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tahar ben jalloun
principle is hidden there:
stories in exchange for life.
Literature and life. Literature
is life earned day by day
until the thousandth and
first night when the woman
triumphs over the cruelty
of the prince and saves her
head, as well as the head of
all woman in the town.
Therefore, if the prince’s
“boss” had been able to
perform and keep sufficient
stiffness to please his wife,
there would have been no
cheating and no murder
rituals every morning until
S cheher azade showed
up. Scheherazade, whose
mouth gave birth to some
of the cruelest, most racist,
atrociously misogynistic,
wicked, and ambivalent
stories, and not placing the
most extravagant sexual
practices to the side, was
for a long time disapproved
of by Arabic morality who
cursed the work. Her stories
relegated morality into the
safekeeping of censorship.
You could say wi thout
fear that if the prince of
Baghdad’s penis had been
as exceptional as the slave’s,
the world literature canon
would be deprived of one of
its major works…