One Thousand and One Nights Read online

  This is a 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 by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Holly Macdonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by 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 House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in slightly different form, in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, in 2011.

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shaykh, Hanan.

  One thousand and one nights : a sparkling retelling of the beloved classic / Hanan al-Shaykh; with an introduction by Mary Gaitskill.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95887-7

  I. Arabian nights. II. Title.

  PR6119.H398054 2013 823′.92—dc23 2012039272

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Gray318

  v3.1

  For Shahrazad and her daughters

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Mary Gaitskill

  Preface

  Shahrayar and Shahrazad

  The Fisherman and the Jinni

  The Porter and the Three Ladies

  The First Dervish

  The Second Dervish

  The Third Dervish

  The First Merchant

  The Hunchback

  The Mistress of the House’s Tale

  The Doorkeeper’s Tale

  The Shopper’s Tale

  The Reaction of the Caliph

  Dalila the Wily

  The Demon’s Wife

  The Woman and Her Five Lovers

  Budur and Qamar al-Zaman

  Zumurrud and Nur al-Din

  The Fourth Voyage of Sindbad the Sailor

  The Resolution of the Porter and the Three Ladies

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Foreword

  BY MARY GAITSKILL

  One Thousand and One Nights is about worlds underground, where jewels are embedded in darkness and a beautiful woman may love a devil; it’s about powerful slaves and foolish demons, secret spirits hidden in jars; it’s about 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 woman-kind. If she stops telling stories, he will kill her like every other woman he sleeps with.

  Shahrazad isn’t a character in the usual sense, as her voice disappears in the stories that seem to exist without a narrator; she appears only at the very beginning and very end of One Thousand and One Nights. Yet she is an icon of feminine force, both submissive and powerful, invisible and generative. Traditionally One Thousand and One Nights ends when Shahrazad presents the king with three children and, because she has proven herself, he decides to marry her rather than kill her. Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Hanan al-Shaykh’s delightful retelling is that it does not end with Shahrazad’s transformation from storyteller to wife and mom; instead, al-Shaykh chooses to keep her in the realm of invisibility and magic.

  Shahrazad’s 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/female, union/disunion, love/hate, nature/society. The theme of betrayal and/or trickery runs through many of them: A brokenhearted woman helps her gullible fiancé to win the love of a murderous beauty while protecting him with talismanic poems which will save his life—even as he destroys hers. A woman traps five amorous fools inside a cabinet (which she’s tricked one of them into building) 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’s the wife’s lover, as he flaunts a rare fruit the husband gave her. Two sisters who betray another sister because they are jealous that she has found love are turned into dogs, and must be savagely beaten every day by the sister they wronged for the rest of their lives—even though she has long ago forgiven them and sobs as she strikes them.

  The action of the stories in One Thousand and One Nights is dark and full of cruelty—especially toward women, who are constantly being accused of adultery and then murdered or beat up. But the animating spirit here 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 love” to her; they obey and then 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 one hundred men under the very horns of this filthy demon as he snored happily, assuming that I am his alone … he is a fool, for he does not know that no one can prevent 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 lust keeps popping out against the theme of vengeance against said lust, and it is not 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 One Nights were told orally for centuries, coming out of India and Persia in the sixth century, and carried by traders and travelers all over the world; they were first written in Arabic in 1450. Through subsequent translations, disparate versions became folded into each other, as minor characters become major players and events are transformed, revealing the original themes differently, yet faithfully. For if the characters telling the stories within the stories are, like Shahrazad, pleading for their lives, they are also pleading for an aspect of truth to be revealed, and this desire for revelation is profoundly heartfelt. Shahrazad is not just out to save her skin, she wants to heal; she is asking for forgiveness, not only for women’s sexual infidelity but for men’s violent possessiveness, for human boobishness in general. She also acknowledges that certain things cannot be 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 there 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 camp whether he knew it or not.

  Al-Shaykh’s Nights has special beauty in that it emphasizes this mischievous aspect alongside the expansive, revelatory and forgiving nature of the tales. With so many versions of the Nights it’s hard to compare, but 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’s least interesting fairy tales, a sort of then-this-happened-and-then-this-happened action-based narrative style. In contrast, al-
Shaykh’s style foregrounds structure 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 get a mention. Instead the narrative pivots around a grand party at the sumptuous home of three beautiful 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 beyond it. The classic Nights features these ladies and their guests in passing, but al-Shaykh returns to them again and again, rooting her stories in the mysterious underground of male-female relations.

  Many of the classic stories have long, literally underground, sequences where major action takes place: one story starts with a prince agreeing to entomb his cousin and his cousin’s beautiful sister in a fabulous crypt where they will consummate their love and be burnt to cinders doing so. Another prince follows a beautiful young man down into the gorgeous underground chamber, in which the boy’s father has hidden him and discovers his fate—that he must kill the boy—while doing everything possible to avoid it.

  Al-Shaykh features some of these stories, but she stresses the secret underworld we experience every day, in which emotional truth is expressed in strange actions that have somehow become normal. The story of the two sisters turned into bitches, who are compulsorily whipped by their unwilling sister in the middle of a civil gathering, is a story of cruelty that is secret and mechanical even as it happens in plain sight. It 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 we first see the dogs being beaten, we don’t know who they really are or why this is happening. The sisters demand that their guests ask no questions, and when one of them breaks the rule, the truths underlying the beautiful 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 king; much later the slave reveals himself as a powerful healer with magic strong enough to lift the curse and return the dogs to their human form. 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 attention to propriety is present in the stories, even if sometimes comically so. The first guest of the three glamorous ladies, the besotted porter, is allowed to stay, feast and bathe with them because he shows himself discreet by quoting poetry: “Guard your secrets closely / When they’re told they fly / If unable to keep treasures in our own heart / Who then can forbid another, yours to impart?” (this page). As the night goes on, they each cuddle up in his lap and ask him what they’ve got between the legs—by which they mean, he’s got to guess the exact name they’ve given it or else be pummeled—and each lady has a different private name. In “The First Dervish” the woman (Aziza) helps her cousin and fiancé (Aziz) to woo another woman who also 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 conceal his love and hide

  Showing only his patience and humility.

  He: He tried to show fair patience but could only find

  A heart that was filled with unease.

  She: If he cannot counsel his patience to conceal his secrets

  Nothing will serve him better than death.

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

  In the story Aziz has failed completely to conceal his love or to be patient, but he can nonetheless woo the other woman; he is also saved from death by reciting the lines, “Loyalty is good. Treachery is bad.” At the same time, the fiancée is speaking to her rival through the words and, in the initial sequence, congratulating her on her victory. Ironically, it is Aziza, who has restrained her love and shown infinite patience, who will die. The story (and there is more to it than I have described) is essentially a fight between sacred and profane love; it is bloody and no one can really win. It doesn’t make sense that reciting these lines should save Aziz, none of it makes “sense”—and yet in a deeply satisfying way it does, for the ritual nature of the incantatory words stands as a dramatic counter to the raw power of sexuality and emotion, and expresses the protective quality of propriety, discretion and order.

  These stories of intense opposites are rich and flashing in combination, a skein of words that glimmers like a net of fast-darting fish which are also jewels. They make unity of chaos and take joy from suffering. Before he meets the demon’s mistress, the brother of the cuckold Shahrayar, King Shahzaman (a cuckold too!), sulks about their wives doing it with slaves and kitchen boys, lamenting, “What treacherous world is this which fails to distinguish between a sovereign king and a nobody?” (this page). It’s a question that asserts propriety, discretion and social hierarchy and, over the course of One Thousand and One Nights, Shahrazad, with her loving plenitude and subtlety, replies by revealing the entire world, with all its chaos and abiding order. He asks, “What kind of a world is this?” And she answers, “Why, king, a very wonderful world indeed.” Finally, he believes; so do we.

  Preface

  I don’t recall exactly whether I was eight or ten years old when I first heard the words Alf layla wa layla, one thousand and one nights, but I do remember listening to a radio dramatisation and being utterly smitten: the clamour, hustle and bustle of the bazaars and souks, the horses’ hooves, the creaking of a dungeon door, how the radio seemed to vibrate and shake at the footsteps of a demon, and the famous crow of the lonely rooster at the start of each episode, which would be answered by all the roosters in our neighbourhood.

  I heard that a girl in my class had Alf layla wa layla, and I hurried with her to peer at a few volumes in a glass cabinet, next to a carved tusk of an elephant. The volumes were leather-bound, their title engraved in gold. I asked my friend if I might touch one, but she said that her father always locked the cabinet and kept the key in his pocket, because he said he feared that if anyone finished the stories they would drop dead. Of course I didn’t know then, and neither did my friend, that the reason her father didn’t want any of the women of the house to read Alf layla wa layla was because of its explicit sexuality.

  As the years passed, my obsession with Alf layla wa layla faded. I wanted desperately to escape the world it evoked. But Shahrazad found her way to me. I decided I must discover why, while most Arabs considered the framing story of Shahrazad to be a mere cliché, academics regarded it as a work of genius and a cornerstone of Arabic literature.

  I read page after page, marvelling at Shahrazad’s perseverance in remaining the king’s prisoner in order to reveal to him the truth of her mind. I came to see that her weapon was art at its best, her endless invention of all of those magnificent stories. The more I read, the more I came to admire the flat, simple style I had so criticised in the past. The simplicity of the language touched me, for it was the language of those who didn’t reach for a dictionary but expressed their true, crude, raw and intense feelings, whether they praised, elegised or defamed. In these voices lay the foundation of magic realism, the flashback, and the use of the surreal to explain the ordinary—all the things I had mistakenly thought Alf layla wa layla lacked.

  Reading Alf layla wa layla this time was personal: I felt as if I had opened the door of a carriage which took me back into the heart of my Arab heritage, and to the classical Arab language, after a great absence. I was astonished at how our forebears had shaped our societies, showing us how to live our daily lives, through these tales which were filled with insights and moral a
nd social rules and laws, without the influence of religion, but derived from first-hand experience and deepest natural feelings towards every living thing. The effect of Alf layla wa layla was so strong and real that Arab societies shaped themselves around it; the names of its characters were embedded in our language, becoming proverbs, adjectives and even modes of speech. I was in awe of the complex society the stories evoked, which allowed relationships between humans and jinnis and beasts, real and imaginary, and I smiled at the codes of conduct and the carefully laid-out etiquette. But as a female Arab writer my real enchantment was the discovery that women in those forgotten ancient societies were far from passive and fearful; they showed their strong will and intelligence and wit, all the time recognising that their behaviour was the second nature of the weak and the oppressed.

  When I finished adapting these nineteen stories for the stage and for this book, I thanked Shahrazad for leading me into a myriad of worlds. And, when I stepped back into our century, it dawned on me that in a sense my friend’s father was right when he had said that anyone who finished Alf layla wa layla would die: the reader might find herself detached and lifeless when forced to withdraw from the sublime vividness of the numerous worlds of the One Thousand and One Nights. I hope you revel in the journey as much as I did.

  Shahrayar and Shahrazad

  long, long time ago lived two Kings who were brothers. The elder, King Shahrayar, ruled India and Indochina.

  The younger, Shahzaman, ruled Samarkand. Shahrayar was so powerful and strong that even savage animals feared him; but at the same time, he was fair, caring and kind to his people—just as the eyelid protects the eye. And they, in turn, were loyal, obeyed him blindly, and adored him.

  Shahrayar woke one morning and experienced a pang of longing for his younger brother. He realised, to his amazement, that he hadn’t seen Shahzaman in ten years. So he summoned his Vizier, the father of the two girls Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and asked him to go immediately to Samarkand and fetch his brother. The Vizier travelled for days and nights, until he reached Samarkand and met King Shahzaman, who welcomed him and slaughtered beasts in his honour, and he gave him the good news. “King Shahrayar is sound and well; he needs only to see your face and so he has sent me to ask that you visit him.”