An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

order to communicate, surely as a way to meet basic needs, or perhaps to
imagine how they could all collectively liberate themselves. We might call
this dialogue a discourse of freedom. They were likely exchanging ideas in
order to discursively think about how to gain their freedom. After all,
language remains a central component of liberation in human history.
Upon entering the slave ship, he experienced horrors that we can’t even
imagine. The smell and sorrow that he experienced led Equiano to think, “I
now wished from my last friend, death, to relieve me.” 16 While death did
not relieve him, he did experience some reprieve upon learning that some of
his fellow Indigenous people were also suffering the same yoke of bondage.
He asked them what would be their fate, and they responded that they
would go to the white people’s country and work for them.
It is through this relationship that we began to see how they constructed
their sense of self through their enslavement. In other words, they gained
another identity, that of an enslaved person versus one who is free. This
does not mean that they lost their Indigenous identity; it just means they had
to conceptually and materially come to terms with the conditions of their
oppression.
I want to pause here and remind the reader that Africans did not get rid
of their Indigenous practices and beliefs. I return to Cedric Robinson, who
writes, “For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by
enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would
attempt and in some ways realize, the recreation of their lives.” 17 While we
might wonder why Equiano would decide to go to England later in his life, I
would contend that we don’t really know the psychological impact that
being kidnapped and transported as cargo to a whole new world would have
on a person. I don’t even know if we even have a vocabulary, a grammar to
describe such terror that this historical event caused those who experienced
it. I am amazed at the level of detail and pain with which Equiano wrote.
While some believe he made up his own history, I think we should embrace
his literary genius, and never forget that his ability to recount these
traumatic events in such detail demonstrates the inventiveness of this Black
literary form in the face of trauma, and its resiliency over the centuries from
the era of enslavement well into the present.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY