orinooko (aphra behn)

Behn’s Orinooko is one of the more extraordinary texts from the canon of English literature. In part because of its evident contemporary ordinariness. Just another story about a tragic hero. The fact that the eponymous tragic hero is a slave in a British colony in the Americas only appears, retrospectively, remarkable. At the time, for all its exotic context, it belonged to a recognisable literary trope. Now we can read it and think: ‘How could a female author in the late seventeenth century be writing about globalisation and slavery, with a black African protagonist?’ 

The novel occurs in both West Africa and Suriname, which was a British colony before it was ceded to the Dutch in exchange for New Amsterdam. According to Janet Todd’s excellent introduction, Behn had travelled to Suriname. The novel employs the authorial voice as the narrator, although clearly it’s not known to what extent Behn was recounting actual events or inventing them. The section in West Africa, which she hadn’t visited, certainly feels more sketchy, less rigorous in the writing, as it sets up the background for Orinooko falling in love with Imoinda and his subsequent betrayal and capture by an English slaver who ships him to Suriname to be sold.

The issue of slavery is central to the book, but dealt with in a complicated fashion. Firstly, Behn seems to suggest that slavery was endemic to West African culture before it became part of European culture. Next, the moral argument against slavery appears to be not so much that it enslaved individuals, but that it enslaved particular noble individuals who were put on this earth for greater things. A kind of Nietzschean variation. Whilst the fate of the other slaves, both in Suriname and Africa doesn’t appear to bother Behn particular, the fate of Orinooko and Imoinda is what grants them their tragic destiny, elevating Orinooko onto another moral sphere altogether, where the murder of his beloved becomes an honourable act. Which could be a twist on Othello, a sly reading of alternative models of morality to the rigid Judeo-Chrisitan one. Lastly, there is the issue of the actual physical state of slavery itself. Behn’s description of Orinooko’s life in Suriname feels more like a depiction of someone in an open jail than in the state of slavery as it has been depicted. The narrator herself becomes friends with Orinooko, who hunts and swims and generally hangs out with his oppressors as though he’s not only one of the gang, but the most valued member of that gang. 

What this depiction does is it elevates the concept of freedom and individual liberty. Looking at the ravages of war, plague and fire that 17th century England had endured, the description of Orinooko’s existence in Suriname seems almost idyllic. (Todd notes that Behn has been criticised for painting an idealised, Edenic vision of Suriname which ignored mosquitos, disease, humidity, etcetera). However, rather than enjoy this idyllic life and the princely privileges he is granted. Orinooko insists on rebelling. Hence we have the first depiction that I know of in British fiction of a slave revolt and the subsequent punitive reaction taken by the capitalists/ slave owners towards the revolt’s leader, Orinooko. Orinooko is brought down precisely because of his princely demeanour which values an elevated notion of liberty above and beyond anything else. As such, Orinooko feels like the forerunner of an increasingly individualistic trend in Western culture. One which it could be argued leads towards the existentialists or even the diverse cultural reactions to the current crisis around the globe, (where some countries have chosen to prioritise liberty/ freedom and others have engaged in a more draconian battle against the plague), a globe whose actual shape and geography was only just coming to be defined at the time Behn was writing.