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

The joys and benefits of personal narrative

Working with Story has endless possibilities. Personal Narrative - stories from our own everyday lives - is one aspect of Storywork.

Often we imagine that to be a storyteller, we need to find stories only in books or other traditional sources. But stories from our own lives, telling of joys, sorrows, challenges, achievements, successes and recoveries can do so much for us as well. It has been said that personal histories provide a “golden thread of awareness” in us, helping us know, remember, reflect, question, and understand ourselves and the world around us.

Personal storytelling builds groups and communities.
We often get judgmental when we do not know people well; when we know someone's story, we can't help but understand them more, if not actively like them. It doesn't matter if we are different culturally, financially or generationally - our stories enrich each others’ lives.

Personal storytelling creates networks of support and encouragement.
People who have gone through the same illnesses or problems, find relief and release through the sharing of their stories. They realize they are not alone; perhaps even that others have bigger problems, and also that there could be hope through all this suffering. It can also teach us to count our blessings, to empathize and to reach out.

Personal Storytelling provides us with options and solutions.
Sometimes, listening to steps others have taken can show us alternative ways of behaving, or gives us options to choose from, and often gives us courage too.

Personal stories help us replace negative interpretations with positive ones.
Some stories about ourselves that we continue to carry have been feeding us with damaging or unhelpful information. These stories need to be first told, then left behind, to be replaced with future positive stories. Messages in these stories that say "you can't" can be replaced with those that affirm "I can". This makes it much easier to live out of the new telling.

Personal storytelling can help younger people to go through life’s passages.
My friend Carolyn created a special book for young Lina , then 12, that wasn’t only filled with information; she had a group of us women all write our own first menstruation stories that included the fears, the anticipation. Lina, now 30, still treasures this very personal gift and says she will share it with her two young daughters.

Personal storytelling can bond us intergenerationally.
Alright, we have all known – or have been - adults who have told stories about our childhood and had the listeners roll back their eyes way into their sockets in disbelief (the more polite ones, anyway!). But how about a story ‘exchange’? Children and adults can come together and tell and listen to each others’ stories. And it needn’t always be about how good or studious or kind or generous we used to be…

Personal storytelling helps us know each other better.
I am not just talking of those who have just met – old friends and long-time couples too often can discover stories and events they have not talked of before – funny, sad, embarrassing, learningful – profound or just plain silly. Recently, a women’s group I am part of, and who have known each other for many years, shared ‘new’ pieces of our lives that have made us realize that we are all so multifaceted, and there is no end to getting to know each other more deeply – it just takes time and loving awareness.

Personal storytelling can help create a precious, enduring gift.
A woman I know collected family recipes from her mother, grandmothers, aunts and grandaunts, adding a personal anecdote/story and a photograph from each of their lives, and had a book printed for each of the twenty-six young women in her extended family.

Personal storytelling is healing and releasing.
There are times when having told and released our story, we are free to let go and move on. Isak Dinesen wrote, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” This does not necessarily involve speaking it out to another person. Individuals have often written their own stories as a myth or fairy tale, or created paintings and sculptures that allow them to now step forward with their lives.

May you find ways to share your personal stories.

Marguerite Theophil

Practicing and protecting stories
The telling of our stories is as basic, important and necessary

as our personal freedoms, yet, sadly, also as threatened.
When not practiced and protected, stories are lost to obscurity
and knowledge itself is placed in jeopardy.

~ Waddie Mitchell

Healing re-tellings

Because we are motivated to make decisions and to take action, consciously or not, by the stories we repeatedly tell or hear – we need to be attentive to just what those stories are.
Stories we tell about ourselves and that other people tell about us deeply affect how we live.

Telling our stories of pain and sorrow once or twice is healing; telling them again and again is allowing that one part of our lives to determine how we see ourselves, or sadly, what we focus on or expect our lives to be like in the future.

Sometimes the healing re-tellings come from outside, like in the story of Opalanga, whose story is told by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, author of that engaging book on Story, ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’. Unusually tall and slender, as a child Opalanga was teased, and also told that the gap between her front teeth was the sign of a liar. However, as an adult she visited the Gambia and there found some of her ancestral people, many of whom were very tall and slender, with gaps between their front teeth. This gap, they called ‘sakaya yallah’ or ‘opening of God’; to them it was a sign of wisdom.

Pinkola-Estes comments on the consequences of such revision: "... stories which began as experiences both oppressive and depressive end with joy and a strong sense of self. Opalanga understands that her height is her beauty, her smile one of wisdom, and that the voice of God is always close to her lips". She offers this as an example of how easily we become ‘caught in a story’ and that the toxicity of attributions is even more disruptive and destructive if they are told to us early and authoritatively.

Often with young children and teenagers, while it may be counter-productive to have them change the details of what has already happened to them, it is useful to have them re-create or re-context outcomes, or possible new endings.

A young girl who worked with me for over two years first told me that her name meant “Clouds” and that clouds “made the sky dark and unhappy, bringing destruction whenever they appeared.” An older family member had cruelly repeated that her father had lost his business the day this daughter was born! As we worked over many months, among other things with yoga, story and with symbols, drawing and painting, her clouds now and then were less grey and menacing. Later, the bottom of the page had a few fragile green things growing, a bird or two became visible in the sky, and much later her story was: “Clouds give welcome shade, they bring life-giving rain, they can make people happy.”

Stories – personal or cultural – shape our perceptions. In fact, stories of the collective very easily slide into propaganda and dogma when viewed from one single perspective. In truth, it is often said, “the people who tell the story shape the culture.”

Historically, many re-told stories slip from pain and suffering into a perpetuating of hate and reprisal, as we see in so many cultural and religious or ethnic clashes the world over today. And ridiculously, the same people who keep telling those stories of hate and revenge on Monday, on Tuesday talk of creating peace!

Healing our lives and world does not mean an avoidance of talking suffering and abuse; it does involve also telling of how we found – or are going to find – the strength to rise above this and how we want to put an end to generating such a cruel and endlessly retaliatory world.

May you tell your stories in such a way that they to bring healing to yourselves, to the world.
Marguerite Theophil

Power over the story
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives,
the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it,
joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless,
because they cannot think new thoughts.

~Salman Rushdie