Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies

From the jury:

I Cannot Write My Life is a moving account of the enslavement of Omar Ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar sold into slavery and brought to North Carolina in the 1800s. It is based on Omar's autobiography, the only one of its kind written in Arabic language in America. In that sense, the book will make a significant contribution to the history of enslavement. At a deeper level, it is about the vulnerability of texts to the cruelty of their context and their susceptibility to being rendered illegible. Lo and Ernst's meticulous research describes the events that placed Said in the headlines with a crafted legendary life story. In this narrative, Omar had been saved from the tyranny of his religion [Islam] by slavery. This was while he tried to tell the story of his enslavement in Arabic knowing full well that it would not be heard. Lo and Ernst refer to Omar's writings, particularly his autobiography as "impossible documents." From their perspective, the impossibility of these documents is due to mistranslation, distortion, and their unavailability to the public for almost two centuries. That is if decades of enslavement had not rendered self-expression impossible for Omar. There is more to language than always being a source of wonder and comprehension, or a tool for liberation.