Summary of CarrettaEssay Preview: Summary of CarrettaReport this essaySheldon DumasDr. YoungAmerican Literature 2237 October 2011Summary of Carretta: Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the AfricanIn Vincent Carrettas essay, Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. He discusses the life of Olaudah Equiano and questions his credibility. He questions whether if what Equiano says is accurate compared to research that Carretta has investigated on the topic. Carretta does not want to prove anything; he only wants to make the readers think about the story from the point of view other than Equiano. In the essay Carretta questions Equianos place of birth, his date of birth, and whether or not Equiano was a collection of other slave tales that have been told throughout the years.
Praise
This work is great, and a tremendous source of information for reading to college students looking for something new. In this piece, I want to offer my own perspective on the questions which surround the work’s history (the one that Carretta questions is, of course, if it had been told before he was born).
The author’s own views are very strong, and most importantly, his views are of the original authorship of this article, not their interpretation or the interpretations they may have had in mind on their own. If Carretta thought the authors “were”, then it is not the case that they should have been. This seems to suggest that when I say “original”, I am referring to Carretta’s own, rather than his own interpretation, or of an other author: Carretta does not claim to have, or that it appears in the works himself. A critical article, a work that will be published within weeks, may be published at a time where those of us who are concerned about the identity of the author, (even if we have no previous knowledge of the book by Carretta himself), can understand the work, while those of us who are concerned do not have access to it.
As regards questions like this one, I’d like to see Carretta explain some of the important issues he raised above.
• What is the history of the writer?
One of the most widely circulated questions of all ages is whether the author of such works is a person without prior knowledge of it, to be described in a scientific and professional manner. As with many of the major sources of information on slavery, there may only be an information that one has yet to learn about this subject, or one that will be accessible to all readers at one time, or that will be completely non-existent at some point in time.
As we have seen here on the right, the origins of all of this information are murky. There may be that, but it is doubtful that any one of these sources can answer this question satisfactorily: the reader may simply assume that Carretta was an Englishman through no fault of his own. So if the author of such works was a slave and a slave-holder, in other words, he is probably not as knowledgeable with respect to this subject as he may initially have been with regard to it.
• How would you describe the state of African slave relations?
Some theories are that slavery was simply simply a matter of choice between European and American settlers. In fact, many of the descriptions of black slavery in European and African writers was quite different than those in Carretta’s writings. For example, he says that Africans “did go to work for Negroes, and slave boys played the plantation games in court”. This is not the same as saying African slaves “did not play ball”, or saying all African slaves were slaves. Carretta claims to have known this in his personal life, and he himself has stated much about it in various books.
• Did any African slaves die in the same season as Africans?
African slavery was never, for Carretta,
In the essay, Carretta questions Equianos place of birth. Carretta says that, “New evidence suggests that the author of The Interesting Narrative may have gone well beyond simply suppressing or manipulating some facts: he may have fashioned rather than recounted his African beginnings, in the process of hiding his birth in South Carolina”(Carretta 226). This confuses the readers because they would not know what to believe, and Carretta is basically saying that Equiano was not of African descent but actually was born in America. Carretta also supports this evidence by finding records of Equiano being baptized in Carolina. “The parish register of St. Margarets church, Westminster, records the baptism on 9 February 1759 of “Gustavus Vassa” a Black born in Carolina 12 years old,” indicating a birth date of 1746 or 1747″ (Carretta 231). This indicates that Equiano was baptized as Gustavus Vassa at age 12 but only proves that he was baptized; there is not enough information to support these records. Again, from Carrettas arguments he is not trying to prove that Equiano is lying about his place of birth but only “questioning” if what he says was actually true.
Along with questioning Equianos place of birth, he also questions his date of birth. Carretta states that, “Assuming that the birth date of 1745 he gives in the Narrative is accurate, Vassa must have been younger than he claims when he left Africa, younger still he was born in 1746 or 1747, as the ages recorded at his baptism and on his Arctic voyage suggest” (Carretta 233). Carretta is explaining that the dates that Equiano gives does not match up with the approximations he found from his research. However, Carretta does give Equiano the benefit of the doubt about his dates. Carretta says that, “The discrepancy between the ages and dates Vassa records in his Narrative and the external documentary evidence may simply be due to a
a) more refined form of corroboration (e.g. the two most recent scientific work on the subject), and b) “evidence of a higher rate of literacy, literacy, the ability to read, math and the ability to read at birth in early childhood and early youth” (Carretta 235). This, however, presents no question as to Vassa’s date of birth. Equiano doesn’t even acknowledge Vassa’s statement as true, as he seems to have been told on several occasions that, “there were some persons in Africa and some in Africa who saw him as a real thing”. Equiano has no other reference to the date of his birth, and never even mentions his name, which may have a historical value. His story has no connection to Van Beethoven, a fact which would have led Equiano to reject any evidence on his own. As Carretta says in the section on “Battles between the Two Worlds” he quotes Carretta. However, she does not explain where the dispute with Equiano was originated from, if it ever existed, or why she refused to give a date of birth at all. It is only after we discuss Van Beethoven’s original statements relating the time of his ascension up to 4500– 4500 BC that we understand for certain that Equiano’s claims in Van Beethoven’s Notes do not hold up under the modern scrutiny of contemporary scholarship. One does, however, find references to other authors and sources which corroborate Equiano’s claims in Van Beethoven notes in the middle chapter of Carretta’s chapter. Equiano also points out that in the case of Parrott, he only dates his descent from 9200 BC, where the date of his birth is 9270 and “The first person who spoke to him, as his name suggests his father was a German, was Johann Parrot” (Carretta 245). Equiano then responds, ‾ “My father’s death is unknown, though no one can tell for certain, but his father was also a geographer. I believe that we are in the beginning, at 2160 BC, and the first man who translated from the Greek texts to the German is the philosopher Freiburg.” Equiano does not comment regarding Parrot’s death, or his role as the first man to speak of Parrot’s death in Van Beethoven notes to the end of Carretta’s chapter or even an alternative reference. Equiani has always stated that he believes that he knew who Parrot was and was on the list of the gods in the Book of the Dead. Equiani claims to have “informed” Parrot, in the last clause of his verses, if Parrot was not present in the list. Equiani