The Divine Pen. Yelimane Fall. c.2007.
by Jennifer J Yanco
When I heard that the Boston Lyric Opera would be producing Rhiannon Giddens’ and Michael Ables’ new opera, Omar, I was both excited and intrigued. The opera Omar is based on the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a learned man who, at the age of 37, was forced to leave his home in West Africa and brought to the US involuntarily to be sold into slavery.
I am a linguist by training, specializing in African languages. I am currently working with an international team of scholars on the preservation of ancient and contemporary Ajami manuscripts in four major world languages, all of them West African. The term Ajami refers to the use of the Arabic script to write languages other than Arabic. My interest in languages dates back to my childhood. Growing up in a largely white and linguistically homogenized community, I had an abiding curiosity about other languages—how they conveyed meaning and what new stories they might reveal about the depth and breadth of the world. As an adult, I had the opportunity to discover some of this richness. I lived for many years in West Africa and developed a deep appreciation for the diversity of the region’s many languages and cultures.
Omar is the story of language and the miracle of the written word. It’s the story of a remarkable man in an intolerable world. It’s the story of a profoundly shameful period in our history as a country, a period that continues to reverberate throughout our society today. Omar takes us on a journey through time—to a thriving West African community at the beginning of the 19th century, across the waters of the middle passage, and into the vagaries of life lived under the complete and total control of others. It’s a powerful journey, one infused with unspeakable pain. It’s also a testimony to the indomitable human quest for liberation and light, the refusal to fade into dust. Omar presents us with a story we may be avoiding, and difficult questions we need to resolve. It does so through a rich and surprising interweaving of musical traditions.
I was intrigued, too, upon learning that Omar was written and composed by Rhiannon Giddens, whom I had associated mainly with the African American folk music of her band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Many years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing them perform on a very cold First Night in Boston and fell in love with their music. I only recently learned that Giddens is also a classically trained opera singer and, as she puts it, “a performing historian”. Yet, like most of us, she had never heard of Omar ibn Said, so when she was commissioned to compose an opera centering his life, she had much history to discover. Interestingly, she has also described herself as “the research arm of the performing arts”. Her careful research, combined with her and Abels’ musical genius, provides a window into Omar’s life and this unreconciled chapter of our national history. Through the opera, Giddens follows her mission of “uncovering and highlighting parts of our history that have been suppressed to tell a false narrative that is tearing us apart.” Abels, best known for scoring the modern-day horror film Get Out, puts it this way: “We need to know their stories,” he says, “and then we will know more about who we are now.” Together Giddens and Abels have created a powerful musical experience, illuminating the complex textures of this story about a West African Islamic scholar and the magic of the written word, and in so doing, shed light on this infamous chapter of American history.
Omar is also about chattel slavery: one of the worst atrocities in human history. It’s a very tortured part of our country’s foundation—something about which my early education was criminally silent. Actually, most of us don’t know much about it at all. I have come to see that what I learned in school—about Africa, about slavery and its aftermath, about those enslaved—is so far off the mark that it’s really more akin to fiction than history. I am continually learning things that I should have known but didn’t—about how we got to where we are now. For more than 20 years, I have been part of a community education program called White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action. This series is aimed at uncovering our deep history of racial injustice, violence, and exclusion; and taking action to dismantle its ongoing reverberations of continued oppression. The learning (and unlearning) is ongoing. I have come to see more clearly the ways in which slavery’s legacy continues to shape our country and our communities—the way it keeps returning, demanding to be acknowledged for what it was, and seeking reparations for the damage it has wrought.
The common idea of Africa lodged in the minds of many Americans is one of a wild, exotic, and undifferentiated land of poverty, and upheaval; a land in which literacy has never had a significant place. This view hasn’t really changed much since the early 19th century. It is a single story1 that, when we tell it over and over again across generations, becomes a powerful narrative. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. And, as with the many tall tales about Africa that we’ve swallowed whole, so too with the stories we tell about slavery in this country—that it wasn’t so bad, that those arriving in chains were illiterate and unskilled, and that it was a relatively short period so very long ago; can’t we just put it to rest and move on? (Actually, as Byron Rushing notes, it will only be in 2111 that people of African descent will have been free in the United States for as long as they were enslaved.[2] So no: it’s not that long ago.) It is owing to these false narratives that we have so deeply absorbed that Omar ibn Said—an enslaved African who was a scholar and a man of letters—seems unlikely and so very extraordinary.
Omar ibn Said was indeed extraordinary, but perhaps not for the reasons we think. Omar, among many other persons enslaved in the US, came from a region of West Africa where the rates of literacy were as high or higher than of those in the US at that time.[3] He was likely one of many enslaved persons whose scholarship equaled or surpassed that of their “owners.” Omar ibn Said was born in the late 18th century to a prosperous Pulaar family in the Futa Toro; a region of what is now Senegal that remains a center of Islamic scholarship. Like others in his predominately Islamic community, he would have attended Quranic school from an early age and learned to read and write in the Arabic script. He would also have been fluent in his native language, Pulaar, and quite probably in one or two other languages. He elected to continue his studies and by the time he was captured and enslaved, he was in his mid-30s and was an accomplished Islamic scholar with over 25 years of study—analogous to today’s post-doctoral scholar.
He was sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade, arriving in Charleston, South Carolina on one of the last legal slave ships. After escaping from his initial place of bondage in South Carolina, he was caught in Fayetteville, North Carolina and, tragically, lived the remainder of his life enslaved by James Owen. During his time on the Owen’s plantation, Omar wrote the story of his life, in Arabic. His autobiography was recently acquired by the Library of Congress. Given that a significant number of Africans enslaved in the US came from Islamic West Africa, neither being literate nor Muslim was unusual. We know Omar’s story because he wrote his own account, and it has survived to be studied, shared, and preserved.
Drawing on this autobiography, Omar the opera gives us a visceral sense of what it must have been like for Omar, a man, to be hurled into a world where he couldn’t speak or understand the language, a world where others attempted to strip him of his humanity, a world where he was surrounded by violence simply for being himself, an African in America. What must it have been like to be forbidden to read and write? Forbidden to teach one’s children this magical skill that opens worlds of knowledge and experience, a skill that, for Muslims, brings one closer to God?
This kind of violation of one’s person, in addition to the physical and psychic horrors routinely meted out to the enslaved is not something we are accustomed to thinking about, or to feeling so viscerally. And this is what the opera Omar asks of us: feel it, get it, believe it.
The opera Omar invites us to reflect upon our national collective trauma. The perspective provided by Omar ibn Said gives us a lens through which to view our shared history, a history that we as a country have so resolutely refused to confront. Yes, Omar was extraordinary, but not because he could read and write. We must unlearn and relearn who the people that labored to build the foundations of the US really were. We must ask different questions; for example, is the practice and study of Islam really new to US or is it deeply embedded in our early history? Does learning about Omar ibn Said make us curious about the stories we were taught, how they may not be the whole picture, or even the real story at all?
Through the deeply resonant medium of music and song, Omar shows us we have much more to uncover, unlearn, and understand about our history and about the rich cultures, religious traditions, sensibilities and histories that each person carries inside of them. Omar is a celebration of these riches, a lamentation for the horrors of slavery and its ongoing legacy, and a notice that we have much to do in the way of repair. In the tradition of all good art, Omar helps us, to repeat Abels’ words, “know more about who we are now.”
Jennifer J Yanco, PhD, is a Visiting Researcher at the Boston University African Studies Center and a self-proclaimed opera-lover.
[1] See Chimamanda Adichie’s talk about the single story. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
[2] See Byron Rushing’s illuminating account of slavery and emancipation in Massachusetts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKoKQ1nF2Ow
[3] Baron Jacques-Francois Roger, who served as Governor of Senegal from 1821-1827, noted that literacy was much more widespread in this area of Africa than it was in Europe at the time. Was the US so different?