by Mike Telin
“What makes that document so remarkable is that it is a window into a world that we don’t talk about and that we don’t teach about, and it’s just miraculous that it survived,” composer Rhiannon Giddens told Martha Teichner during a Spoleto Conversations interview. “We have so few of these documents and each one holds multitudes in it. We have so little and it’s a miracle that we have it at all.”
The document that Giddens is referring to is the 1831 autobiography of Omar ibn Said, the only known autobiography written by an enslaved person during their enslavement, and the only document written in Arabic by an enslaved person.
During that same interview, composer Michael Ables noted that the document was written at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write. “And why is that? Because they knew that knowledge is power, and Omar’s power to speak to us today is expressed through the fact that he was educated.”