Who is Shaharazad in the 21st Century?
Surviving the king's court means spinning stories and making art.
In Naguib Mahfouz’ Arabian Nights and Days, a breathtaking novel set in Mamluk-era Cairo eerily similar to the dictatorial dystopia of the current-day Middle East, Shahryar, the sultan, asks his queen about her true opinion of him. Shaharazad, who wove a tale every night to escape being executed the next morning, is excellent at thinking quickly on her feet and stroking her husband’s ego. But in Mahfouz’ novel, which reenacts the stories of the 1001 Nights (more accurately known as أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ Alif laylah wa-laylah), Shahryar seeks wisdom and salvation, which means confronting the inevitable remorse for killing hundreds of innocent girls and women in a convoluted revenge for his ex-wife’s infidelity.
“The truth is that your body approaches while your heart turns away,” he tells Shaharazad, who for once cannot hide—even if she tries—her secret contempt for her husband. “Don’t lie, and don’t be afraid. You have lived with a man who was steeped in the blood of martyrs.”
As women, who come from marginalized backgrounds, who have lived in Muslim-majority countries, who navigate white-majority spaces in diaspora where we are rarely considered equals, who are born and raised in communities with traditions persisting for millennia, how many times have we approached in our bodies even as our hearts turned away?
This kind of double consciousness becomes a mainstay of our lives, a part of our souls and learned patterns of behavior. No individualized attempts to break free can ever truly (or completely) transform the world in which we live. Rationally, we can unlearn the way in which our childhoods and the brutal experience of coming to life as a woman has wired us, but we still have to go outside and face the shame the world projects onto us. We still have to feel that hard pang of nervousness in our guts. The world as it exists will continue to exist. Attempts of escapism are imaginary and short-lived. Even if we cannot make our peace with the world, the violence of sacrifice and compromise still etches its permanent scars onto our bodies.
Nobody knew this better than Shaharazad. She was a storyteller, a dilettante, a master manipulator. She was a woman on a mission, stepping up to be Shahryar’s wife with the near-certainty of death, but wanting to save the women who’d be murdered if she didn’t try to sway the sultan using her wits alone. She had the audacity to believe she could talk herself out of anything. She was a double agent, loyal only to herself (and by implication, all the women who had once been in her position) in a system that cannibalized her body, but daring to survive in it anyway. She was the original content creator, inventing 1001 stories for 1001 nights until her husband finally accepted her as his queen.
Did he accept her for who he thought she was, or for who she really was?
That trickery, that ambiguity, is a constant negotiation in the life of a woman who exists in two realms—the image of respectability and responsibility she must project to her family, the outside world and a romantic partner, and her interiority of self and deepest desires, which remain hidden. And if they ever appear, it is only in flickers—disappearing as quickly as they came.
If those desires are revealed, much less acted upon, the possible result is social conflagration, which must be avoided at all costs.
As such, these desires must be sublimated, as Freud would say, or contained and managed as the late Moroccan feminist writer Fatima Mernissi discerned in her analysis of Muslim women. And this isn’t to say a woman’s external self and interiority don’t intersect, but that slippages will exist (especially as the world turns increasingly right-wing, doubling down on its most vicious impulses in a heady embrace of fascism), and that discrepancies have always existed.
In this lifetime, freedom is elusive, and our lives are defined by a series of compromises we make in order to continue living. ‘Compromises’ can also mean sacrifices, especially if you are a brown and/or Muslim woman, and even if you are neither, as this schematic has a universal truth to it.
Leaving the paragon of marriage, or family, or communal bonds means exposing ourselves to the world beyond, which is hostile to single women. The civilizing pretenses of the West are not any better. For white people, we exist as an exoticized curiosity at best, and a faceless inconvenience at worst.
We are fetishized and brutalized, no different from the bellydancer in Gustave Flaubert’s travelogues of his visits to the Mediterranean. The bellydancer of Esna is a famed beauty, and a sex toy for Flaubert, who, as Edward Said writes in Orientalism, “never spoke for herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her.” She didn’t even have a proper name - Kuchuk Hanem means ‘little lady’ in Turkish.
So where exactly does that lead us? Embracing the contradictions of this subjectivity, of modernity and tradition, of private versus public, of perpetual pain versus steady healing, and of heart and body, is the magic key to the richness of our experience. Will we ever be able to understand what any of this means? Will we ever learn the secrets of this contradiction?
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