One Thousand and One Arabian Nights Read Aloud

This is a piece of work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 past Hanan al-Shaykh
Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Holly Macdonald
Introduction copyright © 2013 past Mary Gaitskill

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random Business firm of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in slightly different grade, in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, in 2011.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random Business firm, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shaykh, Hanan.
One thou and one nights : a sparkling retelling of the dearest classic / Hanan al-Shaykh; with an introduction past Mary Gaitskill.
pages    cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-95887-7
I. Arabian nights. II. Title.
PR
6119.
H
398054    2013      823′.92—dc23      2012039272

world wide web.pantheonbooks.com

Jacket design by Gray318

v3.ane

For Shahrazad and her daughters

Contents

Foreword
BY MARY GAITSKILL

One Yard and One Nights
is virtually worlds underground, where jewels are embedded in darkness and a beautiful woman may dear a devil; it'south nearly powerful slaves and foolish demons, underground spirits hidden in jars; information technology's well-nigh truth living in the treacherous heart like an abiding and holy law waiting to be revealed in the words of a story told by a porter, a tailor, a concubine or lady—all through the lips of the lady Shahrazad to an enraged, cuckolded king on a revenge mission against adult female-kind. If she stops telling stories, he will kill her like every other woman he sleeps with.

Shahrazad isn't a grapheme in the usual sense, as her voice disappears in the stories that seem to exist without a narrator; she appears simply at the very beginning and very terminate of
One Chiliad and 1 Nights
. Yet she is an icon of feminine force, both submissive and powerful, invisible and generative. Traditionally
1000 and 1 Nights
ends when Shahrazad presents the male monarch with three children and, because she has proven herself, he decides to marry her rather than kill her. Maybe the most refreshing thing virtually Hanan al-Shaykh's delightful retelling is that it does not end with Shahrazad's transformation from storyteller
to married woman and mom; instead, al-Shaykh chooses to keep her in the realm of invisibility and magic.

Shahrazad'southward stories are on every theme and subject, from con-artistry to justice to love; they are surreal and grimy-real, and they express powerful oppositions: male person/female, union/disunion, love/detest, nature/society. The theme of betrayal and/or trickery runs through many of them: A brokenhearted woman helps her gullible fiancé to win the dearest of a murderous beauty while protecting him with talismanic poems which will save his life—even as he destroys hers. A adult female traps five dotty fools within a chiffonier (which she's tricked i of them into edifice) where they eventually, to avoid bursting their bladders, pee on each others' heads. An impoverished elderly widow disguised as a holy woman and concerned mother goes on a rampage of fraud and theft, tricking one of her victims into yanking out another's teeth—and is rewarded for her crimes with a government position. A husband chops his beloved wife to pieces because, at market, a slave who in truth has never met her brags that he'south the wife'south lover, as he flaunts a rare fruit the husband gave her. Ii sisters who beguile another sister considering they are jealous that she has found love are turned into dogs, and must exist savagely beaten every day by the sister they wronged for the remainder of their lives—even though she has long agone forgiven them and sobs as she strikes them.

The activity of the stories in
Grand and One Nights
is dark and full of cruelty—especially toward women, who are constantly being accused of adultery so murdered or trounce up. But the animating spirit hither is light and full of play,
especially
on the part of the female characters, who are consistently resourceful and witty. The supposedly enslaved mistress of a demon taunts and commands two cuckolded kings to "make dear" to her; they obey so dance and cheer, "How great is the cunning of women!" Both
cunning queens are murdered, but the demon's mistress lives on to triumphantly declare: "I have slept with i hundred men under the very horns of this filthy demon every bit he snored happily, assuming that I am his alone … he is a fool, for he does not know that no one can forbid a woman from fulfilling her desires, even if she is hidden under the roaring sea, jealously guarded by a demon" (
this page
).

This apparent fear of and admiration for triumphant female person lust keeps popping out against the theme of vengeance against said lust, and it is
non
al-Shaykh's invention; it is intrinsic to the complex soul of the original. But how to refer to the "original"? The stories in
One thousand and Ane Nights
were told orally for centuries, coming out of Republic of india and Persia in the 6th century, and carried by traders and travelers all over the globe; they were outset written in Arabic in 1450. Through subsequent translations, disparate versions became folded into each other, equally minor characters become major players and events are transformed, revealing the original themes differently, however faithfully. For if the characters telling the stories inside the stories are, like Shahrazad, pleading for their lives, they are also pleading for an attribute of truth to exist revealed, and this desire for revelation is profoundly heartfelt. Shahrazad is non just out to save her skin, she wants to heal; she is asking for forgiveness, not only for women's sexual infidelity simply for men's violent possessiveness, for man boobishness in full general. She also acknowledges that sure things cannot exist tolerated. In her stories, foolishness, lust, greed, jealousy, lying, cruelty, cowardice and vanity are exposed and readily forgiven; rape and cold-blooded murder are
not
forgiven. The moral codes are honored sincerely—but then in that location is that lewd demon's mistress, a consistent narrative mischief, a respect for pure, life-force passion that runs through the tales, which reminds me of what William
Blake said about
Paradise Lost
: that Milton, being a poet, was of the Devil's army camp whether he knew it or not.

Al-Shaykh's
Nights
has special beauty in that it emphasizes this mischievous attribute alongside the expansive, revelatory and forgiving nature of the tales. With so many versions of the
Nights
it'south difficult to compare, only many of the older versions I've seen have a tight, convoluted quality which, while dreamishly, brilliantly inventive, can have the random feel of Grimm'south least interesting fairy tales, a sort of and so-this-happened-and-then-this-happened activity-based narrative style. In contrast, al-Shaykh'south mode foregrounds construction and character. She pays little attention to the famous voyages of Sindbad, and Ali Baba (who was apparently invented by the first Western translator, Antoine Galland) doesn't even go a mention. Instead the narrative pivots around a grand party at the sumptuous habitation of three cute and independent sisters who are hosting several men—dervishes, merchants and a porter, all of whom are unexpected guests. They eat, drink and sing, but mostly they talk and tell stories that take them around the world and across it. The classic
Nights
features these ladies and their guests in passing, simply al-Shaykh returns to them once again and again, rooting her stories in the mysterious underground of male-female relations.

Many of the classic stories have long, literally hugger-mugger, sequences where major action takes place: one story starts with a prince agreeing to entomb his cousin and his cousin'due south beautiful sis in a fabulous crypt where they will consummate their love and be burnt to cinders doing and then. Another prince follows a cute fellow downwards into the gorgeous underground chamber, in which the boy'southward male parent has hidden him and discovers his fate—that he must kill the male child—while doing everything possible to avoid it.

Al-Shaykh features some of these stories, just she stresses the
secret underworld we experience every day, in which emotional truth is expressed in foreign actions that take somehow get normal. The story of the two sisters turned into bitches, who are compulsorily whipped past their unwilling sister in the middle of a civil gathering, is a story of cruelty that is secret and mechanical even equally information technology happens in manifestly sight. Information technology is a physical metaphor for the invisible violence that goes on between people everywhere (especially in families), while civil words are being spoken and daily life goes forward.

When nosotros first encounter the dogs being browbeaten, nosotros don't know who they really are or why this is happening. The sisters demand that their guests inquire no questions, and when one of them breaks the rule, the truths underlying the cute party are revealed. The very slave who caused an innocent woman to be hacked to death with his trivial marketplace bragging is exposed and pardoned by a suddenly revealed rex; much later the slave reveals himself as a powerful healer with magic stiff enough to lift the curse and return the dogs to their human class. Whipped dogs are also dignified women, a stupid slave is also a wise healer; the truth of this night is ugly, then beautiful then finally mysterious because of the way these qualities are linked.

But
how
such truth is revealed is as important as
what
is revealed: delicacy and attending to propriety is present in the stories, even if sometimes comically so. The first guest of the 3 glamorous ladies, the besotted porter, is allowed to stay, feast and bathe with them considering he shows himself discreet past quoting poetry: "Baby-sit your secrets closely / When they're told they fly / If unable to keep treasures in our own heart / Who then tin can prevent some other, yours to impart?" (
this page
). Every bit the night goes on, they each cuddle up in his lap and enquire him what they've got betwixt the legs—past which they hateful, he's got to guess the exact name
they've given it or else be pummeled—and each lady has a unlike individual name. In "The First Dervish" the woman (Aziza) helps her cousin and fiancé (Aziz) to woo another woman who as well happens to be a killer. Aziza instructs Aziz on exactly what verses to say to the lady every night, and asks how the lady replies:

     He:   Lovers, in the name of God
Tell me how can one relieve this endless desperation?

    She:   He should muffle his love and hide
Showing only his patience and humility.

     He:   He tried to show fair patience but could only notice
A centre that was filled with unease.

    She:   If he cannot counsel his patience to conceal his secrets
Zippo volition serve him better than decease.

     He:   I have heard, obeyed and now must I die Salutations to she who tore u.s.a. apart. (
this page
–
this page
)

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