OMAR IBN SAID: THE MAN AND HIS STORY

The opera Omar was inspired by an autobiography written by Omar Ibn Said.

Omar was an enslaved man who lived in Futa Toro in what is now Senegal. Like many “first-generation” enslaved peoples who were trafficked to the United States, Omar was literate prior to his captivity. However, literacy was often forbidden for those who were enslaved as a means of control and dehumanization. Omar’s narrative is thus distinctive from those by other authors with similar experiences of enslavement, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, since they learned to read and write after emancipation. While in West Africa, Ibn Said had been a teacher and prolific scholar. He read the Qur’an and studied for twentyfive years first under his brother, Sheikh Muhammad Said, then from two other Muslim sheikhs.

In 1807, at thirty-seven years old, Ibn Said was enslaved by a raiding army and trafficked to Charleston, South Carolina, where he spent the next five decades of his life on plantations. He was first sold to a harsh and unsympathetic plantation owner named Johnson. In 1810, he escaped and walked north to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was recaptured and jailed for sixteen days. In jail, Ibn Said wrote in Arabic on the walls. John Owen’s daughter noticed the unfamiliar writing and brought him to the attention of her father, who purchased Ibn Said for his brother, General James Owen of Bladen County.

While the property of General James Owen, Omar wrote his autobiography, Life, in formal Arabic in a West African (Maghribi) script in 1831. The autobiography itself is short, consisting only of fifteen handwritten pages, and it is preceded by a chapter from the Qur’an, Surat al-Mulk, which centers God’s absolute power through ownership. Unlike other contemporaneous slave narratives, the document was not edited by Ibn Said’s owner; it is likely that Ibn Said’s ability to write in Arabic lent him a bit of cultural glamor and admiration from his master. As the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States, Ibn Said’s Life is a crucial document of and testament to not only Omar’s life in captivity but also to the broader presence of Arabic literacy and Muslim culture in early America.

Omar remained enslaved until his death around 1864, but his story lives on in Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ operatic retelling. The world premiere of Omar was on May 27, 2022, at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. It was co-produced by a total of six opera companies, and it traveled to Los Angeles, California for the West Coast premiere by LA Opera in October 2022. The Carolina Performing Arts produced it in February 2023 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Boston Lyric Opera’s Northeast premiere is in May 2023 and San Francisco Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago will produce it within the next two years.