Between Languages and Religions:
Omar ibn Said’s Voice in the Arabic Narrative and English Translations

Omar ibn Said (“Umar ibn Sayyid”)¹ is one of the enslaved people² who wrote an autobiographical narrative in nineteenth-century America, but his work tends to be marginalized in the studies on American literature and “slave narrative.”³ The marginalization possibly comes from two factors. First, the narrative is written in Arabic. As the recent publication of The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature tries to remedy the situation, Omar’s Arabic narrative and other non-English texts have been overshadowed because of the long-standing perception that the “American literary tradition” consists purely of English texts. Secondly, Omar’s narrative diverts from more eloquent accounts of slavery written by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northup, and others. Omar’s narrative does not contain vivid descriptions of brutal scenes from slavery or direct criticism of the “peculiar institution” and people living by its codes. In fact, the brief narrative repeatedly emphasizes how “good” his enslaver and his family are. This laconic and seemingly “tame” view on slavery separates Omar’s narrative from other well-known texts. Yet, the presence of his narrative requires us to review our generic understanding of narratives by enslaved people as well as American literary traditions by considering the underrepresented influence of Islamic and Arabic texts. Since Omar’s narrative responds to the surrounding Christian discourse with his Islamic teaching, I will argue that his narrative constitutes American literature in the way that has been overlooked among the scholarship. This paper thus aims to highlight that Omar’s voice, which goes through the layers of mediation by translations and discourses, enables us to revisit the trope of “merciful master” in slavery and to recognize the unique way of presenting institutional violence in the displacement and refraction of the enslaved person’s voice.

What we know about Omar ibn Said is limited by the brevity of his narrative, known as The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831). He was born in Futa Toro, a region located along the Senegal River in West Africa. Captured amid an unspecified conflict, he was sold to the United States and landed in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1807. He ran away from his enslaver but was found and put into jail for about two weeks in Fayetteville, North Carolina, until James Owen, another enslaver, bought him. Omar died in his late eighties and remained enslaved by Owen throughout his life. Omar’s autobiographical narrative in Arabic was written more than two decades after his landing in the United States, at the request of someone whom he calls “Sheikh Hunter (Hanta),” but we do not know who exactly that person is (Ibn Said 61). The short narrative was written on fifteen quarto pages and his account of slavery omits any detailed descriptions or straightforward criticism that calls for the readers’ sympathy or action.

Consequently, instead of the content or rhetorical strategies, the history of publication and surrounding discourses of The Life of Omar ibn Said have been attracting scholarly attention. Omar’s narrative had been heavily mediated by inaccurate translations and the Christian agenda during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, since the United States did not have a systemic education of Arabic language in the nineteenth century and the process of the translation was mainly driven by those involved with the American Colonization Society (Lo and Ernst, I Cannot Write My Life 144). Founded in 1817, the Society’s mission was to liberate enslaved people and send them to a new colony in modern-day Liberia, while making them Christian missionaries in the African continent. Omar’s narrative thus appears in periodicals with the emphasis on his conversion to Christianity. The Christian Advocate, for example, features Omar’s conversion in 1825, juxtaposing the account with the excerpt from William Cowper’s “Charity” (1782), where the poem praises conversion and “freedom” it brings. The Wilmington Chronicle in 1847 introduces Omar as “a worthy member of the Presbyterian church” with the account of him writing the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, whereas the North Carolina University Magazine publishes a more substantial but similar story of his conversion to Christianity in 1854. As we can see from these articles, Omar’s conversion story has been circulating through periodicals even before his autobiographical narrative was written and kept spreading until the twentieth century.⁴ All these articles also emphasize Omar’s refusal to return to Africa. If the American Colonization Society’s mission centers on making emancipated people missionaries in Africa, it may be counterintuitive to emphasize Omar’s aversion to Africa. Yet, these articles serve their purpose by establishing the public image of Omar, the converted Christian with “capability” and “intellect.” As Basima Kamel Shaheen explicates, the Society sought for “wise, literate slaves who could demonstrate their ability to adapt to and adopt Western culture in order to confirm their humanity to those who denied it” (193). These articles focus more on convincing the general audience for the cause of the Society, so they featured the intellect and “Christianity” of Omar, rather than his intention or desire regarding his return to Africa. ⁵

In response to the arbitrary narratives that have been constructing Omar as the public figure, the recent scholarship provides us with more insights into the subtle nature of Omar’s presence in the Christian discourse. Yet, these scholarly efforts contribute to multiplying Omar’s voice even further through new translations and the translators’ annotations. For example, the twentieth-century translation (which was the slight modification of the nineteenth-century version) introduces Omar’s description of his past Islamic faith as clearly distinguished from his present and emphasizes his conversion:

Before I came to the Christian country, my religion was the religion of “Mohammed, the Apostle of God—may God have mercy upon him and give him peace.” I walked to the mosque before day-break, washed my face and head and hands and feet. (Jameson 793-94; emphasis mine)

However, Ala Alryyes, in his latest translation in 2011, points out that Omar does not use the past construction to explain his Islamic faith. In Alryyes’s translation, the same passage reads as follows:

Before I came to the Christian country, my religion is the religion of Mohammad, the prophet of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. I used to walk to the mosque (masjid) before dawn, and to wash my face, head, hands, feet. (Ibn Said 67; emphasis mine).

The quoted passage continues to list Omar’s past Muslim practices, including prayers throughout the day, practicing zakat, joining jihad, and walking to Mecca and Medina. Alryyes claims that the passage sounds almost like catechizing readers (Ibn Said 68-69; Alryyes 26). Therefore, in Alryyes’s version, Omar’s alleged conversion sounds less definitive and the following passage implies the remaining importance of his Islamic practice. Similarly, scholars have been underscoring the importance of Islam in Omar’s narrative in various ways. The narrative begins with the Surat al-Mulk, a chapter from Qur’an and ends with the juxtaposition of Islamic and Christian prayers (Surat al-Fatiha and the Lord’s Prayer) without indicating the source in both cases. The narrative also uses the Qur’anic formula of invocation to address the readers, such as “O people of North Carolina. O people of South Carolina. O people of America” (69; 71) (Shaheen 195; Osman and Forbes 337). Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst aim to clarify these miscellaneous references to Islamic and Arabic texts with their newest work of translation, while dissecting each section of the narrative and claiming that Omar edited the narrative so that it ends with his experience in enslavement, rather than his conversion to Christianity (51). What these translations and scholarly works suggest is that Omar’s text defies the simple narrative of his Christian conversion, which had allegedly happened over a decade before this narrative was written. Reading his narrative as the Arabic text, English translations, and part of periodicals demands us to recognize the abundant references to Islamic faith and Arabic texts as well as the surrounding stories of conversion, all of which end up multiplying the voice of the narrative, mirroring each other in a distorted way, for contemporary readers.

The complexity of Omar’s narrative is that even contemporary translators can make different decisions that change how we perceive Omar’s voice. Although Alryyes points out the obscure verb tense in the above-quoted passage, the newest translation in the work by Lo and Ernst seems to regard it as an error to be corrected (“ . . . my religion was the religion of Muhammad, the messenger of God, may blessing and peace be upon him”) and the term “Allah” is treated as a generic word for “God” (71). The similar decision is made when Omar writes about the moment when he reads the Christian Bible with the Owens. In the Lo and Ernst version, the paragraph begins, “I am Omar, who previously loved to read the book of the Great Qur’an” (71; emphasis mine); in Alryyes’s translation, the same passage is translated as “I am Omar, I love to read the book, the Great Qur’an” (73; emphasis mine). Through the variations of translations, we can see the translators’ decisions that change not only the implications of Omar’s relationship with the Islamic faith but also the readers’ perceptions of his stories. Lo and Ernst prioritize the identification of Arabic and Islamic texts, but Alryyes’s decision to insert Arabic words as they are (Allah, masjid, zakat, etc.) invites the readers to be more conscious of Omar’s original language.

With the history of mistranslation, distortion, and rediscovery of Omar’s narrative, it may be natural that many scholars try to search for his “true self” reclaimed through the writings. Alryyes’s decisions to keep Arabic words in his English translation seems to be also related to this mission of finding Omar himself in the writing. Alryyes in his introduction calls for a deeper reading of The Life of Omar ibn Said to look for “concealed utterances that not only hide his views from potentially dangerous readers, but also test the readers, sifting them into those who can interpret the utterances and are, therefore, within Omar’s circle—his community—and those who cannot decipher them, and are outside it” (17-18). The idea of “concealed” self resonates among other scholars’ argument, as Lo and Ernst point out “resilience” through “silence, omission, and occasional allusions to his Muslim faith in his writings” (“The 1850’s Photographic Portrait” 429), while Shaheen regards concealment as Omar’s tactic not unlike a stage performer, since he “may have preserved a degree of his mental and spiritual independence precisely by taking advantage of the ambiguity surrounding him in his own lifetime” (188-189). Underlying this line of argument is that Omar’s self exists somewhere beneath or behind the narrative and the readers’ work is to discover this self or to even enter “within Omar’s circle.”

The attempt to find Omar’s voice amid the surrounding discourses and images seems significant, but it is also crucial to carefully examine what such an assumption of the “true self” can lead to. Scholars of American literature have argued that an enslaved person’s identity goes through complex displacement and distortion, as they were forced to fall between categories, the condition pointed out by Colin Dayan and Shari Goldberg respectively: enslaved people were regarded as a commodity and their personhood was materialized by law only when culpability was in question or they were “citizens” without civil rights.⁶ Goldberg thus argues that Frederick Douglass’s work shows that “the text is a permanent stranger to the body” because of the ways in which labels such as “a citizen” ceases to preserve its integrity as a defining term (63). Resonating with these observations, the scholarly focus on the narratives by enslaved people has foregrounded their power to present what is essentially unrepresentable, left unsaid, and inaccessible to the readers. If we understand narratives by enslaved people as a reminder of the unrepresentable nature of their experiences due to the violence of forcibly multiplied identities, assuming a true, accessible self to be discovered in Omar’s narrative may undermine the complexity and insidiousness of the violence the narrative is showing us in its own way.

While the scholarship of slavery in American literature informs my reading of Omar’s narrative, I also emphasize that his voice helps us to review the generic assumptions. The Life of Omar ibn Said may seem lacking in descriptions of slavery and therefore makes it challenging to find Omar’s voice or rhetorical strategies in the conventional sense, but the narrative broadens our definition of what counts as “voice” in autobiography by considering Arabic literary traditions. Omar’s brief and non-descriptive narrative falls into what Dwight Fletcher Reynolds calls “problematic texts” in the Western definition of autobiography: Arabic autobiographical texts include “brief accounts of the external events of a life and which apparently offer us little of the author’s personality” (80). As Reynolds points out, these texts enable us to reexamine the assumption that autobiography provides “inner self” based on the simplistic dichotomy of the “private” and “public” (73). Although Omar’s narrative is not mentioned in Reynolds’s research, it is crucial to consider what counts as Omar’s “voice” in the ramifications of translations and discourses that involve not only the writer himself but also the translators and scholars from the last two centuries.

My ultimate argument is that Omar’s voice emerges not as the hidden, tangible and centralized self but as the very intersections of Islam and Christianity, of Arabic and English, and intervenes with the rhetoric of slavery in its own manner. The key moment of such an intervention lies in the trope of “merciful master” in the narrative. Instead of depicting cruelty and violence in slavery, Omar’s narrative praises his enslaver’s benevolence repeatedly: “I continue in the hands of Jim Owen who does not beat me, nor calls me bad names, nor subjects me to hunger, nakedness, or hard work” (Ibn Said 79). As the narrative ends with this passage, the image of the comfortable life in enslavement could appear to be the final message. Yet, it is crucial to understand what lies at the center of Omar’s praise for Jim Owen. Before this final passage, the narrative praises the Owens’ treatment of Omar, but the reference is also accompanied by their religious faith. Speaking about Jim Owen and his brother, John, Omar writes:

They are good men for whatever they eat, I eat; and whatever they wear they give me to wear. Jim with his brother read from the Bible (Ingeel) that Allah is our Lord, our Creator, and our Owner and the restorer of our condition, health and wealth by grace and not duty. [According?] to my ability, open my heart to the right path, to the path of Jesus Christ, to a great light. (67)

In this passage, Lo and Ernst identify a fragment of the typical Islamic language in “our Lord, our Creator . . . to my ability.”⁷ This identification of the Islamic language is indicated for the readers with Alryyes’s choice of preserving the word “Allah,” like in other places, and suggests the meshing of Islamic faith in the scene of reading the Christian Bible. The passage thus shows an intriguing interaction between Omar and the Owens, as the Bible read by Jim and John Owen praises Allah, while Omar mentions opening “my heart” to Jesus Christ. The crossing references to Christian and Islamic faith continues, as the next passage is where Omar uses the ambivalent verb tense to explain his past Islamic practices of giving alms (zakat), including wheat and barley (68). Read together, these passages foreground the resonance between the Owens’ provision for Omar and Omar’s practicing zakat. In this way, when the Owens are introduced as the merciful enslavers, their action is associated with the Islamic faith, which is not necessarily the past practice as already shown in the comparison between translations.

To extend the association between the Owens and Islamic faith, the narrative repeats twice the fact that the Owens “fear Allah” (71; 77). This description gives a distinct contrast to his former, apparently more harsh, enslaver: “A weak, small, evil man called Johnson, an infidel (Kafir) who did not fear Allah at all, bought me” (63). In this short narrative, Omar characterizes two different kinds of enslavers in accordance with the Islamic faith—fearing or not fearing Allah. The criticism of enslavers through Qur’an is consistent from the beginning of the narrative, with Surat al-Mulk, also known as The Sovereignty Chapter in Qur’an. The scholars have read this chapter as criticism of slavery, which emphasizes Allah’s ownership of all human beings.⁸ In fact, the criticism does not end with the opening pages, since the narrative invites us to associate cruel enslavers with those punished as unbelievers. Surat al-Mulk begins with the praise of God as the creator of all, but at the same time, provides warning for those who do not fear God: “We have prepared the scourge of Fire for these, and the scourge of Hell for those who deny their Lord: an evil fate!”; “But those that fear their Lord although they cannot see Him shall be forgiven and richly rewarded” (Ibn Said 51; 52). Considering how the following narrative categorizes enslavers into “good” and “evil” in accordance with their fear of Allah or the lack thereof, we can find this narrative framed as the criticism of slavery through Islamic teachings: benevolent enslavers are practitioners of Islam, while cruel ones are not fearing Allah and destined to the fire in Hell.

Omar’s narrative thus contributes to the genre of enslaved people’s narratives by adding the Muslim voice that condemns the institutional vice. Even if his criticism seemingly falls short of criticizing the system itself and just focuses on cruelty of enslavers, Omar’s narrative complicates our understanding of the voice against enslavement, since the voice has to emerge out of the layers of mediation created by translations and Christian agenda. In this context, the seemingly conventional rhetoric of narratives by enslaved people, which is the humbling preface that undermines the author’s writing capability, becomes a more direct testimony of slavery’s violence. A narrative by an enslaved person usually begins with the white abolitionists’ preface that authenticates the narrative by ensuring the writer’s intellectual capacity, while the writer himself or herself provides a “disclaimer” that laments the inadequacy of the following writing, due to his/her lack of skills or resources.⁹ Omar also writes in the beginning, “I cannot write my life, I have forgotten much of my talk as well as the talk of the Maghreb. O my brothers, do not blame me” (59). Since the following narrative characterizes the United States as a “Christian” country—he was bought by “a Christian man” and sold “in Christian language”—the religion and language in his narrative are deeply connected with each other in the practice of slavery. In other words, his lament is not a rhetorical disclaimer but a testimony of the forced distance from his geographical and religious past. In this context, Alryyes’s decision to translate the Arabic word “المغرب‎” into “the Maghreb” adds an interesting effect to Omar’s rhetoric. The Arabic term itself means the western part of the Arab world, and “the talk of the Maghreb” could be translated merely as “the Arabic language,” as the Lo and Ernst version does. On the other hand, “the Maghreb” spelled with capital “M” in English indicates a region in North and North West Africa, while “maghreb” also means a prayer recited at sunset by Muslims. In Alryyes’s translation, the readers thus can see the displacement of Omar both from the native land and from the religious faith. What I emphasize here is that Alryyes’s translation not only invites the readers into the original Arabic text, as mentioned above, but also foregrounds the violence of displacement that deracinates the person’s voice, both as language and religious faith. In this sense, Omar’s powerful Muslim voice appears through not only with his Arabic texts but also with the English translation guided by the translator’s decisions.

The narrative’s importance thus lies in the way in which Omar’s voice emerges from the displacement of multiple modes. The narrative nevertheless uses Arabic as the “talk” from Omar’s past connection to the land and the religion, along with his recitation of chapters from Qur’an, whereas these “Christian” men are categorized and understood through Islamic teaching and practice. The displacement of Omar from Africa clearly indicates slavery’s violence, which extends to the arbitrary images of him due to the Christian agenda. However, his voice becomes a significant medium to understand the way in which Islam intervenes with Christianity, neither assimilated nor merged: the two religions are instead juxtaposed to understand the community created in slavery through the two religious lenses. Omar’s criticism of slavery is clear, but he does not use emotional descriptions or fiery rhetoric to do so: his religious faith guides our understanding of his experience at the intersection of the two religions. Therefore, the significance of his voice does not necessarily lie in the self “hidden” in the narrative. It is instead the frameworks that the narrative navigates through and provide a new perspective on American slavery.

In this sense, our work as readers is not necessarily finding the true voice of Omar or entering his “circle.” As Lo and Ernst emphasize, The Life of Omar ibn Said is “unreadable” not only because of mistranslations and distortions but also because of the absence of target readers: the Arabic narrative was not legible for enslavers or general audience, while it never reached his “brothers,” possibly those in Africa. Lo and Ernst suggest with their work that the narrative is best read with the information about the multiple ideologies and traditions, which help us to understand Omar’s intention. Yet, I place more emphasis on the very absence of the credible account of Omar’s “life.” By reading Omar’s Arabic text side by side with the English translations, readers are invited to experience his voice without any stable foothold, refracted through the languages and different agendas of the translators. I believe that this ever-deepening unfamiliarity and uncertainty of the voices that arise from the intersecting ideologies is the very essence of what it means to be the reader of the multiple traditions of American literature. We may never be able to identify the “true” voice of Omar ibn Said, or the author’s intention may be best set aside from our reading to avoid the limiting interpretation of intentionalism. Still, approaching his narrative should not reduce his voice completely into a simple textual presence devoid of lived and embodied experiences, especially when these experiences are encased in the violence of enslavement. The challenge of the readers is then to recognize the multiple voices surrounding this narrative as the factors that shape Omar’s lived experiences, which surface always between two religions, two languages, and multiple agendas of the translators and readers. In this sense, the narrative itself is the testimony of his experiences that are neither full conversion nor harmonious synthesis of two faiths and languages; it is “translation” in the sense that the movement from one to the other produces multiple texts that are somehow connected but the connection is not dictated by a certain rule of lexicon or syntax. As Omar’s voice appears between the languages and religions, the movement of translation hinges on the presence of the motivation, either of the author, translator, or reader. The Life of Omar ibn Said consequently invites the readers to recognize and even experience themselves this unique dynamic of shuttling between religions, languages, and agendas, whose nature can be captured only in the word “translation.”