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 at his owner’s request in 1831. Ibn Said was a teacher and prolific scholar who lived in Futa Toro, in what is now Senegal. In 1807, at thirty-seven years old, Ibn Said was captured and trafficked to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was sold to an unsympathetic slave owner named Johnston. In 1810, he escaped and walked north to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was recaptured and jailed for sixteen days. While in jail, Ibn Said’s Arabic writing caught the attention of John Owen’s daughter, who brought him to the attention of her father. Owen later purchased Ibn Said for his brother, General James Owen of Bladen County, and Ibn Said remained enslaved until his death around 1864.
As Giddens attests, the archive points to only a faint outline of the man who lived nearly two hundred years ago. His writing provides hints of the remarkable narrative of Ibn Said’s life, and the aforementioned list of sites where Ibn Said was held captive are voids to be filled with imaginative detail. By reading with and between the lines of Ibn Said’s autobiography, composers Giddens and Michael Abels infuse musical and dramaturgical imagination into Ibn Said’s Life, animating the true story of an enslaved man in a new operatic living archive.
The lacunae within Ibn Said’s Life present opportunities to reimagine not only the person he was, but also the many figures that surrounded him throughout his life in colorful three-dimensional detail. Audiences can now witness the raid that tears apart the homes and families of Ibn Said’s village. In the hull of a ship, other enslaved captives recount the Middle Passage, elaborating upon the impossibility of language to express the horrors of their journey. The most extensive of these imaginative speculations are the supporting women characters of the opera: Julie, a fictitious enslaved woman, is a composite character inspired by other contemporaneous slave narratives, and Ibn Said’s mother Fatima returns to the stage after her death as a guiding spirit, reminding Ibn Said of his faith and path.
While these additional characters help us understand the world Ibn Said lived in, perhaps the most important dramaturgical expansion is the exploration of his interiority. Memoirs and autobiographical writing are particularly rich sources for operatic exploration because of the reader’s access to the author’s voice. However, in comparison to more contemporary autobiographies, Ibn Said’s text is sparse and contains little self-reflection. Many scholars point to the chapter of the Qur’an, Surat al-Mulk, that precedes his account as a reflexive commentary on his captivity; the chapter focuses on God’s absolute sovereignty, and by highlighting God’s dominion, Ibn Said redefines his enslaved position not as serving another human, but rather divine will. In contrast, within his autobiographical account, Ibn Said omits detail about his emotional perspective, challenging the operatic retelling of Omar to expand his voice as a way of interpreting the human experience.
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Ibn Said’s Life is a crucial document that attests to the broader presence of Arabic literacy and Muslim culture in early America. In drawing on this slave narrative as both inspiration and source material, composers Giddens and Abels contribute to a larger American phenomenon of creating operas that are based on true life. American opera has increasingly selected its divas and heroes from momentous events of (sometimes very recent) history. Significant historical figures such as President Richard Nixon (Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams and Alice Goodman), Malcolm X (X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) by Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis), and Isabelle Eberhardt (Song from the Uproar (2012) by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek) are now operatic characters, joining the ranks of Violetta, Tosca, and Siegfried. Beginning in the 1980s, librettists expanded the kinds of materials used in the creation of operatic narratives, drawing on materials such as court transcripts, newspaper articles, oral histories, and memoirs. Notably these source materials have bolstered the authority and perspectives of those who have been historically excluded from the operatic stage, amplifying new voices in operatic song. More recently, operas such as Dead Man Walking (2000), by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally, and Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019), by Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons, have reflected the search for stories that speak to the cultural issues of our contemporary moment.
However, not everyone has joined in the celebrations of this version of opera. One of the most influential critics of these operas was Peter G. Davis, who took issue with the ways in which historical figures and headline events have been reinterpreted, adapted, and expanded as operatic subjects. Such a move, he argued, was a shallow tactic to draw audiences to the art form without developing a deep sense of engagement or appreciation. In his opinion, the attention-grabbing protagonists shifted the opera’s spotlight to the narrative content and the celebrity status of the protagonist, not the music of opera. In other words, true life just isn’t musical enough for opera.
Davis was not alone in his critique; in critical reviews of these new operas spanning the last few decades, it’s common to come across references to the opera’s story as “ripped from the headlines” or comparisons of operatic protagonists to their true-life counterparts. Many reviews question the status that such operatic renditions award their subjects: should the complex messiness of a real person be subsumed in the name of an operatic mythological character? Despite the constant impulse for comparison, the phenomenon’s persistence into the twenty-first century has demonstrated the case for opera’s relevance. Of course, opera is not the first medium to adapt stories from reality; true stories abound especially in many films and television shows. Still, with its particular blend of music and drama, opera opens up a space for considering a deeper and multilayered commentary. Ultimately, what this broader phenomenon — and Omar in particular—reveals is how real life can be fundamentally operatic, and how music can help us to make sense of the world around us.
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Director Kaneza Schaal describes the process of bringing Omar to life as creating a “library from which we will collectively work to begin a conversation.”2 Just as spoken dialogue relies on vocal inflection to deliver text and clarify its meaning, opera provides interpretive and emotional nuance in its musical setting and sonic parameters. What does this collective library of music sound like? In the case of Omar, Giddens and Abels blend their unique genre-defying styles to construct a living archive of sound that accompanies Ibn Said’s account and captures a distinctively American soundscape. Vernacular musical practices, African drumming patterns, and Islamic prayer rituals evoke a transatlantic story. Giddens, whose career oscillates between historian and performing musician, regularly seeks to emphasize the African American roots of traditional folk songs. Blending imagination and history has always been a crucial part of her practice; in reviving various regional traditions of folk music, Giddens centers the narratives of those too frequently pushed to the margins of history. Abels adds to this blurry line between historical facticity and imagination with his orchestral facility and his emotion-stimulating film scoring techniques.
But how does Omar as an opera, an art form with European origins, recount American history through music? For Giddens and Abels, this work begins with more traditional elements of the genre: sweeping arias sound introspective moments, hymn-like choral segments depict different communities, and recitatives clue the audience into a character’s specific musical persona. The guiding spiritual apparition of Ibn Said’s mother recalls the tropes of ghosts that haunt the operatic stage. Vocalises on open syllables poignantly communicate emotions at the limits of language. These components are then expanded into new sonic dimensions; Giddens and Abels also incorporate a stylistic plurality that reflects the diversity of the voices on stage. Spirituals and hoedown dances illustrate the bonds between the enslaved on the plantations, and the regularity of call-and-response and folk-song verse patterns structure musical passages. The specific drumming patterns of the Koromanti, an African tune transcribed in the Caribbean in the early eighteenth century, influence the lively Overture. To compose Omar, Giddens recorded herself singing with her own banjo accompaniment, and Abels then fleshed out the musical worlds supporting her melodies; the quintessential American folk instrument can be heard throughout the opera as shadowy hints that are transformed and re-voiced by the power of the orchestra. Bluegrass influences join the melodic lines of Islamic prayers—which, in some orthodox communities, are not considered music—in an expansive, dynamic score. Each of these influences captures a snapshot of a musical history, expertly woven by the creators into a catalog of American sound.
It is in each of these influences that we hear the musical worlds of the creators alongside the text of Ibn Said’s Life. As the creators of Omar have shown, the task of telling Ibn Said’s story necessitates a melding of musical styles and histories. Ibn Said’s ability to speak to us today may be limited to that which is preserved in the archive, but in experiencing the opera, we hear the musical conversation that Giddens and Abels stage: helping Omar say what could not be said.
Allison Chu is a Ph.D. candidate in Music History at Yale University. Her research focuses on the intersection of identity and opera in the twenty-first century.
[1] “Omar: Collaboration in Conversation.” Spoleto at Home series, Spoleto Festival USA. May 22, 2020.