By Allison Chu “It's all made up. The Omar that I wrote is a made up Omar. It's not the real Omar, because the real Omar we cannot know. We can only try to evoke the spirit of Omar passed down to us.”1 With this declaration, composer Rhiannon Giddens lays out the limitations and creative possibilities of recounting Omar Ibn Said’s autobiographical writing through opera. The fifteen short handwritten pages of The Life of Omar Ibn Said comprise the only surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. What we know of the real Ibn Said is largely pieced together from his written voice, documented [...]

Dive In by Leigh Webber leighwebber.com By Lucy Caplan  “The act of imagination is bound up with memory,” writes Toni Morrison. In her foundational essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison takes up the question of how her fiction responds to and extends upon the slave narrative, a genre that is at the heart of the African American literary tradition. Slave narratives – in which fugitive and formerly enslaved people documented their experiences in order to communicate slavery’s brutality, advocate for abolition, and assert the writer’s humanity – were acts of testimony through which African Americans, under conditions [...]