For my proposal for the final essay, I will choose to closely read The Interesting Narrative by Olaudah Equiano. This is due to the shocking, egregious content presented throughout his work that sticks to the reader’s minds. While Equiano is assimilated into British culture and religion, he still has many critiques of the system of empire that Europeans partake in. My essay will have 3 subsections. One section will be about how Equiano critiques the practice of chattel slavery. The second section will be about how Equiano critiques the limited rights freed black people possess. The third and final section will be about how Equiano critiques sinful followers of the Christian religion. The block quotation that I will incorporate into my essay will be Equiano’s monologue at the end of the second chapter, in which he calls out slave traders and conquerors who identify with the Christian faith:

O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God? who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? (Equiano 61)

This quote is especially crucial for my third subsection on Equiano’s critique of religion because it juxtaposes Equiano, an African, following Christian values more than white European slavers. In a moral sense, Equiano is more European than these racist colonists! He abides by the commandments of God with great scrutiny in comparison to the Christians only by name, who are complacent in the robbery, torture, and rape of indigenous African people. He points out the Biblical sin of greed that nominal conqueror Christians indulge in, not considering black people as fully human in order to justify the actions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not only does Equiano wish for his fellow fraternalized Africans to be free of the chains of slavery, he desires that his cultural surrogate family, the Europeans, reflect upon their own moral transgressions.

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