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Chatham Life & Style is a digital magazine based in central North Carolina. Since 2018, we have sought to amplify queer, neurodivergent, BIPOC, and women writers as they speak to and about our community through music & theatre reviews and events coverage. If you are interested in writing with us, please reach out.
By Naveed Moeed, staff writer
Chapel Hill, NC
Omar, a new opera by Rhiannon Giddens & Michael Abels, runs February 25 & 26 at Memorial Hall on UNC Campus. Learn more about the show and get tickets HERE.
This is how I need Muslim history celebrated.
In the years that I have been in North Carolina, probably the questions I am asked the most are around Islam and my Muslim heritage. There are themes which begin to present themselves in these questions. “Why do Muslims come to this country?” “How do they feel about living in the predominantly white Christian south?”
I know why I am asked these questions: there is next-to-zero documented history about the Muslim experience in America. Definitely not when you compare it to the mountain of riches we have of white history, as celebrated in paintings and song and translated into a multitude of languages. And the Black Muslim experience? Short of always trotting out Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, there is almost nothing mentioned of the fact that 30% of the enslaved Africans forced to the United States were Muslim. Most of them ended up in the South.
The Southern Futures program at UNC seeks to redress this by helping us reimagine the American South. Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts engages artists and community partners in restorative justice and co-creation by producing new works, collaborations, and research on social justice and racial equity. Rhiannon Giddens -- Grammy and MacArthur Award-winning founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops -- was provided a three-year research residency at the core of the Southern Futures at CPA initiative, beginning in spring 2022.
In 2021 the Spoleto Festival and Carolina Performing Arts co-commissioned a news opera: Omar. Composed by Giddens and Michael Abels, Omar is based on the life and 1831 autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a Muslim African scholar enslaved in the Carolinas. His story tells of his enslavement from Senegal, the horrors he suffered in Charleston, his subsequent escape to Fayetteville, and his eventual servitude on the Owen plantation.
After a sensational debut at the Spoleto Festival and along with a plethora of community events, Omar will come home this weekend to where his original manuscript resides -- UNC Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. As part of the build-up to this week, Chatham Life & Style were given the chance to interview both co-composer Michael Abels and Carolina Performing Arts’s Southern Futures archivist Taylor A. Barrett:
CHATHAM LIFE & STYLE: Taylor, what is CPA’s mission in bringing works like Omar?
TAYLOR A. BARRETT: We’ve been invited to reconsider the assumed past of the south and poke holes in it. [Look at] whose stories are included, whose stories have been left out, by accident or on purpose. [We get to] really interrogate the past, and see what kind of fuller pictures we can bring to it. And then carry those lessons forward to work for a more equitable representative idea of what the South means.
Carolina Performing Arts is using its charge to see what the arts can lend to this kind of work, to see what kind of voices and stories can be uncovered. Especially by lifting up the local networks that happen in the artistic process and uncovering the stories behind them. Performances are important but they are not the only piece in this artistic network.
CLS: What makes archival history so compelling to the arts?
BARRETT: There is an up-close-and-personal material connection to history that archives provide. The thrill of holding something that someone else has made, or also held is an intimate way to understand history. A primary source document, regardless of its era, is an unfiltered experience. You get to have whatever connection that organically comes up between you and this thing that was made by someone else.
CLS: And what makes this particular material compelling enough to produce an opera?
BARRETT: It is part miracle and part reflection on the systems and structures and values that our society has. History that is generated by white people is more accessible because in a country where we live under white supremacy, those are the things that are deemed valuable by society. The reason why we don’t have many first hand accounts from non-white men in our country is because those people did not have access to getting their stories documented.
[On the other hand] we have many accounts of Black enslaved people in the US but they’re written by white people so it’s not the same. [There are] hundreds of other Omars, if not thousands, and their stories were never documented. In one respect Omar’s story is very special. It is highly unique and, on the other hand, there are so many other people like him that we’ll never know about. There’s a real sorrow in that.
CLS: Describe the “chain-of-luck” which led to Omar ibn Said’s story being preserved.
BARRETT: From what we know about Omar’s story, at the time of his life he was considered unique. His fate made it so that he was enslaved by a family who recognized his literacy. It was also that he was enslaved by a prominent family and his materials, images of him, et cetera, stayed within prominent families. Those larger collections made their way into various archives and special collections and libraries across the country. Part of it does reflect whose stories get preserved by our nation’s archives and libraries.
CLS: Michael, how did you come to be involved in the project as its composer?
MICHAEL ABELS: It was CPA’s and Spoleto Festival’s idea that Omar could be the subject of an opera. And their idea was that it would be Rhiannon [Giddens] because she is from the area. [Jordan Peele’s] Get Out, which I did the score to, led to a mutual friend who introduced me to Rhiannon. She emailed me and invited me to her show. Anyone who hears Rhianonn instantly becomes a fan of hers. The same happened to me and when I went backstage she asked “do you want to write an opera together?” and I of course said yes.
CLS: What attracted you to Omar’s story?
ABELS: It is an American story that is not told very often. It’s also not told very often from a first person point of view…it always seems like someone else's story. But an enslaved person’s story is, in fact, an American story. And therefore stories of the enslaved -- and people who are descended from the enslaved -- need to be told in the first person so that we can understand them as being our story.
CLS: There are Senegalese influences in the music of Omar. Can you tell us more about that?
ABELS: There are phrases in Omar that are meant to be reminiscent of the kora [a lute-like 21-stringed West African instrument], but made the conscious decision not to use any non-western instruments. There’s no kora. And there’s no banjo (even though that is Rhiannon’s primary instrument). Even though we chose a traditional orchestral palate, the influences of the music are very diverse. We had a great respect for wanting to tell this story in a way that is authentic and believable and yet we’re also writing an opera, which is a traditionally western form.
Because Omar is everyone's story, there was a huge opportunity to incorporate and make reference to all of the American genres of music that have been invented or heavily influenced by People of Color through the centuries. There’s a reference to the first transcribed melody of an enslaved person in America, called “Koromanti,” transcribed in the Caribbean in the 1770s.
CLS: So in the course of Omar we’re bound to hear a variety of music?
ABELS: [We] ground the musical identity of the opera in the places from which we came and have it grow out from there. There’s some early jazz, some Gershwin-y type harmonies as kind of a nod to Porgy and Bess. There are some very dissonant moments…there are
songs of the enslaved that we begin, take them and do another side to them. Music that sounds happy came from a way to deal with a dark place, so there are a couple of spirituals where the happiness and the sadness are exposed. With all these styles influences it was important to be influenced, but come from our own artistic voice -- and not to appropriate things.
CLS: When did the writing really start to take off?
ABELS: The best music comes from beyond you…you are just transcribing music that the universe has presented for you. If you choose to listen, you should write this down. So there was a point at which the music no longer felt personal because it was never personal to begin with.
CLS: How does the format of opera help tell this story?
ABELS: [Omar’s autobiography is] not a gripping novel, it couldn’t be, it’s just reserved in its language. But to think that this man lived with the hardships that his life presented is inspiring, moving, and profoundly sad. There’s the horror of what occurred to him, but then there’s also the possibility that, even in spite of that, he can be someone who inspires us and we learn from, and that’s the message of the opera. Through Omar’s words and through his literacy -- things that were taken from him while he was enslaved -- it is through those gifts and talents that he is remembered and respected.
Omar offers the possibility of transcendence -- the possibility of seeing him transcend his circumstances through the power of his own gifts and talents. If this man lived and survived all that he did -- what’s possible in each of our own lives?
During our time with Barrett, Abels, and the rest of the Omar team, we learned much about the history of the project and its subject.
Taylor Barrett has been documenting rehearsals and conducting interviews during the final stages of Omar preparation at CPA. This material will be available on the forthcoming Southern Futures Digital Platform and Archive, scheduled for release this summer -- to help continue conversations around the artistic processes of Southern Futures artists. It will feature multimedia documentation of rehearsals, performances, residencies and events, reflections and stories from local community members, scholarly writing, and relevant curated digital material from UNC Library Special Collections: rich contextual information for future artists-in-residence.
Souther Futures is bringing Omar and his story into triangle area classrooms. In a half-dozen high school and community college classrooms, they presented a teaching workshop in collaboration with Latesha Smith (formerly of Spoleto), Wilson Library’s Sarah Carrier, and Christie Norris of Carolina K-12.
In the workshop, teachers learned how to implement Smith’s Omar Workbook in their classrooms and how to incorporate Wilson Library’s primary source documents. Students and their instructors were given a sneak-peek during an open rehearsal of the opera where they could experience a North Carolina-specific scene and participate in a Q&A with Rhiannon and other performers. Omar’s story is a North Carolina story, and it's vital that it is shared with NC audiences of all ages.
There are two opportunities to experience Omar for yourself this weekend in Chapel Hill. You can purchase tickets HERE.
Naveed Moeed (he/him), staff writer, is a British-born Pakistani and makes his home in North Carolina as an IT Business Development professional. An actor, producer, and photographer, Naveed volunteers with the American Friends Service Committee on issues of social justice and peacebuilding and serves on the Board of Directors for Raleigh-based Bare Theatre. Naveed reports on theatre and musical performance and is a photographer at www.fractalsedge.net. He began writing for Chatham Life & Style in 2019 and is an active member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
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