There is much that is fascinating in the famous 1001 Nights. Reading Richard Burton's late 19th Century translation (1885-1888) I found the representation of Africans troubling. For instance in the framing story of "King Shahryar and his Brother" there is a racist depiction of two Africans, "a big slobbering blackamoor" and a "black cook of loathsome aspect" both of whom appear as lovers or sexual partners of the wives of the sultans. Not only were the descriptions clearly racist, and the Africans described as deceitful and lustful (though the wives were certainly their willing partners!), but they are positioned in the text so that the very idea that the wife should "make love" with an African becomes especially abhorrent.
I wonder to what extent these portrayals are Burton's doing, and how much is in the original. I know that the Arabic and Turkish empires did take slaves from Africa for many centuries in the Arab slave trade, and that were at war with Africans from the subsahara for centuries. (Indeed, that kind of struggle could still be seen to be going on in Sudan and Darfur.) I am curious about these political relations of power play into the existence of the stereotyping... perhaps going back to the 15th Century when the tales were composed.
4 comments:
It never occurred to me that the racist comments directed toward the blacks would have been Burton's doing. I suppose to check this one would have to return to some original sources. It may be the case however that the middle easterners did not view the African's highly. I don't know off the top of my head how developed any nations in Africa were at that time, however in the "The City of Brass" the foreigners they find "live in caves, and were naked like beasts". There may have just been no developed societies in Africa and the Middle Easterners had their own racisms.
If you remember the third voyage of Sindbad I talked about in class today, there was an ogre that killed many of Sindbad's crew. The story details the Ogre as "...a huge creature in the likeness of a man, black of colour, tall and big of bulk, as he were a great date-tree, with eyes like coals of fire and eye-teeth like boar’s tusks and a vast big gape like the mouth of a well. Moreover, he had long loose lips like camel’s, hanging down upon his breast and ears like two Jarms27 falling over his shoulder-blades and the nails of his hands were like the claws of a lion." It may be just me, but it seems as though the author of this story may be exaggerating his disgust for slaves of the time.
Oh I forgot that later in the story more ogre's come, the text says "...behold, up came the blackamoor with other two as they were Ghuls, fouler and more frightful than he," I find it interesting that he calls them "blackamoor".
There were developed societies in Africa, you moron
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