He ended up in North Carolina, where he was enslaved for over 50 years and died in that condition. He was a Quranic scholar, a very learned man, and was sold into slavery. 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. Giddens: Well, with Omar, we don’t have a lot of specifics in terms of his life. Yes.” And then immediately, I was trying not to freak out about having said yes to this project, but was very excited about it.Īrun 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? Shortly thereafter, they asked me if I wanted to write an opera about him. 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. Rhiannon Giddens: I was born and raised in North Carolina and had never heard of him, which was astonishing. What follows is a lightly edited transcript. 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. She’s a MacArthur 'Genius' and a student of history and music. Rhiannon Giddens co-wrote the opera and wrote the libretto, basing it in part on Omar bin Said’s own writings.

He lived the remainder of his life as a slave in North Carolina, where he continued to write in Arabic.

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.

Well of Souls by Rhiannon Giddens