Sometimes the best thing a person can do is talk about what’s troubling them and have someone listen. Isn’t this the age-old advice that people get? It isn’t fool-proof, but in articulating troubles or traumas, there’s a process of reflexivity, objectivity and camaraderie. This is also true of female storytelling in Arabic tradition; women have used stories to articulate their traumas and build/withhold solidarity amongst themselves.
My first interaction with female storytelling was through the movie Aladdin. This movie is horrendously racist even from the very opening track “they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face/ it’s barbaric but hey it’s home”, effectively othering Arab people and reinforcing the stereotype that west is civilised and therefore Arab’s are barbaric. But it did lead me to A Thousand and One Nights and consequently, Scheherazade. For those that don’t know the plot already, King Shahriyar finds out that his wife is having an affair and so he kills her. Making the arbitrary decision that all women are impure and evil, Shahriyar takes a new bride every night and kills them the next morning at dawn. To stop this, Schehrazade, the grand vizier’s daughter sacrifices herself as Shahriyar’s next bride. She uses stories to divert Shahriyar from his path of blood. Every night she tells a story, and every morning just before dawn, the moment of her execution, she ends her story on a cliff-hanger, thus prolonging her life for another day.
Scheherazade has been considered by some as the maternal precursor to female storytelling in the Arab world. She epitomises the title of A Thousand and One Nights, which is synonymous to infinity in Arabic, suggesting that stories are infinite, and they never cease to exist. Scheherazade is strategic in her storytelling, she’s known to be intelligent and an excellent storyteller. It also stands to reason that she’s courageous and bold to take on the task of facing a murderer every night.
These qualities aren’t always shown at their best in the English and French translations of A Thousand and One Nights. Often English translations are incomplete and don’t offer the continuity in the story that the original does. In one of the very first few stories, Scheherazade tells the story of a fisherman who meets an unjust jinn (genie) who has been trapped in a bottle for hundreds of years. He threatens to kill the innocent fisherman because of the pain that he’s endured. Does this sound familiar? Just like the jinn, Shahriyar has made the arbitrary decision to hurt and kill innocent women. By telling this story, Scheherazade is asserting her dominance within the frame of the story, but dissociating in order to provide a smoother reflection for King Shahriyar. He can judge the jinn as unjust on a whim, but when he reflects on this story later on, he will sub/consciously notice the similarity of his own decisions also.
In another story Scheherazade tells the story about Princess Budur, who disguises herself as a man to protect herself and ultimately becomes king. This story is told on a later night, some say two-hundred-and-three, others say nine-hundred-and-sixty-second, to allow time for King Shahriyar to become completely immersed and entertained in her stories and so less likely to kill her for being too bold or insolent as to assert that women can fool society and hold power just by dressing differently.
Though Scheherazade is telling these stories to King Shahriyar alone, it is evident that she’s doing so to offer justice for the lives that have been lost but also for the future of women. It is a form of female solidarity, whilst also educating King Shahriyar and providing a reflective and objective base for him to learn from. I think this is the key lesson we should take away from Scheherazade: that through stories we can build understanding and change the world.
As a young Muslim girl growing up in the U.K. I spent a lot of my time reading books without characters that looked or thought like me. At best, I could empathise with a small piece of a character, but often I couldn’t understand them, they’d lived too different lives from me. At worst, I didn’t feel like these characters understood me and I began to internalise that my way of thinking was wrong and I should emulate their way of thinking. Books and stories are supposed to inspire empathy, understanding, offer entertainment and sometimes even escape. And once you close the pages of the book, there’s supposed to be something that you’ve taken from the story, something you’ve not consciously learnt but someone you want to be more like or you want to make the world around you more like the one you read about. For that, stories need to be diverse. As a writer myself and a successor of Scheherazade I want to create and offer a space to readers where they can be understood, where they see a world that they want to live in, be understood, empathise and emulate.
Though I’ve focused on Scheherazade, there is more to the Arab literary tradition that just her. Outside of fiction, there’s Ayesha R.A, the prophet’s wife and a scholar in her own right, who preached through anecdotal stories. There’s Khansa and poetess Walla Bint al-Mustakfi Who are women who either inspired women’s literary salons in the Arab world or infiltrated a male literary and public sphere. There are also current women who tell stories within private female circles for other women. Female storytelling has existed for a long time and it has persisted. With a better understanding of female storytelling, I believe that it can continue to exist and offer women a chance to articulate, understand and reflect on their traumas.
