Project 1– An Equiano Collage Visual

The whole of my unessay and the process to get there was interesting, to say the least. I knew straight away for this first project that I didn’t want to do a traditional essay but maybe something more creative. The problem with that is I am somebody who is artistic, but not super artistic. For example, I can play several instruments but have trouble trying to make my own music. I can write but not well enough for something really substantial to work with in this situation. I can do origami and have an eye for detail but cannot for the life of me draw or paint. I was really racking my brain for what I could do. It wasn’t until an assignment in one of my other classes about making a collage that I finally had an idea for what I wanted to do.

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The result ended up being part collage, part scrapbook, part an assembly of images and symbols. I originally had the idea to make a long, horizontal collage that resembled a timeline of sorts for Equiano’s journey. However, the more I took notes and gathered images, the more I realized just how much of Equiano’s narrative involved ships or being at sea. That was when I decided to make the boat at the center of the collage, with events and symbols of his life scattered around it. I searched for a lot of the images from the internet and also from a couple different magazines I owned. I took a quote from the book that I thought did a good job describing Equiano and a view of his life, which I got from cutting out different letters from those magazines mentioned. And then I made the boat with little scraps of patterned origami paper and typed page clippings arranged together in simple shapes. 

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First, there are the perimeter images which are fairly self-explanatory. In the lower-left corner, I started with his home in Africa. Unfortunately, it was really hard to find images for where he lived because of so few records of it back then. I ended up settling for a map showing where the Kingdom of Benin was, a photo of crop fields in that area, and an old textile taken from that region. After that, I found images depicting his slavery with a couple of relevant illustrations of the time, as well as a pair of chains and cuffs. Then there are also two illustrations of the ports and streets of England during the time period he was there, along with Equiano’s portrait. The images at the top are illustrations representing the battle of the Seven Years’ War at sea, which Equiano got mixed up in, followed by a boat getting shipwrecked to show his own near-death experience with that. The last two image clumps represent his strong relationship with literacy and Christianity, both of which he carried with him through the rest of his life.

Next, I got the idea for including a line from the book when I saw other collage examples use of cut-out letters and immediately wanted to try it out. Choosing the actual quote took a little bit more time. I read all of Equiano on my laptop and because I couldn’t really highlight, by the time I finished it I had a several-pages-long Google Doc with pasted bits and pieces that stood out to me. You can find the quote I ended up using, “whatever fate had determined must ever come to pass” from the online format linked on the site, paragraph six of chapter six. That entire paragraph was one that really grabbed me when I was initially reading it. It’s one where Equiano thinks out loud about his slavery, his freedom, and some of his values. About honestly, the golden rule, and fate. It was his belief in fate that I thought was really insightful. His belief that even though he went through so much awful shit, all of the things in his life have their own place and happened for a reason. It really gives you a window into his mind and his interpretation of the world, and I thought it was very fitting for looking at a visual of his life and journey.

Finally, there is the focal point of the collage, the ship. Now, as mentioned earlier, I cannot draw or paint at all. Because of that, there was no way I was going to be able to make a realistic-looking ship with pieces of paper. So I settled on using shapes and hoped that it would do a decent enough job to get the point across. The different textures of wood and water were one of my favorite things to pick out and put together, and the sail of the ship is something that I think could speak to a lot of different things. I loved the idea of having the sail be made up of text. Not only does that represent Equiano’s own narrative being propelled by the power of the written word, but it also says something to literature and life itself. I don’t know much about boats, but I know that without a sail, a vessel wouldn’t be able to effectively move forward. And that makes me think of words. How words are the tools for “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”, as well as for literature in general, and how stories can carry you through all of the harsh winds of life and existence.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this piece. It’s very simple on the surface but is something that you can find more meaning within it, whether it be from the ensemble of pictures themselves, the quote from Equiano’s own thoughts, or the sail stitched together with words. There were a few road bumps along the way when making this. Such as running out of certain materials and not being able to get a dark paperboard to glue everything to. Certain colors clashing or certain things hard to read, and the low quality of my phone camera not doing anything to help. However, I am still generally proud of the result. It was a tedious process but I enjoyed it and learned a lot. And if I ever do something like this again in the future, I will know even more ways to do it better.

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https://youtu.be/0b0OfQHYla8