Verse and voice in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative

Though much has been made of Olaudah Equiano’s quotation of poetry in his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), it has previously gone unnoticed that he also borrows the words of one of those poems (Day and Bicknell’s The Dying Negro) in places outside of block quotations, working its lines into his own prose. This essay draws attention to this overlooked element in the rhetorical structure of Equiano’s work and attempts to make sense of that strange appearance of poetry with reference to critical conceptions of lyric “voice,” especially within Black abolition-era writings. Consulting the case of Phillis Wheatley’s On Being Brought from Africa to America, it argues that the fluid relation of verse to prose within these works parallels and reinforces the kinds of “double voicedness” that critics have elsewhere uncovered in writings of the Black Atlantic—a doubling that has bearings on the difficult critical question of Equiano’s identity and his authentic literary “voice.”