Nearer My Freedom Review
Module 3: Poetic Form-Found Poetry
Bibliography
Edinger, M., & Younge, L. (2023). Nearer my freedom: The interesting
life of Olaudah Equiano by himself. Zest Books. ISBN 9781728450988
Nearer My Freedom is a novel in verse using found poems from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. The book opens with a table of contents; this is especially helpful because of the amount of back matter. Following the table of contents is an “About This Book” section which gives readers a brief overview of the life of Olaudah Equiano, an explanation of how this found verse book was created using Equiano’s autobiography, and a quick note about vocabulary changes that make the text more suitable for contemporary readers. There is a brief prologue in verse, then Part 1 of the book. Part 1 has seven chapters and Part 2 has five. There are inserts spread between the poems that provide historical context for the reader. Following part two is a considerable amount of back matter: epilogue, creating a verse version, timeline, glossary, source notes, bibliography, further reading, and an index. The “Creating a Verse Version” section is especially interesting as it walks through the process of taking the original autobiographical text, highlighting significant words and phrases, then creating the verse version. With this, readers can see the transformation of text from 1789 prose to 2023 verse. Readers also learn in the back matter that the titles of the chapters are from the original autobiography, while the titles of poems are line numbers from Equiano’s autobiography. The extra information makes this book highly accessible to young readers.
Analysis
The poems within this novel are all constructed as free
verse in structure, which makes the most sense for them as found poems. Trying
to force rhyme would not work, but Edinger and Younge still use several poetic
devices throughout the book to support Equiano’s values and message. For
example, repetition is used in multiple poems to bring emphasis. In poem 49, after
the war is over, and the sailors are expecting a different life, “ I thought
now of nothing but/ being freed and working for myself/ being freed and getting
money/ being freed and getting a good education/ being freed/ being able to read/
being able to write/ being freed” (Edinger & Younge, 2023, p. 79); this
repetition creates a tone of desperate determination.
Within the text, readers will encounter parallelism, especially during emotional scenes like when he “…had told several people the story/ of my kidnapping/ of my sister,/ of being separated,/ of my anxiety for her fate,/ of my sorrow at never having met her again” (2023, p.69). The strategy creates both emphasis and a rhythm that creates a sorrowful and anxious tone, almost like it is hard to breathe when it is read aloud.
Edinger and Younge splendidly balancing their word choice to be accessible for young readers while not losing the emotion and power of Equiano’s journey. Sometimes, the authors embedded the words so that context clues are available, for example, “The slave-trade has a tendency/ to debauch men’s minds,/ to harden them to every feeling of humanity!” (2023, p.94). When context clues are not within reach, “One morning about the ship/ we had vast quantities of sea horses/ which neighed exactly/ like any other horses” (2023, p.147) or “We set out for England in a sloop” (2023, p.58), the glossary is helpful in identifying unknown words, e.g. sea horses as walruses and sloops as a sailboat with one mast.
Excerpt
106.
In January
we arrived at Jamaica.
One Sunday I took
Prince George to church.
When we came out, we saw all kinds of people
half a mile down to the water
buying and selling all kinds of commodities.
I went with the Doctor on board a Guinea-man
to purchase slaves to carry with us
and cultivate a plantation
and chose all my own countrymen.
On the twelfth of February
we sailed from Jamaica,
on the eighteenth
arrived at the Musquito shore.
All our Indian guests went ashore
and were met by the Musquito king.
We never saw one of them after.
Activity
This text is rife with possibilities! For high school
students, it would be an interesting opening to research the complexities of roles
within the slave trade and the road to abolition. Equiano was helped by his
white friends more than once; in fact, one of his white friends was responsible
for persuading his owner to allow Equiano to purchase his own freedom. Ironically,
after he was free, Equiano was complicit in participating in buying and
shipping slaves himself before his transformation and advocacy for abolition. After
reading entries of his involvement and his transformation to abolitionist,
students will answer the following prompt: how can someone who was once part an
oppressive system, then complicit in its functioning, become a strong ally in
its elimination?
Reviews
From Publishers Weekly:
“Without losing the source text’s
emotional heft, Edinger and Younge’s visceral poems respectfully provide an
effective entry point into the seminal work.”
From Kirkus Reviews: “This highly successful adaptation of his original work uses Equiano’s own words, turned into found verse and supplemented with important historical context that makes this primary source accessible. The overall result is exceptionally readable as well as informative.”
Awards
YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults,
Short-listed, 2024
NCTE Notable Poetry Books and Verse Novels List, Winner,
2024
CYBILS Award Finalist, Short-listed, 2023
School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Winner, 2023
Center for the Study of Multicultural Children’s Literature
Best Book of the Year, Winner, 2024
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