Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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…

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