Scheherazade and the Everafter

"One Thousand Nights and a Night," more familiar as “The Arabian Nights”, brought the unforgettable Scheherazade into our lives.

The frame story has Shahriar, a king so shocked by his wife's infidelity, he has her killed. Believing all women to be equally unfaithful, he takes a new wife every night, who is executed at dawn. This continues for some time, until the wazir's daughter Scheherazade, sickened by this, comes up with an ingenious plan, volunteering to become Shahriar's next wife.

Each night, Scheherazade spends many hours “beguiling the night" with a tale that always breaks off before dawn at a key point of the tale, ensuring that the king keeps her around a little bit longer to hear a little bit more.

The stories-within-stories have that special quality that can only come to tellings that have passed through many voices in many lands - India, Persia and several Arab lands. There are love stories, tragedies, comedies, burlesques, poems, mixed in with historical accounts and religious legends. Their essential quality is the interweaving of unusual, extraordinary and supernatural threads into the fabric of everyday life, in a world in which people often suffer but come out all right in the end.

By the time 1001 nights are up, Scheherazade has given birth to three sons, and the king, convinced of her faithfulness and impacted by her brilliance, makes her queen, revoking his decree. Meanwhile he has learnt a lot about life – the good and bad, the ups and downs.

Scheherazade was not only a fictional character but also the key as the "frame" story around the numerous tales; what we in India would call a “sutradhar”, implying a connector. Scheherazade is indeed about connection. In many ways.

This connection is enduring, not just between story and story in her tellings, but in the many stories written years later, including many today.

Anthony O’Neill’s “Scheherazade” focuses on the world of Baghdad under the rule of Haroun al-Rashid, highlighting a motley crew of seven chosen to rescue Scheherazade from a fate worse than death.

In Penelope Lively’s short narrative, “The Five Thousand and One Nights” we meet Scheherazade today, driving the king mad with her renditions of stories reminiscent of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters; he is bored silly and longs for the ‘old style’ stories she once enchanted him with!

In one of the stories in his “Chimera, “reworkings of traditional myths and stories, John Barth presents the story of the Arabian Nights from the perspective of Dunyazade, Scheherazade's younger sister.

Crafting imaginative sequels, Edgar Allan Poe in “The Thousand-And-Second Tale Of Scheherazade” and Joseph Roth in his “Scheherazade in Vienna, The Tale of the 1002nd Night'' (that has less to do with Scheherazade, and more with intricacies of storytelling), emulate the book’s early translators -- it may come as a surprise that several of the more familiar stories, like Aladdin and Ali Baba were, in fact, inserted only in the 18th century by Antoine Galland.

Again, this connection is enduring, not just between story and story, but in the way we see – and understand - Scheherazade today.

To re-look at Scheherazade anew is to see a woman's life before male-centered customs and interpretations consigned girls and women to second-class citizenship. In a translation by Husain Haddawy from a 14th-century Syrian manuscript,we are told she is a woman who “… had read the books of literature, philosophy and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, and studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and refined."

Fatima Mernissi’s, whose earlier work pointed out how differently those in the East and the West regarded Scheherazade, later wrote “Scheherazade Goes West”, a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the Western female trapped in an invisible socio-cultural harem.

In “When Dreams Travel”, Gita Hariharan allows us a glimpse of the two sisters grown old in the ‘ever after’ that most stories end with, leaving us to wonder, imagine about the everafter place where anything that anyone can imagine is at least as true as all that went before.

Marilyn Jurich's “Scheherazade's Sisters” reminds us of fables, myths, stories of clever and self-sufficient women who demonstrate initiative and courage, turning obstacles into triumphs. She sees them as tricksters in female form, calling them trickstars. The trickstar exposes hypocrisies and stupidities in the social establishment and introduces new ways of seeing and being. Through the trickstar's efforts, the "system" is circumvented or foiled, often enlightened, and usually improved.

Azar Nafisi, while a university professor in Tehran, collected six of her brightest female students in Tehran and began study of a multivolume version of Scheherazade's stories. She saw in the fictional heroine, "who made her world as she talked about it," a woman who used her courage, erudition and wit to face down her own likely death and who, in the process, transformed a kingdom and a king.

The stories Scheherazade wove together hold modern-day writers, and us, in her spell. Not only do her stories enthrall and transport us, but she is a timeless example of a seemingly ‘weaker’ story character who outwitted authority and conventional power – in the most unexpected of ways.

For Scheherazade the choice was between imagination and cruel injustice, between death and story. Through her stories she saved her own life, the life of her people, and the life of the sultan too; without her he would go on being a monster.

Story has the power to transform the monster in us all.

May we learn to use story to heal and empower.
Marguerite Theophil

The traditional story is the product of a whole chain of tellers.
It gives us the distilled wisdom of the culture from which it springs,
filtered over many years of telling and retelling.
Examine a traditional story and you can see
the values of the culture that told it.
The story is shaped by the culture, and in turn,
the culture is shaped by the story.
~ Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis

Alternative Tellings

We watched an old classic again a few days back. Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, that was made in 1950. To me, this is the best illustration of Truth, because at the end of it, we are made strikingly aware of the subjectivity of any of our versions of the truth.

The main story tells of the rape of a woman and the death of a man, presumably by a wandering bandit, and is presented entirely in a series of flashbacks from the perspectives of each of four different narrators.

The ‘holding’ of the story is done through a group of people seeking shelter from a heavy rain storm at Kyoto's crumbling Rashomon gate, as they discuss the recent crime. One of them, a woodcutter, says he was a witness to the crimes.

In each of the four versions of the story, those of the woman, the man, the bandit and the woodcutter, even though the characters and many of the details; there is much that is very different.

In the bandit’s story, he accepts responsibility for the murder but not for the rape, saying that it was an act of mutual consent. The woman's story is that the bandit attacked her, but suggests that she may have been the killer. The dead man's tale, presented through a medium, involves rape and suicide. The witness who says he saw it all, presents a story that weaves in elements from each of the other three, but that does not corroborate any one of the other three stories, leaving the viewer doubting his claim to have seen it all.

As a viewer, trying to make sense of ‘what really happened’ is impossible. You realize that Kurosawa has not made a whodunit; he focuses on something far more disturbingly profound - the inability of any one person to know the truth, no matter how clearly we think we see things. Perspective makes all truth subjective.

Some writers have been drawn to the idea of ‘perspective’ and the shaping of the story. One of my favorites is Donna Jo Napoli, who re-tells fairy tales from other angles. “Beast” has the actual Beast from the well-known Beauty and The Beast as narrator, and the background to his change of form. So too with “ Spinners” the Rumplestiltskin story that moves backwards and forwards in time. Curious about the witch in Hansel and Gretel? “The Magic Circle” paints a different possibility.

C.S. Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces” was the first book I found that dealt with alternative versions, and it was fascinating to read of how Psyche’s sisters saw her story being played out, and how it affected their own lives. My search for more in this genre led me to Howard Jacobsen’s “The Very model of A Man”– in outer form the story of the Biblical character Cain (yes, he who murdered his brother Abel), but a scintillating work on the power of words and language.

There is more. Yukio Mishima sought to enter the mind of the wife of the Maquis de Sade in “Madame Sade” and Kahlil Gibran did this with people who loved and followed Jesus, as well as those who feared and mistrusted him in “Jesus, The Son of Man”.

In Gregory Maguire's “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” and “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” his task is that of questioning stereotypical roles through reinventing and recontextualizing the well-known Wizard of Oz and Cinderella stories.

Women’s voices are often given space through alternative tellings.

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys is a moving and beautiful account of the life of Antoinette Cosway, the fictional character who becomes the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Brontë's older book, Jane Eyre.

In the "Penelopiad", Margaret Atwood retells the familiar story of the Odyssey through the eyes of his long suffering wife Penelope. Under the patient wife waiting and waiting for her husband to return, Atwood, in a clever take on an ancient classical Greek-tragedy form using poetry and song and a chorus of Penelope's slave girls, reveals a biting cynicism about Penelope’s thoughts and attitude that gives a timeless feel to this re-telling.

Alessandro Portelli of the University of Rome La Sapienza, a pioneer in engaged oral history points out that, “Many of the most important stories are true but not accurate.” In memory, he reminds us, facts are reshaped to serve the present.

In many counties there are heated debates about the way history is being taught. The fights are generally about ‘whose version of history’. Maybe we need to become more open to an understanding that no version – however attached we are to it - is ever The Version, and alternative perspectives give us a broader understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

May we learn to make space for tellings that differ from our own.
Marguerite Theophil

As things seem
….. Actually, after all,
things are not quite as real or permanent,
terrible, important or logical as they seem.
~ Joseph Campbell