Orificially Olaudah: Eschatological Feasting, Gastronomical Rhetoric, and Abolitionism in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative

Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself is gastronomically surprising. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives leaned on the rhetorical powers of eating and drinking to stir up sentimental feeling and moral disgust among anglophone publics hungry to consume eyewitness accounts of slavery. But Equiano uniquely sets the table for readers by critiquing the British slave trade for its consumptive logics and cannibalistic desires through diverse metaphors, rhetoric, and scenes related to eating and drinking—particularly in a theological key. Equiano’s autobiography thematizes his antislavery polemics through a rival feasting of interracial love and freedom in his climactic conversion to Methodist Christianity: the love feast. Contra readings that locate Equiano’s love-feasting in the history of the early church or his boyhood past of Igbo ritual and commensality, I argue Equiano spotlights this fellowship meal as an eschatological foretaste of an interracial kingdom to come. God, as Equiano indicates, condemns the slave trade and racial injustice from the future—not the past or even the present—allowing Equiano to consume, and appeal to, a Christian faith that promised, for himself and his race, a place at God’s eternal table.