The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano
The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano
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黑色弥赛亚：写作 Equiano
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
0.2
通讯作者：
Chika Unigwe
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Chika Unigwe
在这篇文章中，尼日利亚作家 Chika Unigwe 讨论了撰写传记小说《黑色弥赛亚》（目前仅以荷兰语译本 De zwarte Messiias 出版）所面临的挑战，该小说富有想象力地回顾了奥劳达·埃奎亚诺的一生。 Unigwe 在 20 世纪 90 年代末首次尝试以儿童读物的形式重新构想 Equiano。这个项目立即让她注意到写传记小说的两个主要的、对立的困难：一方面，需要依靠历史信息来准确地再现过去，但另一方面，小说——作为艺术——无法在不变得过于说教的情况下传递大量此类信息。 Unigwe 放弃了这个早期项目，但最终以成人小说的形式再次开始。她在写这本书时的一些创造性选择是受到艾奎亚诺自传中留下的想象力的指导——例如，他几乎没有提到他的白人妻子，并且对他担任种植园监工的时光仍然含糊其辞。这引发了Unigwe探索的一系列问题：一个黑人在十八世纪是如何经历跨种族婚姻的？作为监督者，艾奎亚诺如何处理“顽固”的奴隶？一位二十一世纪的作家如何能在不以当代标准来评判艾奎亚诺的情况下重现他的精神状态呢？还有其他挑战。一个与讲述艾奎亚诺故事所用的语言类型有关，另一个与描写真实人物所涉及的限制有关，因为他的生与死的许多方面都记录在历史记录中。最终，乌尼格维试图在事实与虚构、历史与想象之间找到平衡，以突出埃奎亚诺成就的伟大，同时也探索他作为一个人的故事在今天仍然特别重要。
In this essay, Nigerian author Chika Unigwe discusses the challenges involved in writing the biographical novel The Black Messiah (currently published only in Dutch translation as De zwarte messias), which imaginatively retraces the life of Olaudah Equiano. Unigwe’s first attempt to reimagine Equiano took the form of a children’s book in the late 1990s. This project immediately drew her attention to the two primary, antithetical difficulties of writing biographical fiction: on the one hand, one needs to rely on historical information to recreate the past accurately but, on the other, fiction — being art — cannot impart a great deal of such information without becoming too didactic. Unigwe abandoned this early project but eventually took it up again in the form of an adult novel. Some of her creative choices in writing this book were guided by the imaginative spaces left in Equiano’s autobiography — for example, he hardly mentions his white wife and remains vague about his time as a plantation overseer. This prompted a series of questions for Unigwe to explore: how did a black man experience an interracial marriage in the eighteenth century? How did Equiano handle “stubborn” slaves as an overseer? How could a twenty-first century writer recreate Equiano’s state of mind without judging him by contemporary standards? There were additional challenges too. One pertained to the type of language to be used to recount Equiano’s story, another to the constraints involved in writing about a real figure, many aspects of whose life and death are on the historical record. Ultimately, Unigwe tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, history and imagination, so as to highlight the magnitude of Equiano’s accomplishments, while also exploring him as a human being whose story remains particularly relevant today.