In I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America, Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst set out to rectify misinformation about Omar ibn Said and the Arabic texts he produced, doing so through a systematic analysis of the texts themselves and contextualizing those texts with other secondary sources from Omar’s lifetime. Omar was a Muslim scholar captured around age twenty-seven in what is now Senegal and enslaved in the Carolinas for more than fifty years until he died in 1863. The title comes from a line in Omar’s own “Autobiography”—kept in scare quotes because it does not fit the definition of what scholars consider an autobiography (41). Lo and Ernst revisit that line repeatedly, arguing that Omar’s writings have hitherto been “unreadable” (6), both because of mistranslations and distortions and because, at the time he wrote them, they could neither reach the Arabic audience of Omar’s Muslim “brothers” nor be understood by the white slaveholding society in which he lived. Thus, they consider Omar’s “Autobiography” “an impossible text” (7). The book accompanies their online edition of the Arabic texts, which includes the Arabic, Lo and Ernst’s translation into English, and useful explanatory footnotes.
Despite Omar’s claim that he could not write his life, Lo and Ernst show that one reason he deserves study is that he is “the only enslaved person in North America known to have written a first-person autobiographical account in a non-European language” (8) and because, unlike the “freedom narratives” of other formerly enslaved Africans published during Omar’s lifetime, his “Autobiography” focuses “unrelentingly” on his enslavement (40). However, because Omar’s “Autobiography” summarizes his life rather than offering narratives, Lo and Ernst use chapter 1 to draw on existing scholarship to provide a historical overview of 18th-century Senegambia that gives us a sense of what Omar’s early years and Islamic education in West Africa must have been like.
Beginning with chapter 2, each chapter ends with Lo and Ernst’s English translation of the texts analyzed in that chapter. Chapter 2 focuses on the “Autobiography” as a document, beginning with the irony that Omar’s enslaver, James Owen, urged him to write it even while Owen’s brother John, the governor of North Carolina, increased penalties for those who taught enslaved people to read and write, or otherwise encouraged their literacy (39). Lo and Ernst describe the text’s circulation and (mis)translation among amateur scholars and Orientalists, detailing their errors, omissions, and misplaced critiques of Omar’s Arabic proficiency. The fact that many of these translations took decades to publish adds to the evidence that Omar's work had “no meaningful audience” (43). They also critique the many narratives circulated about Omar in the press during his lifetime, which described his relationship with his enslavers as familial, labeled him an “Arabian Prince” (111), and claimed he willingly remaining enslaved—claims that Lo and Ernst demonstrate were absurd.
Chapter 3 takes up questions of genre, function, and reception of Omar’s writing. While enslavers were amazed by Omar’s literacy, they assumed he could only read the Qur’an. The scholars and Orientalists who examined his work thought his Arabic, while interesting because of its exoticism, was “bad,” even “unintelligible” (73). Lo and Ernst show otherwise, offering ample evidence that Omar frequently quoted other Islamic sources from memory, which not only speaks to his level of education but also offers insights into the types of sources African Muslims scholars were reading in the early 19th century. Even in texts ostensibly written as letters to various enslavers, Lo and Ernst argue that much of Omar’s work should be read as “sermon rhetoric” (74), following a “preaching model” (87), and others as talismans, using words from the Qur’an and calligraphy. Omar quotes not only the Qur’an but also grammarians, theologians, poets, mystics, and hadith (stories of the Prophet Muhammad).
In chapter 4, Lo and Ernst refute claims that Omar converted to Christianity. Lo and Ernst examine the copy of the Arabic Bible given to Omar, which includes comments and quotations he wrote in it that indicated his ongoing relationship with and mastery of Islamic texts. They suggest that when he wrote out Biblical texts in Arabic, it was at the behest of enslavers, not out of an adherence to Christianity.
Chapter 5 returns to the issue of how so-called experts, including both “academic amateurs” and “missionary scholars” (140), failed to understand Omar’s writings and whose misunderstandings upheld slavery. The authors show how Omar’s ability to write in Arabic and even his photographic images were used to circulate a fictionalized and romanticized narrative of him as royalty, which in turn enabled white supremacist narratives to claim that (non-royal) Africans could not be highly educated.
Lo and Ernst end the book by reiterating their claim that Omar was misunderstood and can only be properly understood by resituating his writings in relation to the African Muslim culture from which he was stolen. They argue for seeing Omar’s work as an early example of American literature in Arabic and “Africa as a source of American culture” (175). I, for one, am convinced.
I Cannot Write My Life, alongside the accompanying online repository that Lo and Ernst created, are crucial sources for studying Islam in both West Africa and the United States, as well as for history, American studies, and Africana studies. With both primary sources (in translation) and deep, contextualized analysis of those sources, the book will be a valuable addition to undergraduate and graduate courses in these various disciplines. In my own course on Islam in African and the African Diaspora, it will provide a useful bridge between the African and diasporic material; I look forward to reading it again with students.
K.D. Thompson is the Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities and a professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Katrina Thompson
Date Of Review:
June 27, 2024
