Rhiannon Giddens opera and new book demand that NC take fresh look at this slavery story

The image projected onto the curtain as audience members file into UNC’s Memorial Hall for the staging of the opera “Omar” is so faint at first it looks like shadows made by folds in the fabric.

But as the lights dim, eyes, a nose and a mouth emerge, until the aged face of the once-enslaved man is clearly seen.

Omar ibn Said’s face — and his story — are emerging larger and more clearly on a grand scale at the moment with the North Carolina premiere this weekend of the opera co-written by Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. With a book by two North Carolina scholars to be released this fall. And with the development of collections of his writings in archives from Wilson Library at UNC to the Library of Congress.

Omar has long been used to propagate the Lost Cause myth of the happy slave whose life was made better by his forced relocation to America and the captivity of a benevolent master. In his lifetime, during which he was never freed from slavery, his owners made him into a celebrity by adding an almost irresistible layer to the myth, claiming that Omar, who had studied Islam in West Africa before his captivity, had converted to Christianity and could write Bible verses in Arabic.

In fact, Carl W. Ernst, a UNC religious studies professor and co-author of the upcoming book about Omar, says Omar’s preserved writings show that he longed to return to Africa and that he remained a devout Muslim throughout his life.

“His story just demands that people rethink some things,” Ernst said. “That’s the power of it.”

Opera in Chapel Hill

More than 2,800 people will get a chance to hear the musical version of Omar’s story at sold-out shows in Memorial Hall this weekend.

The opera was first staged last year at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., an annual event held less than a mile from where Omar was first sold into slavery at the age of 37 after being captured during fighting in his homeland, modern-day Senegal, around 1807. It was Spoleto, along with Carolina Performing Arts, that commissioned Giddens to write the opera.

Three years after his enslavement, Omar escaped and made his way to North Carolina, where he was captured again and jailed in Fayetteville.

He was held there for 16 days, during which he used a piece of charcoal to write on the walls in Arabic. His literacy — and the strange characters he etched — made him a curiosity to the local sheriff, who sold Omar to James Owen, a Bladen County planter, state legislator and older brother to a future North Carolina governor, John Owen.

During his captivity, Omar — called Moro by the Owens — appears not to have been forced to do field labor, Ernst said. Instead, he was given a Bible written in Arabic and made to write out verses from it which were shown to visitors and bestowed as gifts to people the Owens wanted to impress.

“It was sort of a parlor trick,” said Ernst, who along with his co-author, Mbaye Lo, a Duke University professor, is an expert in Arabic.

‘I cannot write my life’

Eventually, James Owen told Omar to write an autobiography, which he did, creating what is believed to be the only autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved Muslim person in America while they were still in captivity.

The document, about 15 pages, begins with a Muslim blessing and with Omar’s apology to whomever might be able to read it. He says he has forgotten much of his native language and says his skills with the written word have diminished.

“I cannot write my life,” he says. That line became the title for the book by Ernst and Lo.

The story it tells, with a few embellishments, became “Omar,” the opera, which opens to a scene in Africa with Omar and others singing praises to Allah before warriors rush in, killing some and taking others to an overcrowded slave ship for the journey to Charleston.

Singer-songwriter Giddens grew up in North Carolina, studied opera in college and has said she was powerfully drawn to Omar’s story.

Giddens has been in Chapel Hill this week and is expected to attend the performances on Saturday and Sunday.

Ernst, who will see the show for the first time Saturday, said Omar’s story presents several realities for modern-day audiences to ponder, including that by having enslaved Muslim people who could read and write in Arabic, America incorporated both Islam and Arabic into its fiber from the country’s beginnings.

In a nation that some people regard as destined to be predominantly white and Christian, Ernst said, “That’s not something that has really been grappled with.”