Re-Imagining Shahrazad: Hanan Al-Shaykh and a Feminism of Difference

Re-Imagining Shahrazad:Hanan Al-Shaykh and a Feminism of Difference Erin Amann Holliday-Karre (bio) In the history of literary scholarship, there is perhaps no character as discussed and criticized as the narrator from One Thousand and One Nights. In the West, she has been the subject of fiction by authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Salman Rushdie.1 In the Middle East, her name has become almost synonymous with any female writer of 'Arab' descent, from Moroccan feminist and author Fatima Mernissi to Egyptian feminist, author, and physician Nawal El Saadawi;2 from Egyptian-American Islamic feminist Leila Ahmed3 to Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh (to name only a few).4 Because of the fact that Shahrazad continues to live on, in scholarship and fiction of the twenty-first century, particularly in relation to the 'Arab' woman writing, the debate over whether or not she constitutes what we could call a 'feminist' has become the subject of endless discussion.5 It is a conversation that goes back to at least 1927 when French author Marie Lahy-Hollebecque, author of Féminisme de Schéhérazade: Le Révélation des Mille et Une Nuits, praised the Islamic world for being so free from prejudice as to assign the "rôle éminent" (eminent role) of the narrator of The Nights to a woman (17).6 Since 1927, however, scholars have become wary of attributing the word 'feminist' to the narrator of The Nights. Three related issues appear to eclipse such analysis in feminist readings of The Nights, issues that prove, according to Daniel E. Beaumont, that "Shahrazad is not a feminist" (61).7 The first issue relates to traditional European translations in End Page 155 which we lose Shahrazad's voice to an unnamed narrator who describes a montage of the various dresses worn by Shahrazad and her sister, reasserting Shahrazad as an object rather than the subject of The Nights. Suzanne Gauch, for example, concedes that "Shahrazad saves not only her own life but the lives of countless women, employing her narrative skills to alter those representations of women as deceitful beauties dominated by physical desire" (x). However, Gauch goes on to argue that "Shahrazad is neither a subaltern nor a western feminist" because in every European translation Shahrazad is inevitably relegated to the "silent shadows" (xiii–xiv). The second issue stems from the fact that Shahrazad's tale ends with the birth of three sons. Fedwa Malti-Douglas argues that "the closure stands in contrast with the somewhat feminist implications of the prologue of the frame story" because "the presence of the children" at the end of The Nights "saves patriarchy" (Woman's Body, Woman's Word 27–28).8 And, finally, the diversity of the tales that fall within the boundaries of the frame narrative forestall any gender-based conclusions. Susanne Enderwitz argues that, in its "inclination to include all kinds of stories," The Nights should be celebrated as "the integrative ability of a woman Shahrazad" (194). But even as she champions Shahrazad's narrative inclusivity, like many contemporary scholars, Enderwitz stops just shy of calling Shahrazad a feminist. Felicity Nussbaum, however, urges contemporary feminists to take a page from the book of Shahrazad, the "crafty Persian Sultaness," to avoid getting trapped in our own narrative: "We might instead consider once again bringing to the foreground the terms that dictate our feminist interpretations" (86). I would argue that such a reconsideration of the terms that dictate feminism is at the heart of Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh's One Thousand and One Nights: A New Re-Imagining (2011). While al-Shaykh is a prolific and well-known writer in the Arab world, and also the subject of monographs published by Western academics (see, for example, Miriam Cooke's War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War), A New Re-Imagining is al-Shaykh's first fictional text written in English. Based on her telling 2013 interview with NPR, it would seem that al-Shaykh's decision to reframe The Nights for a contemporary English-speaking audience indicates her own intervention into the discourse on feminism, scholarship, and...