Season 3, Episode 4:  “Syrians Must Go Back” ft Omar Offendum

Narration: The first time I went back to Ethiopia as an adult, I was nearly twenty-one years old. My cousins couldn’t wait to take me to an Azmari Beit, a traditional music house, and only days into my journey, they got their wish.

Azmari are traditional musicians and poets. They sing, play folk instruments and memorize thousands of poems, which they adapt to the people and situations unfolding in front of them. So there I am, sitting in the back when the Azmari turns his attention to me. He starts riffing poetry about me, singing a very funny song about me being a “habesha-ferenge”, someone Ethiopian, but also from far away. My cousins and I are howling with laughter, and I am blushing but it’s too dark in there for anyone to tell. I clearly have to tip him, which I do by sticking a bill to his forehead, glued by sweat of course, and he soon saunters on to someone else.

But here’s the thing, Azmaris, they don’t just party. They also accompany some of the most important rituals of life. They are cultural libraries, well versed in musical traditions and dance from dozens of tribes. They are the storytellers. They are the grios.

Every culture has its grios, each with a slightly different way of holding a community's stories.

Omar: Arabic as a language is a very poetic one, it's one that was passed down orally for generations before it was ever written.

Narration: Omar Offendum is a rapper and a poet, who embodies his culture’s version of a grio. One morning in early spring, Omar walks me through the importance of playing that role in a present-time way, while honoring the stories of the past.

My name is Meklit and this is Movement, music and migration, remixed.

Omar is the creator behind the Little Syria Show that’s traveled to New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The show is based on New York City’s Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood that was once the cultural epicenter of the Syrian community in the U.S. at its peak in the early 1900s, Little Syria. In each show, he takes on the role of community storyteller in Syria, called a hakawati.

Omar: On stage, I'm talking about it from the frame of reference, one could say of this like an imaginative 1920s Syrian New York neighborhood. But it's infused with elements of my life for sure. It's infused with elements of today. And I think what hits the hardest is just like, for example, in a song like “Not Quite White”, where you hear headlines from newspapers from back then that sound like they were written today. You know, “Arabs not wanted”, “Syrians must go back”, “Syrians must be deported”.

Narration: Omar first began working on the Little Syria Show in 2018, during a year long residency at the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He came to the residency with the intention of developing a theatrical live music performance that could help Arab Americans better grapple with and understand their identity in the U.S.

Omar knows intimately what it’s like to move through the world with a hybridized identity. He was born in Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents, and the family moved to Northern Virginia when Omar was still very young. By the time he landed the residency, he’d spent over a decade sharing his experiences through music and performance.

Growing up in the U.S. as a Syrian-American, Omar’s relationship to Syria was intertwined with his parents' connection to home. And he brought all of that context into what would become the Little Syria show.

 Omar: My father, he was from Hama. So this was a city that suffered a massacre at the hands of the father of the dictator that we just ousted, where somewhere between 10 to like 40,000 people were killed within the span of a week..

Narration:  The Hama massacre was in 1982, and by this time Omar’s parents were living in Saudi Arabia. Coming from Damascus, Omar said his mother had a different, less complicated relationship to Syria than his father, but her influence was just as strong.

 Omar: She had more of a poetic and family connection that wasn't broken because of, you know, conflict and though critical of the regime in her own way, it wasn't like, something that made it like difficult for her to go back and experience Syria over the years.

Narration: In the U.S., Omar’s mother made sure their home was infused with memories of Damascus, especially in the form of stories.

Omar: I remember being a kid and seeing my mom pull books out from her bookcase. She had one specifically that she put all her poetry books in.

Narration: Back in Damascus, she had studied Arabic Literature at the University there, and as a lover of Arabic poetry, she made it a point to instill that appreciation in Omar from a young age. That exposure planted a seed of inspiration.

Omar: So I remember seeing a lot of these covers, a lot of these titles. I remember her reading from them occasionally and then reading to me occasionally and seeing lines in them. And when I had my residency in Ann Arbor, I brought one of those books out.

Narration: That book was a collection of poetry, one that was well-loved by his mother. It's called Diwan by Elia Abu Madi, one of the most prominent poets to come out of New York City’s Little Syria.

Omar: In this book, there's lots of different sections that she had underlined, and one in particular happened to be one that I literally, I remember just like plopping myself on the couch in this Airbnb and just opening up this book. And it was one of the very first things I read, and it was almost like screaming out, this is the foundation of your journey. And basically the lines were: [recites excerpt in Arabic]. And so he said:

Fast asleep are all the people in this beautiful city,

falling upon New York, a feeling of tranquility.

Yet my eyelids and their closing still deceive me,

as they see nothing but that enduring sadness that bereaves me,

to which of course I could only mean one thing, Syria.

Narration: With Elia Abu Madi’s words echoing in his head, Omar continued to learn more about Little Syria during his residency in Michigan. He went through newspaper articles published in the neighborhood, now archived at North Carolina State University and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn. He was captivated by familiar details, like menus from Arabic restaurants that lined the streets of Little Syria. Here was the genesis of the Syrian American experience he’d been born into.

 Omar:  There was like a Syrian American story that we kind of plugged ourselves into. And you know, as complicated as that is, like there's people overseas would be like, why would you claim American? Like you're just, you're Syrian, you know, shut up. Or you were born in Saudi Arabia, aren't you just Saudi? You know, like all these things. And for me it's interesting to be able to plug into a story that had existed prior to us.

Narration: In the 1880s through the 1940s, Washington Street to Rector Street in Lower Manhattan was the landing place for thousands of immigrants from Greater Syria. At the time, the Ottoman Empire controlled Greater Syria, which included Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and present day Syria.Ottoman power was waning and the first wave of migration coincided with the decline of the Syrian silk industry in the 1870s. Migration was at its peak in the early 1900s. And in this wave, many traveled to the U.S. to reunite with family who had already established a new life here. From afar, America represented possibility. But on arrival, New York City was often different than imagined.

Omar: In the late 1800s, you gotta remember it wasn't paved. It's dirty. It's like, not at all this big treasure chest that it's made out to be when you're in this little mountain village in Lebanon or you know, in Damascus where you're promised that it's so much better, but then when you get there, you're like, is it? You know. Wha? And it took so long to get here for this?

Narration: At the same time, the Syrian community grew in Manhattan and found ways to keep their traditions and culture alive. By the mid 1900s, more than fifty Arabic language periodicals had been published in Little Syria. "Kawkab Amrika”, the first Arabic Language newspaper in the U.S. was printed in the neighborhood. By the turn of the century, the Syrian Business Directory of New York listed over 300 Syrian businesses. And although the cultural and commercial impact of Little Syria was undeniable, it was not embraced by all.

Omar: There's often the situation where there's like the store and then there's like the boarding up top, and the goods that are sold in the store can also be pedaled on the streets. And a lot of people made their living basically pedaling. It wasn't illegal, but it was looked down upon for sure. But if you didn't know your rights and you’re an immigrant, you could easily get roughed up by a cop or by a so-and-so, or get your stuff stolen.

Narration: One of the reasons Omar can describe in detail what it was like in Little Syria is because of those community newspapers left behind. They’ve been preserved and archived as historical records, and Omar used them to learn about daily life.

Omar: This neighborhood used to be a Irish one before it was a Syrian one. And so there were like, you know, a lot of articles that talked about people getting beat up by the Irishman until like tougher folks started arriving, like I would go down these little research rabbit holes and find interesting points and be like, huh, what was that like?

Narration: Little Syria was also the birthplace of the Pen League, a collective of writers and intellectuals from Greater Syria who fueled a revitalization of Arabic literature, like writer and poet Khalil Gibran. Some of those works are in Omar's mother's bookcase.

Omar: Every song and moment in the show is touched by one of the writers of al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya, or the Pen League, or the Writer's Circle, which was like the first Arab American artistic collective. And then the idea that this neighborhood existed, that these writers wrote while they were here, that they were influential, it almost was planted in me, from my mother, from her friends. But it was interesting that nobody really kind of commemorated it, you know, physically the way that you would like Little Italy or Chinatown, you know what I mean? Like, it's pretty much gone. And that was always fascinating to me. It's like, how could that be?

Narration: By the 1940s, the once bustling Little Syria neighborhood had dispersed. Many residents were evicted for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in 1950 and settled elsewhere in the city.

Today, besides a few lingering buildings, like St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church and a tenement on Washington Street, Little Syria is physically unrecognizable. Thanks to the storytellers of the past, the newspaper publishers, the journalists, the writers and artists of Little Syria, Omar had a blueprint for his own mission as a hakawati.

Omar: Had they not taken the time to create this art, to publish these newspapers we wouldn't know nearly as much about the neighborhood as we do now.

Meklit: That’s right

Omar: So in a way, working on this project in the process of it was healing and like, you know, help give me the motivation to wanna keep doing it.

Narration: After months of pouring over material, including the book "Strangers in the West" by Dr. Linda K. Jacobs who reconstructs Little Syria through census data, newspaper articles, and business directories, Omar could feel the neighborhood coming alive. He finally had what he needed to reimagine his own version of Little Syria.

Omar: These ideas were just pulling from the many different sorts of stories in these different accounts and trying to find, like, a sort of archetype of a story that I could create through a character that I could semi embody on stage.

Narration: One of the most powerful ways these stories came through in the Little Syria Show is in its music. The show's sound began taking shape during that same residency with help from Omar’s friends and collaborators Thanks Joey, a Syrian-American music producer and beatmaker, and Ronnie Malley, a Palestinian-American ethnomusicologist and oud virtuoso.

Omar: Joey and Ronnie came the following week. We started to work on some of the music and the sonic backdrop of these ideas. So Ronnie with his oud and his various hand drums and percussive instruments and his little midi keyboard. Joey with his drum machine and a bunch of records that he'd picked up over the years that he thought could work for this album, namely some from his grandfather and also an archive of things that we had been collecting online. And sort of piecing that all together, slowly. And everything just felt so natural.

Narration: They had this organic flow going, and by the end of the residency, Omar, Ronnie, and Joey were ready to share what they'd been working on for a final showcase. But remember, the show was still in its infant stages. With only a week together, the expectation was a simple read-through.

Omar: This was meant to be in a community center in a, you know, circle of chairs and just very casually reading nothing, nothing serious. And at the end of the week we find out that this community center had some fire code violations, so they no longer could do it at that place. And so they had to do it at this other backup location, which was like this most epic of churches in the middle of town. I was like, this is not nothing!

Narration: In this new venue, Omar thought, why not dress up to match its grandeur?

Omar: We might as well, we came to do the thing. So we put on suits. I had some extra fez hats for Ronnie and Joey. There was like an epic piano and organ in there. And like we, what I think we realized, or at least I did in that moment was, because there is this like really beautiful sort of journey that you go on, and there are some very deep and impactful moments that just hit even harder in a church setting.

Narration: Omar remembers that not only did the church itself add to the impact, the majority of those who immigrated in the first wave from Greater Syria in the late 1800s were in fact Christian. So, being in a church resonated with another echo of the past.

Omar: It reminded me of just the potential that this project had, when done right to really move people. And just be reminded that like, wow, there's, there's humanity behind every single one of these stories. And I think that's the responsibility of an artist.

Meklit: Why is it important for you to tell this story now?

Omar: If I'm gonna be honest, like even before I was born, like my mother raised me the way that she did and the place that she did. And so I'm a product of all that and this also paralleled me becoming father. Naming my son Gibran was, not a coincidence, highly inspired by Gibran Khalil Gibran and wanting him to know why.

You know, when little Syria was a thing, people referred to themselves as Syrians, whether they were Lebanese or Palestinian, what have you. This was greater Syria. At the time, Khalil Gibran had dreamed of a free Syria, And one that was free from Ottoman colonial sort of chains, so to speak, and also free of foreign meddling as well. So a actual free Syria.You know, it's like the idea that there's this notion of a free Syria has existed even before these nationalistic borders of it were drawn.

And I've seen more conversation around, at least even just in our speech, restoring some of those previous ways of identifying ourselves, like knowing that while of course we're proud of our Palestinian and Jordanian and Lebanese and Syrian roots, we also understand there, you know, these like nationalistic borders are drawn by the French and the British weren't drawn by us.

And that we are cohesively people of Bilad al-Sham, the Shami people. And we have these shared customs and histories and values and cultures and foods and like way of speaking. And no amount of checkpoints and walls can change that. So for me, Little Syria was Greater Syria. It's almost like an opportunity for people to remember that possibility too when we do the show that, you know, of course again, we're proud of and we hold these flags and these symbols, these passports, but like there were other ways we were before. And let's summon those too.

Meklit: It's so powerful. And you know what's really interesting to me as I hear you reflect on this is that, I came into this conversation thinking that Little Syria had disappeared. But the way you talk about it, it makes me feel like it hasn't disappeared.

Omar: Oh wow.

Meklit: And I wonder if like, sometimes if we think about the things that are gone or gone from us, and it can be that longing for homeland or we think about, there's like a grief or a bittersweetness associated with it. But the way you're talking about it, you’re showing us that when the stories survive like they themselves are ships, you know, like, or something like that. Like, I'm wrestling with the feeling that I'm taking from what you were just saying. But do you feel like how do you wrestle with that mix of joy and grief?

Omar: Grief is something that has been at the center of my artistic sort of practice from the jump. And I've talked about that in my music before. I've talked about how profound of an impact losing my father at a young age had on me and my understanding of who I am.

And so I think that's present in almost everything. It's present in how I relate to the pain of, you know, an orphan from war, it’s present in how I relate to kids growing up here, like, separate from a parent for whatever reason.  Of course, Alhamdulillah, I've like worked through it and I've found my peace with it and I'm grateful for the outlet of art to kind of do that. To express myself through that.

But at the same time, it like, I think makes me want to remind people to just appreciate more, you know, what it is we got when we got it. And why I love what I do. It's an excuse to bring people together in person, and to just sit down and focus. I encourage people to put their phone down.

But then also I would say in terms of just the zeitgeist of this moment, like what's happening, I'd mentioned how a lot of these newspaper articles sound like they were from today. We know how Syrian refugees, refugees in general, immigrants in general are being targeted, are being discriminated against. You know, there's no shortage of that. And at the same time, in those very tense and difficult and challenging moments, oftentimes the real lasting art and beauty is created.

And to find ways to celebrate who we are amidst all of this, to give people a reason to even get dressed up. Like, I get dressed up on stage, I look good. I want people to come up and feel good. You know, like I wanted that for my people, for, you know, our people.

And I wanted to do it in a way that was honoring what came before. So it had this element of nostalgia that I think so many Arabs in the diaspora sort of aesthetically are drawn to, and at the same time was future forward in terms of just how it sounded, how it resonated with today's audiences.

Narration: Since 2018, Omar’s Little Syria Show has evolved into an 85-minute production featuring Omar and his collaborators, Thanks Joey and Ronnie Malley. The Little Syria show officially premiered in 2022, to a sold-out crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And when not performing the full-production, they’ve adapted songs and storytelling elements from the show, like earlier this year at the Quoz Arts Fest in Dubai.

They’ve taken Little Syria on the road to Chicago, Los Angeles, and most recently back to New York.

Omar currently has a new show in the works where he plans to continue his hakawati practice, this time, telling the story of his family’s journey and his own.

Narration: You can find Omar’s music and learn about upcoming shows and new projects at offendum.com and keep up with him on instagram at offendum.

This episode of Movement was produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our sound designer and co-founder is Ian Coss. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are distributed by PRX.