Arabian Nights
On Saturday April 21st, I attended a performance of Arabian Nights at the Rarig Center on West Bank. I went on a whim with a friend and had no intention of using it for my event write up. In fact, I had no idea that Arabian Nights would even be a potential candidate. But I was surprised with the content of the play having to do with many ideas we discuss in class (Gender, Sex, Stereotypes, Power, etc).
I didn’t have any prior knowledge about the Arabian Nights story. You could say my awareness was very limited (Aladdin, anyone?). I was pleasantly surprised when I found out how dominant the themes of gender, sex and power were in the stories. The basic story is about a ruler who catches his wife in bed with another man, and from that point forward every day will take a virgin from his people, marry her and then proceed to kill heart dawn. This ritual continues every day until he marries a young woman of one of his loyal followers. She tries to use her talent of storytelling to delay her imminent death. Each night until dawn she would tell a story, and end each with a tense cliffhanger or segue way into another story. He agrees to keep her alive for “one more night”, for the sake of finishing the story. This goes on for nearly three years. The performance bounces back and forth from the reality of the young virgin fighting for her life, and the characters of the magical stories she weaves.
Undoubtedly intentional, each story related to the situation that the woman was facing. For example, in one of them she tells the story of a young man who traveled across many lands in search for the lyrics to a song he will give anything to learn. He begs a woman who knows of the song that he would do anything to hear it. The detail of their agreement escapes me, but the song is representational to the storyteller’s father, who waits silently at dawn with her death shawl every day for three years. The ruler refuses to let her speak to him, and vice versa. The silence is comparable to the silence the young man feels in being unable to know the song. In another comic story, she talks about a man on his marriage day who begins to “pass gas” non-stop. He travels through the lands and is known as the man who won’t stop farting. At the end he states, “People have me marked on the calendar, as the year of the fart.” This story relates to how the ruler will be known as the man who murdered virgins, and will likely be marked as so historically.
One of my favorite pieces of the performance was a young woman who was brought to a counsel of great minds in order to be questioned of her knowledge. She knew everything from the heavens to the earth, and was not afraid to express it. Each member of the counsel inquired her of her knowledge, thinking a woman would not be able to hold such wisdom. She proceeded to stump each member, and in return earned their royal robes that represented their knowledge in the sciences, religion, etc. At the end the woman is asked by the king to marry him, for he would be honored in having a wife like her. She turns him down, wanted to not be tied down by a title, and remain to freely live and share her knowledge. I found this piece to be very powerful.
It is important to note that the protagonist was a woman who was able to gain power over the king. It was because of her wisdom and wit that she was able to save her life and indirectly reinforce stories of morality, love, justice and understanding in the mind of the ruler.
After watching the play I realized how many of these themes we discussed in class. Even the roles of sex, gender and power were dominant literature tools when this was originally written.