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Abstract
The frame story of the pan-oriental literary legacy, the Arabian Nights, involving the gripping and near-tragic nuptial exchanges between Sultan Shahriyar and Queen Scheherazade (Shahrazade), has provoked engaging literary and critical responses around the world – many of them feeding into enduring orientalist, postcolonial and feminist polemics. This article argues that Assia Djebar’s 1987 novel A Sister to Scheherazade proposes an idealized Arab-Islamic sisterhood that deviates from both patriarchy and polygamy, and dominant, reductive representations of woman as other. Ironically, such reductive perspectives have been encouraged by elements of the Algerian female world that are largely traditional. The article argues that the main function of the Scheherazade trope within the feminist/postcolonial framework of A Sister to Scheherazade is to contest the heroine’s implied reliance on male benevolence, while not absolutely writing off the male individual as necessarily woman’s enemy.
Notes
1. In another version of this story, Dunyazad was secretly made to hide under the royal bed all night, so she could wake up Scheherazade at dawn. Scheherazade’s continuation of her unfinished story over a thousand-and-one nights meant that Dunyazad had to repeat her under-bed assignment at the risk of her own life.
2. The “Algerian Quartet” includes L’amour, La Fantasia (Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade; 1985); Ombre Sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade; 1987); Loin De Medine (Far from Medina; 1990); and Vaste Est La Prison (So Vast the Prison; 1995).
3. Djebar’s reading of Scheherazade’s “terms of deliverance” here radically challenges the rather simplistic manner in which many liberal and feminist writers, including those of Arab extraction such as Mahfouz (Citation[1982] 1995), have embraced and appropriated it.