very beginning (before he was enslaved) and moved to the very end (when he is freed in Montserrat).

Unlike Douglass’ narrative, Equiano’s is more about his experiences as a slave and less about slavery. The main thrust of the story is how he was abducted and enslaved; what he saw and what he learned; how he survived; what he experienced, and how he bought his freedom. For the most part, the story is about his experience and not so much about the theory of slavery. Without a doubt, he was a slave, but he was not born as one. From the time of his abduction, he is always thinking of regaining his freedom. He keeps his hopes high and thinks that his slavery is only temporal. In some way, his narrative is similar to Mary Rowlanson’s because she writes about her experience in captivity, and in this, her narrative is similar to Equiano’s.

Equiano writes about what he saw in his voyages, and this is what I mostly appreciate about his narrative. He writes about the suffering of slaves in the cargo ships, and the way he writes about their suffering is appalling. Equiano calls my attention to slavery outside the South of the U.S., and makes me more conscious of the evils of slavery.

Douglass writes from home.

He was born into slavery and he did not necessarily grow up thinking that his slavery was a temporary state. In this respect Douglass’ narrative is very different from Equiano’s. Douglass’ narrative does not become about himself. It becomes about the lives of the slaves working in the plantations or in their masters’ houses. His narrative concerns slaves, their masters, and their overseers. Douglass in not on a voyage like Equiano; he is at home in the plantation.

Although the experience of Douglass is different from Equiano’s, they both bring to light the evil deeds of slavery; they both give a voice to the voiceless; and they both do this in a way that makes you witness slavery.

“Nobody can make a slave out of you if you do not think like slave,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I think that this was the message of both Equiano and Douglass.