This weekend, rapper and poet Omar Offendum will be performing a show he wrote called “Little Syria” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). In it, Offendum uses music to tell the story of the Little Syria neighborhood of Manhattan, which flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century, before many of its residents were displaced by construction and left for Brooklyn.

The Takeaway speaks with Offendum about how he approached telling this history on stage.