13 - Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies

Summary

Introduction: damning the vessel

This chapter deals with the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with an incident from a story that is about exile and travel in the colonial world. This event occurs in February 1767, on board a ship sailing from Montserrat, in the east Caribbean, towards Savannah, Georgia, passing the Bahamas en route. The cargo of the vessel in question includes “above twenty” slaves. Our narrator, by his own account, had been born in West Africa, captured as a child, and sold to white slave-traders. Unlike many others he had survived both the horror of the middle passage and the brutalities of plantation life and had managed, a year previously, to buy himself back from his owner as a formally, if precariously, free individual. His name is Olaudah Equiano and he writes:

[T]he next evening, it being my watch below, I was pumping the vessel a little after eight o’clock, just before I went off the deck, as is the custom; and being weary with the duty of the day, and tired at the pump, (for we made a good deal of water) I began to express my impatience, and I uttered with an oath, “Damn the vessel’s bottom out.” But my conscience instantly smote me for the expression.

(Edwards 1988: 106)