Equiano

Slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass and Oladuh Equiano are essential to understanding the institution and the effect oppression has on the human body, mind, and spirit. Each slave narrative also offers something unique, because no two stories will be the same. Different slaves have different experiences, as well as different reactions to those experiences. Slaves like Frederick Douglass and Oladuh Equiano have formative experiences developed during their childhood, initial capture, and term of enslavement: experiences that provide them with special skills. Those skills could later help them escape and articulate their experiences in writing, thereby promoting the political and social liberation of slaves. Equiano worked much of his life as an assistant to a ship's captain, exposing him to different people and offering him a worldly outlook that would help him later when he attained freedom. Douglass had a completely different background, learning how to calk. Equiano...
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