THE GENRE OF THE SLAVE NARRATIVE

“I

cannot write my

life.”

These mysterious words, which appear at the outset of Omar Ibn Said’s 1831 autobiographical narrative, prompt us to wonder, “what does it mean to tell one’s own story?” – or, more specifically, to have access to the language, materials, and institutions that make it possible for a life story to become part of the written historical record. How did Omar come to write his Life, and what compelled him to create this sparse, elusive document? How did his autobiography come to be a text that today’s readers can access at the click of a button? But more conceptual questions also arise: is it possible for a written text to convey the horrific violence of enslavement? What kind of constraints might an enslaved writer face, and what kind of rhetorical strategies could they use to assert their own agency regardless?

As the only surviving manuscript written by an enslaved person in Arabic within the United States, The Life of Omar Ibn Said has attracted much scholarly attention. At the same time, it’s important to note that the text is part of a broader tradition of Arabiclanguage writing in the Americas. An unknown number of other African-born enslaved people wrote in Arabic during the early nineteenth century, and texts by about a dozen of them have survived: for instance, Muhammad Kaba, born in Futa Jallon (now Guinea) and enslaved in Jamaica, wrote letters to other enslaved Muslims about their shared faith; while Bilali Mohammed, born in Futa Jallon and enslaved first in the Bahamas and then in Georgia, offered written descriptions of Islamic prayer rituals and legal protocols. Omar, however, was the only one whose specifically autobiographical writings have survived to the present day. After Omar wrote his Life, parts of it were translated into English as early as Ajami.

In addition to writing in the Arabic language, many Muslims in Africa wrote in Ajami, a term which refers to the use of Arabic script to write in other languages. By using Ajami to write in their own indigenous languages, these authors created a written record of their lives and an important complement to orally transmitted knowledge. Enslaved Muslims in the Americas also used Ajami. For example, scholars recently learned that in 1838, a formerly enslaved man in Jamaica, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, used Ajami script to convey the sounds of English words in a letter to the island’s governor, in which he critiqued slavery and celebrated emancipation.

1848, and excerpts from the work circulated in print. A full translation appeared in the American Historical Review in 1925, but the original manuscript vanished until 1995, when it was found in a trunk and acquired by a research library. A digitized copy of the manuscript, acquired by the Library of Congress in 2017, can be accessed online via the Omar Ibn Said Collection When writing the opera’s libretto, Giddens and Abels based their work on a 2011 translation of the manuscript by Dr. Ala Alryyes.

Omar’s Life is also a slave narrative, a genre with its own rich literary and cultural history. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fugitive and formerly enslaved people documented their experiences in texts intended to communicate slavery’s brutality, advocate for abolition, and assert the writer’s humanity. These were acts of testimony through which African Americans, under conditions of profound oppression, contributed to their own emancipation. Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Life of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) described what he called the “horrors of a slave ship” in indelibly graphic detail.

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) 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. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) drew attention to the sexual violence experienced by enslaved women.

As politically influential and rhetorically impressive as these texts were, they were also written under numerous constraints. White editors and publishers often prefaced enslaved authors’ words with attestations that