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 [...]