Re- writing the Storyteller: al- Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights (2011)

Abstract

This chapter will specifically analyse Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights as an example of postcolonial feminine writing in terms of how this text re-creates long-standing Shahrazadean tales for contemporary readers, with a distinct focus on misogyny or violence against women. Here, I aim to locate postcolonial feminine writing within Shahrazad’s narrative. I will interrogate how al-Shaykh re-imagines these tales as a way of re-forming social and gender norms and therefore imagines new ways of existing that do not conform to binary oppositions. Indeed, I argue that this chapter exemplifies how postcolonial feminine writing works with Shahrazad signifying the very figure of this concept. This chapter captures the very function of Shahrazad within the technique of re-imagining how we think and write social norms and hierarchies. This chapter demonstrates Shahrazad’s function in the text as a character, a narrator and narrative technique for contemporary postcolonial writers. In doing so, this novel does not simply replicate the tales from 1001 Nights but re-formulates these tales as the basis of transformation of these social and gender norms.