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Peer Review Workshop: Literary Analysis Essay

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Follow the same process from the previous peer reviews. check your grades and feedback to make sure you have been completing the reviews correctly.

Copy the questions below and paste them into your responses. Answer each question, in detail, to earn full credit for the review.

1. Review the assignment guidelines for the Literary Analysis Essay. Does the essay appear to meet the minimum requirements for the assignment (length, topic, sources, etc)?

2. Does the essay include an introduction that provides some background and context for the analysis?

3. Identify the thesis of the essay. Does it make a clear and focused claim about the story?

4. Organization: Does the essay draft have a clear introduction, conclusion and multiple body paragraphs? Does each paragraph address one issue or idea, and relate back to the thesis?

5. Does the author use topic sentences and transitions to guide you through the essay? At any point do you become confused about the purpose or direction of the essay?

6. Does the essay integrate both quotations from the story and quotations from secondary sources? Do the quotations seem relevant and credible to you?

7. Sometimes students get caught up in researching the author’s background or historical events and they forget that the primary purpose is to analyze the primary source. As you read the essay, does the author clearly tie all the research back to an analysis of the story?

8. Check the citations. Can the source for each quotation or paraphrase be easily found on the works cited page? Are the citations in correct MLA format? Has the writer incorporated three secondary sources?

9. Do you notice any recurring grammatical errors, formatting errors or other problems with the essay?

10. Give your peer any other advice for revising the essay.

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TheLossofChildhoodInnocence.edited1.docx

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The Loss of Childhood Innocence

Introduction: A child's first experience with the sea should not be a sea of horror and hopelessness. The blue waters should symbolize adventure and possibility and not the destruction of all that is known. To most children, growing up is a process of learning slowly about the intricacies of the world around them. However, to Olaudah Equiano, the process of growing up was significantly traumatic. In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the author describes his path to becoming an enslaved individual who has to come to terms with the harsh realities of the Atlantic slave trade as a child who lived without any care. In his description of the process of capture, the middle passage, and initial life as an enslaved person, Equiano illustrates how the slave trade systematically destroyed childhood innocence by destroying his sense of trust and security, causing him to experience adult reality through the significant cruelty he saw, and destroying his sense of identity.

Plot Summary: Equiano starts his story in his home, Africa, where he talks of a perfect childhood surrounded by family, community, and culture. He grew up as a young boy in peace with his family and learned the traditions and values of his people. This idyllic life was, however, interrupted when he and his sister were kidnapped by slave traders as their parents were away in the fields. Equiano was later sold to the European slave traders and taken to a slave ship to the Americas after being separated from his sister. The journey to the Atlantic, which was called the Middle Passage, was subjected to unthinkable atrocities such as overcrowding, illness, violence, and death. Equiano arrived in the Americas and was sold to different masters, and his life as an enslaved person started. In these childhood memories, the reader sees how a pure child was changed into a person who has to plan all the time to survive in a world that is hostile to him.

Reason 1: The story of Equiano illustrates how the trauma of capture and separation shattered his basic sense of security and trust. Equiano recalls his childhood before he was taken away as one in which he felt safe and appreciated by his community. He remembers how he was named Olaudah, which in his language means vicissitude or fortunate, and how he felt safe in his identity and position in the world (Equiano 2907). However, this security was broken at once by the violent interruption of his kidnapping. In the description of the moment of capture, Equiano says, “One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, tied our hands, and ran off with us into the nearest wood” (Equiano 2908). The words highlight how his world of comfort is destroyed abruptly and completely. This is a traumatic loss of family and a familiar environment, which is what researchers identify as an adverse interruption of identity. According to Anwesha Das, African literary texts such as Equiano use the narrative to counter the existing narratives by emphasizing the acts of defiance, solidarity, and survival, as well as recording the psychological violence of slavery (Das 1). This trauma is further worsened by the death of his sister, his best friend, and drives him to experience loneliness.

Reason 2: Moreover, the Middle Passage was full of horrors that made Equiano face adult realities of death, suffering, and human cruelty that no child is supposed to see. On the slave ship, Equiano witnessed some events that questioned his perception of humanity and morality. He states that the ship was a scene of horror that could barely be imagined because the screams of the women and the groans of the dying people made the entire ship a place of horror (Equiano 2911). The child who used to live in a world where adults were the protectors and caretakers of the children now finds himself in a world where adults are the cause of unbelievable cruelty. The fact that Equiano witnessed other Africans preferring death to further suffering demonstrates that he was prematurely introduced to the idea of suicide as an escape. This understanding is a very important psychological shift in which childhood optimism is sacrificed to despair and survival instinct. The natural trust children have in adults was replaced by the fear and the realization that not all humans are kind to others and could show them systematic cruelty.

Reason 3: The fact that Equiano was forced to adapt to slavery meant that he had to devise survival tactics that significantly transformed his connection with his identity and agency. Equiano needed to learn how to survive in a world that did not recognize his humanity in his new surroundings and how to survive by making people who regarded him as property happy. He explains how he learned to read the moods and expectations of his captors by writing, ““I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore” (Equiano 2912). This seclusion compelled him to be hypervigilant and self-sufficient in a manner that children are not supposed to be. The analysis by Chinaza Amaeze Okoli of the performative strategies of Equiano shows that enslaved individuals had to adjust their performance to fit the conceptions of white people about Blackness and proves that survival meant that they had to continuously perform the roles expected of them instead of expressing their true selves (Okoli 627). Losing his native language ties also implied a loss of a connection to his childhood identity. Moreover, his account of being taught to fear the white men who could eat him shows how slavery made him redefine fundamental human interactions in terms of predator and prey (Equiano 2910). This change from a child who believed in the safety of the community to a child who has to evaluate danger continuously is a basic loss of innocence that would forever influence his perception of the world.

The counterargument: However, certain critics may say that the story told by Equiano should not be viewed as a story that merely depicts the loss of innocence but rather the great strength of a person and that the fact that Equiano managed to survive and finally obtain the freedom is the testament to the human spirit and not its degradation. Performance and mimicry, as used by Equiano, can be interpreted as a form of strategic resistance, as argued by Okoli, because it shows that, despite this strategy, black subjects still had the agency to adjust their performances to fit the white people's ideas of blackness (Okoli 627). Brown also notes that there is temptation in certain criticism to tune in to just one of Equiano voices and to mute others as she bemoans how academic disciplines have tended to strip The Interesting Narrative of the various contexts that allow it to be read differently (191). The issue that Brown points out is the one that any reader of Equiano has to deal with, including the fact the text is full of changing voices, including Olaudah Equiano, Gustavus Vassa, Jacob, Michael, Captain, Freeman, and the very core of the text is the ability to change identity. The word or in the title indicates that identity is not fixed, and one wonders which self wrote the story. Instead of a loss of self, such complexity can be interpreted as the strength of Equiano, the power to play various identities as a survival and assertion in the oppressive world.

Refutation: Although it is true that Equiano demonstrated incredible strength of character and eventually got his freedom, this does not imply that he did not lose his innocence, as his testimony records. Even the survival skills that critics admire, his hypervigilance, his capacity to read dangerous situations, and his early self-sufficiency are themselves evidence of a shortened childhood. Raghunath underlines that literature can be a platform of alternative historical narratives that can demonstrate the transformative potential of African voices, yet such transformation can be achieved at a huge psychological price (196). The fact that a person is able to operate and even thrive after childhood trauma does not indicate that trauma has not fundamentally changed the way he or she develops. Equiano himself appears to know this change, and he often compares his present state of knowledge with his former naivety (Fisher 78). When he discusses his paranoia that he will be consumed by white men, he observes these fears as an adult, knowing that they were the fears of a frightened child trying to understand unimaginable cruelty. The strength that helped him to survive was paid by the carefree life that childhood is supposed to be. His adult success, which was admirable, was constructed on the ruins of a childhood that slavery systematically devastated.

Conclusion: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano is a very strong example of the use of the Atlantic slave trade as a mechanism for crushing the innocence of children and compelling them to mature psychologically too soon. Equiano helps the reader understand how trauma, cultural displacement, and the ever-present danger of death and enslavement changed his progression from a child into an adult. The little boy who started his story with the feeling of being safe in his identity and position in the world was turned into a person who had to plan his survival in a hostile world continuously. Although the fact that Equiano was able to succeed as a freeman and an abolitionist writer in the end proves that human resilience is something incredible, it does not erase the great loss that Equiano describes in his narrative. His narrative is a strong reminder that the effects of slavery were not confined to economic exploitation but also to the systematic devastation of human growth and psychological health. By writing of his journey between innocence and experience, Equiano did not only leave behind a personal memoir but a statement on how slavery had attacked the very essence of childhood.

References

Brown, Matthew D. "Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph: The Interesting Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism." Callaloo 36.1 (2013): 191-201.

Das, Anwesha. "Remembering Slavery in West African Literature: Reading The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano and Homegoing as Alternate Historical Accounts." Journal of African Languages & Literary Studies (JoALLS) 5.2 (2024).

Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. 1789. In British Literature I: Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century and Neoclassicism.

Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. "The Poetics of Belonging in the Age of Enlightenment: Spiritual Metaphors of Being in Olaudah Equiano's" Interesting Narrative"." Early American Studies (2013): 72-97.

Okoli, Chinaza Amaeze. "Olaudah Equiano and Freedom of the Scenes: Embodied Performances in Equiano's Interesting Narrative." Early American Literature 58.3 (2023): 619-639.

Raghunath, Riyukta. Alternative realities: Counterfactual historical fiction and possible worlds theory. Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom), 2017.