Coercions, Conversions, Subversions: The Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives of Omar ibn Said, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, and Nicholas Said

Omar ibn Said, Mohommah Baquaqua, and Nicholas Said, three remarkable African Muslims entangled in slavery, “converted” to Christianity under duress. This article argues that their life stories reveal the interplay of coercion and subversion in each life, becoming narratives of cultural syncretism that transcend geographical, theological, and linguistic divides and complicate traditional understandings of the slave narrative.

Most students and scholars of American literature have read at least excerpts from the well-known slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Those more familiar with the genre will also know the works of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, William Wells Brown, and Sojourner Truth. But few recognize the names of Omar ibn Said, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, or Nicholas Said, and fewer still have read their narratives of enslavement and survival in Africa and the Americas.¹ Nevertheless, as Werner Sollors argues, “Omar [and other multilingual writers like him] were as American as was Frederick Douglass” (5). Born in Africa, each of these remarkable men escaped from brutal slave masters, “converted” (actually or ostensibly) from Islam to Christianity, and managed to leave a written record of his life. Moreover, their life writing reveal various forms of resistance to hegemonic power— some more subtle than others.² These often-neglected narratives offer insights into the truly multiethnic, transnational nature of American literature; the lives they describe are those of educated travelers and active agents in their own destinies who rely on various tactics to overcome adversity.

Nevertheless, these accounts continue to receive little attention from students and scholars, partly because they do not conform to the conventional forms and themes of nineteenth-century slave narratives, which continue to be perpetuated in critical literature about the slave narrative genre.³ All three narratives belie the archetypal trajectory from southern bondage to northern freedom as well as the triumphalist tone of many religiously themed narratives, whose authors’ Christian faith is often depicted as the source of their strength and resilience—and sometimes as the proximate cause of their freedom.⁴ By presenting African Americans who were principally educated in Africa and whose literacy does not result from exposure to Europeans or white Americans, they challenge notions of the purportedly enlightening influence of Western civilization. These texts reveal the complexity of the African American experience, the connectedness of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, as well as the mobility and relationality of culture(s). However, since they were first recorded, the stories of men such as Omar, Baquaqua, and Said⁵ have always been in danger of appropriation and co-option by dubious friends, eager to claim them as Christians, as Muslims, or as “contented slaves.”

The few scholars who have examined the lives of these men generally categorize them as “African Muslims” and lament the lack of critical attention that their narratives have garnered as such. For example, Allan D. Austin observes that “African Muslims . . . [have] been almost completely neglected by modern America’s eagle-eyed historians and storytellers” (Transatlantic 3). As early as 1857, American anthropologist and diplomat William Brown Hodgson predicted that “the pride of history may not descend to notice the fact that a feeble wave of [Muslim] letters reached these shores, from Africa, bearing with it some humble captives, and then sunk in the moving sands” (qtd. in Al-Ahari 7). But thanks to a handful of engaged scholars, that “feeble wave” never sank completely into historical obscurity, and some of its “letters” have endured.⁶ This preservation is especially fortunate given the United States’ continuing engagements in Africa and the Middle East as well as the contemporary American rhetoric of “global war” against enemies both foreign and domestic. Indeed, the stories of these early “African [American] Muslims” complicate master narratives of American origins and provoke meaningful questions about cultural roots, religious beliefs, and national identities.

Although Omar, Baquaqua, and Said were all at one point in their lives instructed in the Muslim faith—either willingly or unwillingly—it may be as reductive to call their stories “African Muslim narratives” as it would be...