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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris Perry. Walk around New York City today and you'll find neighborhoods and little pockets of communities that carry the legacy of the immigrants that were once confined to very specific sections of the city. Little Italy, Korea town, Little Senegal, Little Odessa. Gentrification has reduced and reshaped many of these areas but some cultural elements of many of these communities remain visible and audible to this day.

Now, that's not really the case for what was once known as Little Syria.

Omar Offendum: Little Syria was on the lower west side of Manhattan basically between Rector and Albany on Washington Street near the Battery. It's where the first Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, Arabic speaking immigrants had settled here in the United States between about 1880 till about 1940.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's rapper and poet Omar Offendum. Since 2018 he's been workshopping a show that uses music to tell the story of Little Syria. Here he is performing part of it at the Art Summit in Washington DC in 2019.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Offendum's music weaves together traditional Arabic instrumentation with more modern hip hop production.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: The result is a show about the past that feels deeply relevant today. Many of the issues at its heart, including assimilation and xenophobia, have still not been resolved a century later. Tonight through to Saturday, Offendum and his collaborators will be bringing a performance of their show Little Syria to audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After Offendum told me about the history of the neighborhood, I just had to ask him, "Why would you want to rap about that?"

Omar Offendum: That's a great question. Well, one of the things that I just have always found so fascinating about this neighborhood was that there was a collective of writers and poets and artists who formed what was essentially the first Arab American artistic collective. It was called Al-Rabita al-Qalamiyah or the Pen League.

Khalilk Gibran, a very well known writer and poet, was the president of the Pen League and there are many other well known writers and poets in the Arabic speaking world who we are all familiar with in Arabic, but who, while they had lived here in New York, are not very familiar here in New York.

I wanted to change that and took it upon myself to translate a good amount of their poetry and their short stories and develop this piece based loosely off of that, but then also transplanting my own life experience a hundred years ago into what they were seeing as immigrants here and comparing it to what I experienced growing up.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You used the word translate. Can you talk to me a little bit about the language choices about when to use English, when to use Arabic, and maybe even like if there were moments that you decided to make one choice and then you decided nope that's the wrong way? How did you make those [00:04:08] borderland language choices?

Omar Offendum: I'm actually rehearsing with my team here at BAM today and we just made one of those decisions now with the director where we decided to actually not translate one particular piece because the music and the delivery of the poetry already drove the point home well enough. The director actually does not speak Arabic, so to have his input was really helpful in that way. Other moments I felt translations were necessary, other moments where in fact the entire piece is a translation.

Really what I've tried to do with this project is paint different vignettes, pictures of what life was like back then from different vantage points from individuals, peddlers, or business owners to more general themes like food or coffee or the idea of whiteness as it relates to the Syrian community. Then also just generally, I try to let the music and the art guide what feels right. If in a particular moment it feels like Arabic is necessary to drive the point home, that's what's going to drive it home.

I will say that you don't have to speak Arabic to be able to watch, experience, and appreciate this show.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to have one more beat on this idea that the director does not speak Arabic. What have been the joys and challenges of that?

Omar Offendum: This is really like a passion project of mine that I've been working on, and cultivating, and developing for years. In fact, when I was a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow back in 2018 and 2019, I had the opportunity to work at the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor and develop this piece with my two collaborators Ronnie Malley and Thanks Joey. They're both musical collaborators of mine with roots in Syria and Palestine.

As this project has now grown and is a part of the BAM showcases for this spring, we've started to incorporate a lot more folks into the project. A lighting designer, a director, a stage manager, a production manager. It's really transitioning from this concert experience to a theatrical one, and so there's plenty of folks involved now who don't speak Arabic, who don't necessarily have the connection to this community.

What's been so humbling and so beautiful to see is that people are really joining me for this ride in earnest and are starting to understand and appreciate why I think these stories are so important. Especially now, I think while it's certainly about this historical experience that most Americans don't know much about but had happened here, it's also very much a lens to examine what's still happening today in terms of the way Syrians are treated in terms of the kinds of newspaper headlines that you read about Syrians.

Very eerie comparisons between things that you would read from the 1890s about not wanting any more Syrian refugees or immigrants here and comparing those to what we hear these days. There's a lot to unpack with this piece. Again, I think just the music is so fun and rich and the experience is so unique that I'm excited to open up this world to people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say a little bit more about that theatrical experience and the engagement of the audience and the ways that that really does. It's not a concert. It is a theatrical experience.

Omar Offendum: It's so fun for me because I'm just seeing this little idea that was like in my head years ago just unfurling into this big beautiful tapestry of an experience. We have a fashion designer who's created unique pieces for each of us to wear, a stylist who's been helping not just with the wardrobe but with the stage setting and dressing. The lighting obviously, it contributes like a huge, huge dramatic effect to the overall experience.

Even the moments in the beats in between songs, the silences or the motions and the blocking and all of that, very theatrical and very much a result of the process of this-- what I would consider like a workshop experience here at BAM. This is just the first iteration of what I believe is going to be something bigger and more elaborate and hopefully more exciting as the years go by. For now, I feel like every part of the process has an important role to play and I'm enjoying it all each step of the way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You talked a bit about the connection between the historical narrative that you're giving and a reflection on both your personal biography and this current moment. What do you hope audiences are leaving with substantively at the end of their evening with you?

Omar Offendum: I'm hoping audiences leave with a deeper understanding of not only what it means to be Syrian in America but what it means to be an immigrant. What it means to see the common thread of humanity that binds all of us.

To understand that while there is one narrative about this "American dream" that's this aspirational thing, money and rags to riches, there's something much deeper happening and that we're learning to cultivate especially in these artistic communities especially in these immigrant communities that have just a different way of understanding what life can be like here. Although it's different, it doesn't mean it's any less beautiful.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are there other voices, other stories that you have your eye on as you're going forward? Other stories you want to bring?

Omar Offendum: I think there are so many amazing ways to incorporate rap and poetry and just theatrics on stage. First and foremost, I think it's important to just make clear that I believe that the foundations of hip hop culture are firmly rooted in the African American community, in the Black community, which has been so inspiring to me over the years, seeing how art and music can be used to uplift and to really pass lessons and stories down from generation to generation. To that effect, there's so many stories I'm excited about telling.

One in particular, I think I've always found fascinating is how 1492 is this historical fulcrum where, of course here in America, we're told it's when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but if you grew up in a Muslim environment like I did you understand that in 1492, the last "Muslim empire" in Spain fell after 800 years.

Those 800 years of Moorish and Muslim and Arab influence in Spain were so instrumental to helping lay the foundation for the Renaissance, for all of this incredible wealth of knowledge that we had inherited from that part of the world. I found that that particular moment is so fascinating that it could mean so much to one part of the world and so devastating to the other. I'm really interested in exploring that historical fulcrum.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just as you were talking, like it was beginning to play in my head and I'm not even a terribly musical person, so I'm very excited to see and to hear what that becomes. Omar Offendum is a rapper and a poet. He's going to be performing his show Little Syria at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Omar, it's so great to have had you here. Thank you.

Omar Offendum: Thank you, Melissa.

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