Overview
Gabriel’s Odyssey is an innovative multisensorial production which brings to life the earliest surviving biography of an Ethiopian slave in a sumptuous imaginary of early modern Ethiopia, Arabia and India, combining music, poetry and visual artistic effects in a rich and moving performance. Reconstructed from surviving archival records from a 16th-century trial held by the Goan Inquisition, Gabriel’s Odyssey tells the story of a black man who had known three faiths, lived on three continents, seen slavery, freedom and captivity.
Told through soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean World, Gabriel’s life represents a universal story of faith, oppression, migration and refashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans.
Told through soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean World, Gabriel’s life represents a universal story of faith, oppression, migration and refashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans.
The Story
Gabriel was a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew, who was kidnapped as a young child from the Ethiopian Highlands and sold into slavery in the Arab world in the mid 16th century. After two decades of enslavement in Arabia where he converted to Islam and took the name Alihan, he was sold again and found himself in the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in India where he served Mullah Muhammad as a stable boy for seven years. Mistreated by his master, their relations soured further when Gabriel got involved with a Moorish woman Misha Cobar. Gabriel took his freedom and his love, seeking a new life as a Christian with the Dominican priests of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Portuguese Chaul. He found domestic employment in the house of an Abyssinian Christian woman. Only two months later, Gabriel travelled back to Ahmadnagar and reinvented himself again as a Muslim for the next 6 years. He then went back to Chaul where he came to the attention of the Inquisition. He was imprisoned in Chaul and deported to Goa to face two trials as a relapsed Muslim.
Gabriel’s Odyssey is an Afro-Indian story of slavery, mobility, persecution, love and resistance, which offers rare views into the early modern Indian Ocean World: enslavement on the Ethiopian Highlands, slave trading in the Arab world, Habshi life through the porous borders of the Indo-Portuguese frontier, and religious persecution in Portuguese India. It appears to be the earliest surviving autobiographical account by an enslaved Ethiopian, yet represents a universal story of oppression, migration and refashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans across the IOW. Gabriel transited through interconnected African, Arab and Indian worlds, as a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian, in a 16th- century global life history of forced labour, abuse, surveillance and resilience in disparate locales of the IOW. Despite his African identity, Gabriel exploited the opportunities for mobility and conversion through active agency that the region’s borders offered to emancipate himself from multiple experiences of oppression. It is the rare life history of a non-elite Habshi slave as told by himself, in an interplay of his Beta Israel ancestry, his stated religious affiliations and the consequences of his perceived African identity and status.
Gabriel’s Odyssey is an Afro-Indian story of slavery, mobility, persecution, love and resistance, which offers rare views into the early modern Indian Ocean World: enslavement on the Ethiopian Highlands, slave trading in the Arab world, Habshi life through the porous borders of the Indo-Portuguese frontier, and religious persecution in Portuguese India. It appears to be the earliest surviving autobiographical account by an enslaved Ethiopian, yet represents a universal story of oppression, migration and refashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans across the IOW. Gabriel transited through interconnected African, Arab and Indian worlds, as a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian, in a 16th- century global life history of forced labour, abuse, surveillance and resilience in disparate locales of the IOW. Despite his African identity, Gabriel exploited the opportunities for mobility and conversion through active agency that the region’s borders offered to emancipate himself from multiple experiences of oppression. It is the rare life history of a non-elite Habshi slave as told by himself, in an interplay of his Beta Israel ancestry, his stated religious affiliations and the consequences of his perceived African identity and status.
Academic Framework
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Gabriel’s Odyssey is based on rigorous new multidisciplinary research by a team of scholar-artists from South Africa, Ethiopia, Zanzibar and India (see bios below), many having worked on the Mellon-funded interdisciplinary research, mapping and archiving project at the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of the Western Cape, and Ambedkar University (Delhi) in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, Dar es Salaam University and Eduardo Mondlane University, entitled "Re-Centring AfroAsia : Musical and Human Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period 700-1500AD". The basis of Gabriel’s story is taken from the reconstructions in Matteo Salvadore (2020), Giuseppe Marcocci (2012), Ananya Chakravarti (2019), and Patricia Souza de Faria (2016), based on a manuscript source from the Inquisition Archive in Lisbon. His biography has been positioned and re-imagined in the wider framework of the latest studies on the early modern Indian Ocean World in the fields of history, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology, art history, anthropology and archaeology.
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Decolonisation and Representation
One aim behind Gabriel’s Odyssey is to explore artistic ways of experimenting with and
reworking archival sources, and decolonising the stories of Africans that emerge out of
colonial archives such as the Inquisition Archive in Lisbon. Without the colonial records
and surviving manuscripts documenting his trials by the Goan Inquisition, Gabriel’s
biography would have been lost forever, like those of countless other Africans from this
period. However, his story and voice are recorded through the Inquisition’s notary and a
translator, adding further colonial layers to the version of his life history that has survived.
Gabriel’s Odyssey strives to recast Gabriel in our imagined construction of his own voice,
drawing on available historical and literary sources that enrich our sense of the lives of
people living in his world; thus we attempt to give him back his agency, but without
claiming that our version of his life story represents a historically accurate ‘truth,’ aside
from drawing on the scant sources that exist.
reworking archival sources, and decolonising the stories of Africans that emerge out of
colonial archives such as the Inquisition Archive in Lisbon. Without the colonial records
and surviving manuscripts documenting his trials by the Goan Inquisition, Gabriel’s
biography would have been lost forever, like those of countless other Africans from this
period. However, his story and voice are recorded through the Inquisition’s notary and a
translator, adding further colonial layers to the version of his life history that has survived.
Gabriel’s Odyssey strives to recast Gabriel in our imagined construction of his own voice,
drawing on available historical and literary sources that enrich our sense of the lives of
people living in his world; thus we attempt to give him back his agency, but without
claiming that our version of his life story represents a historically accurate ‘truth,’ aside
from drawing on the scant sources that exist.
Archival Materials
Script
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Gabriel’s Odyssey is based on rigorous new multidisciplinary research by a team of scholar-artists from South Africa, Ethiopia, Zanzibar and India (see bios below), many having worked on the Mellon-funded interdisciplinary research, mapping and archiving project at the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of the Western Cape, and Ambedkar University Delhi in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, Dar es Salaam University and Eduardo Mondlane University, entitled "Re-Centring AfroAsia : Musical and Human Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period 700-1500AD"www.afroasia.uct.ac.za
The basis of Gabriel’s story is taken from the reconstructions in Matteo Salvadore (2020), Giuseppe Marcocci (2012), Ananya Chakravarti (2019), Patricia Souza de Faria (2016), and our own forthcoming historical research, all based on a manuscript source from the Inquisition Archive in Lisbon, 1595 mss copy of proceedings of trial...Tribunal do Santo Oficio of the Inquisicao de Lisboa entitled “Processo de Gabriel casta abexim que veio de Chaul remetido a esta mesa” file number 4937. Gabriel's biography has been positioned and re-imagined in the wider framework of the latest studies on the early modern Indian Ocean World in the fields of history, musicology, sociology, art history, anthropology and archaeology. |
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Soundscapes and Musical treatment
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Mark Aranha | composer, guitarist
Samir Basalama | composer, qanun and darbuka Grasella Luigi Bonefeni | voice Bronwen Clacherty | composer, voice, vibraphone, uhadi Sumangala Damodoran | voice Tesfamichael Yayeh Hussen | composer, voice, masinqo, krar, washint Cara Stacey | composer, piano, budongo lamellophone, bows, voice The musical compositional process is rooted in our collaborative research into the history, song, and scripture of the different cultures that Gabriel traverses in his journey across the early modern Indian Ocean World. Drawing inspiration from the Ethiopian zēmã to Gregorian chant to Sufi-Bhakti abhang, we work across indigenous instruments and languages to bring imaginary soundscapes and musical textures from this story to life. Where possible, we have used songs from the places and period, but there is much that has been lost to time. These historical and musical gaps are where we bring our personal artistic interpretations and compositions to the production. |
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Visual Treatment
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Kristy Stone | concept, art, set design
Conor Ralphs | art, graphics, interactive design The envisioned art – in collaboration with stage and lighting design, narration elements, musical performance and projected archival imagery tracks the story of Gabriel through the creation of several sculptural worlds. These are presented, initially, by the shadows they project as they are lit and interacted with by the artists. They will be adapted and made specifically to the theater space they will be performed in. Each world consists of a selection of crafted imagery that becomes animated through movement and light, as if an instrument in its own way. At times these follow a close narrative structure and in other moments work to evoke the spirit of the music and the tensions of the story. Towards the end of the production, all of the worlds are revealed as an installation in the space where intersections and collisions as a collective are explored. The artworks form an intellectual inquiry into an imagined Indian Ocean aesthetic, as an alternative to a Western ocularcentric tradition. An Indian Ocean aesthetic draws on scholars’ theorising of a ‘perceptual culture’, that is a multi-sensory realm and Sufi Islam, which forms one such alternative to Western constructs of ‘Art’. Perceptual culture is a sensual engagement with sound, touch, taste, scent, and can be extended to include dreams, the confluence of interior and exterior spaces. The artists draw inspiration from 10th-century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous inquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. In these manuscripts, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history. The experimental process of creating this visual imaginary of Gabriel’s world as an artist-researcher forms part of a broader decolonial endeavour. Stage Design: The 'worlds' Against a projected backdrop the ‘worlds’ are imagined as self-contained structures / sculptures that within them contain illustrative and suggestive aspects of the story being performed by the music. They are animated with movement and light. In the beginning they are lit as sculptural entities, then each is ‘performed’ as if an instrument. Towards the end of the production all are revealed as worlds that intersect. |
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