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 of profound oppression, contributed to their own emancipation. Perhaps the best known is Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which communicated the shocking everyday violence of life on the plantation and established its author as one of the nineteenth century’s most profound writers and speakers. The text on which the opera Omar is based, The Life of Omar Ibn Said (1831), stands out from other slave narratives in that it was written in Arabic by a Muslim author. As a work which not only narrates Omar’s individual story, but also illuminates more broadly the little-known experience of enslaved Muslims in the antebellum South, the Life adds invaluable complexity and breadth to our understanding of the genre.
Yet as politically influential and rhetorically impressive as slave narratives were, they were also written under numerous constraints. White editors and publishers often prefaced enslaved authors’ words with attestations that these narratives were truly “authentic.” They encouraged – or forced – authors to adhere to certain stylistic and narrative conventions, such as a focus on hard facts rather than subjective feelings, or a posture of gratitude toward white abolitionists. As a result, Morrison points out, the slave narrative tends to obscure or efface its author’s “interior life.” We learn more about the inhumanity of the institution than about the humanity of its victims.
Under these circumstances, the act of imagination becomes a possibility, perhaps even a necessity, for understanding the fullness of enslaved people’s experiences. Fiction and other creative practices can animate the silences of the historical record, filling in its gaps at the level of emotion, feeling, and experience. This endeavor comes with great responsibility “not to lie,” as Morrison warns. The goal is to use the powers of imagination not to step away from the truth, but to convey it more fully. As an opera written in the twenty-first century but based on a narrative written centuries ago by an enslaved man, Omar – both its creators and its performers – assume this responsibility. The opera must remain true to the details of his life that Omar does provide, while also attending to all that is absent from his account.
For instance, the trauma of the Middle Passage goes unspoken in Omar’s autobiography; he notes only that the journey happened, and that it took several weeks. The opera, in contrast, devotes an entire scene to that part of Omar’s life, lingering over his fellow captives’ anguish at being forced from their homes. Omar’s own voice is almost entirely absent from this scene, reflecting the fact that we cannot know precisely what he experienced. Instead, he joins the audience in listening to the other captives, whose extended laments are full of impossibly long phrases. Their voices unfold over a tumultuous orchestra whose swirling rhythms evokes the relentless motion of the ship. The anonymous captives recount their stories and ask, with pathos, “Who am I? Who was I?” The scene communicates the utter theft of identity that the transatlantic slave trade imposed, while also attempting to suggest how that theft felt to those who experienced it. At the same time, the scene declines to depict the graphic violence that captives suffered during the Middle Passage: there are no chains constricting the singers, for example. This interpretive choice, too, is an act of imagination – one which declines to reproduce that violence onstage, thereby keeping the focus on the characters’ inner lives.
In retelling a story about the history of slavery from a new perspective, Omar also joins a number of contemporary creative and educational efforts. The question of how to grapple with the fundamental but disturbing truth that slavery was foundational to the establishment of the United States has never elicited easy answers, but it has prompted especially contentious public discourse in recent years. The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which focuses on slavery’s centrality to the nation’s origins, has garnered a vast, appreciative audience for how it draws attention to aspects of U.S. history that are often unduly minimized in mainstream narratives. It has also prompted vicious attacks from those who see it as unpatriotic, given the challenge it poses to ideas of national exceptionalism. The question of how to represent slavery’s end is equally fraught: across the country, and especially in the South, monuments to the Confederacy, long portrayed as a noble “lost cause,” have been taken down or replaced; at the same time, plantation museums which glorify white antebellum life continue to thrive as popular tourist attractions.
In Charleston – where Omar Ibn Said first stepped ashore in 1807, and where the opera first premiered in 2022 – the question of how to contend with the history of slavery is inescapable. Historians estimate that as many as 40% of enslaved people entered North America through Charleston. They endured distressing conditions in quarantine on Sullivan’s Island before arriving on the mainland, where they were sold at market. Even after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808, the city remained a hub of the domestic slave trade. By the 1850s, 3 out of every 4 white families in Charleston enslaved a Black person. As soon as the Civil War ended, the city became a site of contested memory. It was a hotbed of the romanticization of the Confederacy; it was also where newly freed African Americans created and first celebrated Memorial Day to commemorate the Union dead. As of this year, it will become the home of the International African American Museum, an expansive institution located at the wharf where Omar and other captive Africans arrived centuries ago.
Charleston was also the site, in 1735, of the first known performance of an opera in North America. The city’s ability to sustain an active cultural scene depended on its wealth, which in turn depended upon its reliance on slavery. Omar might be seen as indirectly responding to that historical fact, remaking an existing relationship between slavery and opera to very different ends. By taking Omar’s story as its subject, it flips the script, compelling this art form to contribute to the contested memory of slavery in the present.
Of course, Omar is far from the first opera to tackle the subject of slavery in the United States. Dorothy Rudd Moore’s Frederick Douglass, commissioned and premiered by Opera Ebony in 1985, focused on Douglass’s abolitionist efforts after his escape from slavery. Anthony Davis’s 1997 work Amistad took up the story of the 1839 Amistad Rebellion, in which a group of captives seized the ship attempting to transport them. And in 2005, Toni Morrison wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner, an opera by composer Richard Danielpour. Like Morrison’s fiction, it is an “act of imagination”: the opera is based on the same infamous case of Margaret Garner, a fugitive woman who killed her own child rather than allowing her to return to slavery, which inspired Morrison’s novel Beloved. Yet there are key differences. While Beloved focuses mainly on the interiority of its characters, Margaret Garner emphasizes the public, political stakes of the case. Opera, it seems, invites a different relationship to imagination: one which asks us to consider the collective and communal experience of slavery in addition to its effects upon individual people.
In Omar, the imaginative possibilities of the stage allow the work’s creators to emphasize how the title character’s relationships with his family and community sustain him, even – especially – under the profoundly dislocating conditions of captivity. When Omar agonizes over how to escape Johnson’s South Carolina plantation, his mother, Fatima, reappears as a fantastical, ghostlike figure. “No matter where you go, I am with you,” she reminds him, her voice rising in pitch and urgency as she insists that he listen to her guidance. Her presence, a departure from the autobiographical perspective of the original text, makes sense within the multifaceted world of the opera, in which we behold the events of Omar’s individual journey and also bear witness to how his enduring attachments to home, faith, and family shape his decisions.
Just as Omar’s own memories guide his choices within the opera, then our collective national memory of slavery can guide how we choose to confront this brutal history. “Facts can exist without human intelligence,” Morrison cautions in the same essay, “but truth cannot.” Omar’s focus on how enslaved people maintained individual and collective identities, and opera’s formal ability to depict those practices onstage, requires just such human intelligence. It transforms the facts of Omar’s life into a richly emotive narrative, marshalling imagination as a pathway to that narrative’s factually inaccessible dimensions. In doing so, it moves us closer to an uncomfortable, essential truth.