[April isn’t
just National Poetry Month; it’s also National
Arab American Heritage Month. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the
many compelling Arab American stories & figures I feature in the final
chapter of my book
We the People, leading up to a
weekend post on contemporary Arab American writers!]
On how a
striking life and book help us engage with a few key historical questions.
As every entry
in this series has illustrated, for any 19th century (or earlier) historical
figure to be remembered in the 21st century, they must have led a
pretty interesting life. But even among this collection of interesting lives
and stories, that of Muhammed
Ali Said (1836-1882) is especially striking. Born into the family of a
renowned general in the Central
African Kanem-Bornu Empire (part of modern-day Chad and Nigeria), as a
result of whose military exploits he learned Arabic and converted to Islam
while still a teenager, Said was subsequently taken captive and enslaved, first
to a Turkish diplomat and then to two Russian princes, Alexander Sergeyevich
Menshikov and Nicholas Vassilievitch Troubezkoy. While enslaved to the latter Said
was baptized as a Christian and given the new name of Nicholas, and was
then granted his freedom, which he used to travel to the Americas in the late
1850s. He spent time in the Caribbean, New York, and Ottawa, before settling in
Detroit where he worked as a teacher in a school for free African American
students. Shortly thereafter the Civil War began, and in 1863 Said volunteered
for the 55th
Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first African American regiments. After
that wartime service he moved to Alabama, possibly with a new wife (more on
such ambiguities in a moment), and went on to write and publish The Autobiography of
Nicholas Said, a Native of Bournou, Eastern Soudan, Central Africa
(1873).
Those details
and experiences would be complicated enough if they were all straightforward
and agreed-upon. But that’s very much not the case, and the reason, ironically enough,
is Said’s own version of them in his autobiography. To cite the most prominent
confusion: in the book Said does not refer at all to his Civil War service,
possibly because he was writing while living in the Deep South during
Reconstruction and did not want that side to his past known by the white (and
especially the ex-Confederate) members of his new community; we know today of
that service from such primary sources as an 1867
Atlantic Monthly article and a
surviving photograph
of Said in his 55th Infantry uniform. The 1867 article also
refers to Said’s marriage to an American woman, with whom he had journeyed to
that new Alabama home; but that significant detail is likewise not included in
the autobiography (perhaps due to similar fears of communal reprisals), and
thus that side of his life remains largely ambiguous and uncertain. Besides
producing such gaps or ambiguities, this element of Said’s story opens up important
questions about how we read and analyze personal narratives, about their
relationship to the lives and identities on which they focus, and about them as
fraught (but also in many cases crucial) historical
documents and primary sources.
As with the story
of Olaudah Equiano on which that last hyperlinked post focuses, however, both Said’s
autobiography and his life open up other important historical questions
regardless of the precise details of particular events. Like Equiano, Said’s life
and identity were strikingly multi-layered, featuring significant shifts in
culture, place, language, religion, and race among other elements; both men
thus help us think about what remains continuous across such stages, but also
about the fragility (or at least the breadth and variability) of categories
like Muslim American, Arab American, African American, enslaved person, and so
on. But despite those individual complexities and layers, I’m also struck by
how much Said’s American experiences do link him to the broader community of
mid-19th century African Americans. After all, each of the three
communities I referenced above—the school for free children in Detroit, the 55th
Massachusetts, and Alabama during Reconstruction—represents a hugely telling
and important space and stage for African Americans, and one with which a newly
arrived immigrant like Said could and apparently did connect. The relationships
between individual American identities and broad cultural and social
communities and categories are another fraught and vital question, and another
one Nicholas Said helps us engage and analyze.
Last Arab
American story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Arab American figures or stories you’d highlight?
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