Rhiannon Giddens tells the story of Omar ibn Said in her first opera

The opera “OMAR,” which gets its New England debut with the Boston Lyric Opera on Thursday night, tells the true story of Omar ibn Said, an Islamic scholar in the 19th century who was captured, enslaved and shipped to America. He lived the remainder of his life as a slave in North Carolina, where he continued to write in Arabic.

Rhiannon Giddens co-wrote the opera and wrote the libretto, basing it in part on Omar bin Said’s own writings. She’s a MacArthur "Genius" and a student of history and music. She’s done her share of research into slave narratives from the 19th century, but in an interview with GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath, she found it strange that she only learned about Omar ibn Said when she got the commission for the opera. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Rhiannon Giddens: I was born and raised in North Carolina and had never heard of him, which was astonishing. Not surprising, and inevitably angering. I was approached by the folks who were running the Spoleto USA Festival, Nicole and Nigel, and they said, “Have you ever heard of Omar ibn Said?” And I was like, “Who?” Then they told me the story, and I couldn’t believe it.

Shortly thereafter, they asked me if I wanted to write an opera about him. I was like, “Wow. Yes.” And then immediately, I was trying not to freak out about having said yes to this project, but was very excited about it.

Arun Rath: In terms of Said, what do we know in terms of his history? What did you have to work with when you started digging into it?

Giddens: Well, with Omar, we don’t have a lot of specifics in terms of his life. You know, when you go to the autobiography, we’re talking about this man who, at the age of 37, was taken away from his homeland in Senegal. He was a Quranic scholar, a very learned man, and was sold into slavery. He ended up in North Carolina, where he was enslaved for over 50 years and died in that condition. He never saw freedom.

He left behind this document, this remarkable document, an autobiography that was written in Arabic. It’s the only thing—the only document of that kind that we have in existence. It’s fairly slim. People are always surprised by how short it is. You have to consider that this was over 20 years after he had been in the United States, and he’s using a language that he learned to read the Quran. That’s how you read the Quran; you have to do it in Arabic, so it’s not really a language that he had. He had learned to write long essays about his life, so he had to make it work. The details are few.

We know that he was, as I said, stolen away from his homeland, that he was a part of the Middle Passage and that he was sold first in Charleston, where he ran away. He escaped his enslaver; he self-emancipated, we like to say, from his enslaver in Charleston and made it up to Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is quite a trek if you know anything about the Carolinas’ geography. He was then taken in by the family that he ended up living with for the rest of his life, where he was allowed to be inside and to write. He was kind of paraded around a little bit as this sort of learned slave man. So it’s not a lot of details that we know about his life.

Rath: So you’re left reading between the lines to figure out how this incredible mind lived through this experience without going mad.

Giddens: Basically. But luckily, I think one of the reasons why this worked and why I was able to—I wrote the libretto, so it was my task to figure out what is the story. How do I find the story here?

Most of my career has been finding fragments and building art from then. You take a slave narrative or you take a line in a book. I’ll see a paragraph or a line in a historical book about slavery times, and I’ll make a song out of it. So I’ve been doing this. I mean, a three-minute song and a two-and-a-half-hour opera are two different things. But in essence, it’s the same; you take the scraps, you take the ephemera, you take the bits and pieces that you have, and you create this artistic response to it, which is basically what “OMAR” is.

I took the bare bones of his autobiography, and I focused on what we don’t know a lot about. You know, how was his family life? What exactly happened? What was his daily life like in the Americas? We don’t know the details from his hand, but I know a lot about the time period.

So what I try to do is fill in the blanks with what I know from my research in terms of the movements in his life. I could write about the Middle Passage because I’ve read a lot about the Middle Passage. His experience in the Middle Passage is probably like thousands of others, so you fill in those blanks where you can.

Then, I represented the specificity of his life in the Quranic quotes that he chose to quote and also, in a smaller part, the Bible. Really for me, the story was how he maintained that connection to his religion while being expected to convert to Christianity by the people who have his life in their hands. How does he maintain his sanity? How does he maintain his intellect? How does he do that?

It’s not about the movement of his body. It’s about the movement of his mind. That’s where I could get specifics, because he was very clear about what he quoted and when he quoted it. So that became the real story for me.

Rath: Was there a moment or a part in this work where when you were doing it, you felt that this was it—you’ve fleshed out this amazing human?

Giddens: I had to be very spiritual, frankly, about this project. This is not something where I sat down and went, “Okay: here’s the dramatic arc, and here’s Act I, Scene I,” and sketch it all out with the drama and everything. I didn’t do that because I couldn’t.

This also was my first opera, and I was operating a lot from instinct, but I kind of let scenes write themselves and suggest themselves. For me, it was Psalm 23, I think, which is in Act II, where he has been given a Bible in Arabic, which really happened. I’ve held it, actually, in my hands at Davidson College. It’s really remarkable.

He was given the Bible by his enslaver with the expectation of converting to Christianity. He’s looking at this Bible, and he starts to read Psalm 23, and then he starts to contemplate his whole existence. How did he get here? Why? What is the plan for him? What does Allah have in store for him? How is he trying to figure this out?

It’s really his contemplative moment, and that, for me, was one of the moments where I was like, “I think I’ve found something here.” It really means a lot to me that I’ve kind of found this moment for “OMAR” that rings true to me anyway, as the creator.