Once upon a time – or maybe that wasn’t the way all stories necessarily had to start in days of yore – there was a man who became the Sultan after the death of his beloved brother. The Sultan discovered that his wife had been betraying him, and he killed her and all her ladies-in-waiting. From that day on, he decided that he would have avenged himself of the female gender and of love itself, by marrying a young woman every day. He would have lain with her at night and the woman would not have seen the light of the next day. Many women followed one after the other, they were brought to the Sultan, they became his brides and then they were dead by the following day. This succession of young women went on until one fine day when the daughter of the Grand Vizier, Scheherazade, both beautiful as well as intelligent, offered voluntarily to marry the Sultan in order to save all of the other women of her people. Her father was horrified by such a plan, but his daughter was so determined and sure of herself  that her father was unable to oppose her decision.
Scheherazade implored her sister to come to the Sultan’s palace on the night of her wedding. She intended to tell her a last story before leaving her forever. This was exactly what she did, and the Sultan did not deny the two sisters their last wish. Scheherazade thus began her story. The tale caught the attention and pricked the curiosity of the Sultan to such a degree that he decided to save her life. Day after day, story after story, child after child spurred the Sultan on to becoming once again reconciled with womankind and heal that open wound.

This is a story in a story,  like those young people and the plague in Florence told by Boccaccio in the Decameron, or the thirty pilgrims headed towards Canterbury, in the eponymous Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. As a matter of fact, Pasolini had dedicated his Trilogia della Vita – “Trilogy of Life” – to these three masterpieces of meta-narrative literature.
Why does meta-narration fascinate us and intrigue us so much? Perhaps it stems from our spasmodic need for confirmation and acceptance by other people, or might it merely come down to a simple flaunting of ourselves and a touch of narcissism? The narrator’s incursions (although this might be a futile comment to make) turn a written text into something that is closer to us and more captivating. We might talk about a bigger picture or about astrology but when we turn directly towards the reader a different sort of relationship starts up. Don’t you agree with me? What do you think about it? How would you use the power behind a pen, or a typewriter, or, indeed, the QWERTY keyboard, if you knew that you had an audience before you full of people who were ready and willing to answer you? Is this what social media platforms have now become – our one-to-one relationship with a public that is able to see, at the same time, our outbursts, our inspirations and each and every detail that it considers worthy of being shared?

I might well be anachronistic, but I preferred Boccaccio and Chaucer and the Middle Eastern Homer of the One Thousand and One Nights. Creating in order to leave a mark as well as communicating through art so as not to die here and now but to be able to go on and on in time. These are megalomaniac concepts which are often old and worn. Yet, I ask myself: what memory will we have of a post, of a story or of a reel compared to what a poem might leave to us, or a novel, a piece of humanity that we can see in person, that we can touch and that we can caress and cry over? This is what happened to me when I read Les Misérables or the works of Dickens. When I reflected upon the opportunity to approach the One Thousand and One Nights, I thought, OK, I’ll have to look closely at the issue of women, of violence against women. It might not however be easy to avoid banalities. Much like saying that I have always believed that the essence of being a woman is not having to demonstrate that we are different but that we are all the same and so deserve the same sort of treatment. Right? I am teaching my son, Orlando, that his mother can ride a tractor, she can cut the wood for the fire, and she can find relaxation in cleaning the home. His father, too, can cook, he can draw, and he can talk about international economics. There is no one thing that is only for men or only for women. Each one of us can do what we are good at doing and that we want to do or help to do for the sake of a smooth family life. Unfortunately, we will still be, for some time yet, accompanied by the struggles ahead of us. In reality, our manifest equality has in no way yet become solidified. What is courage today? Is it different from the courage of yesteryear? Perhaps it is about fighting with all our inner strengths to achieve our ambitions, our desires and, even better, the desires and the needs of others? The proto-feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, was a courageous woman. Rosa Parks and Virginia Woolf, too. However, this is not the place for concocting lists. Courage is also perhaps about telling a story and about listening. Despite all else.

When I was a little girl, it was my father who told me stories and I adored listening to him for hours and hours. I never wanted to fall asleep. Sometimes, he was the one who nodded off when he was reading me those stories. The power of stories, of those once upon a times, of entering into an imaginary parallel world, or however a world that is different from your own, is a journey in itself. It’s a journey that every child and every adult should try since it opens up the mind, it makes it more fertile, and it enables one of those rarest and most precious things germinate. One of those things that we must never risk losing: our imaginations.

Scheherazade put both imagination and creativity at the service of a generation of women, in order to save them from such a brute, as indeed the Sultan was, and to give them their freedom.
In One Thousand and One Nights there is much mention of amorous disillusion, at every single layer of society, of genies and magic lamps, of burlesque stories and more traditional portrayals. Let yourselves be carried away on a flying carpet and marvel at everything you see.

“It’s such an honour to marry the Sultan. The greatest honour a woman may aspire to.”
“It’s a death sentence!”
“I am sure that thanks to me he’ll change his mind.”
“I’m terrified, I don’t want to get married.”
“I am ready to be sacrificed.”
“How can I be saved?”

It was the multitude of women who had lost their lives that prompted Scheherazade to save all the rest. Or perhaps, had Scheherazade been the first to die, so many more women would then have died so fruitlessly.
First of all, however, why did these women have to die? Why could the Sultan decide upon the life or death of another living being after having been himself wounded by a wife who had betrayed him with the eunuchs?

The figure of Scheherazade has for centuries fascinated the West and it has indeed inspired the creation of each and every art form. With intelligence and the power of the word, Scheherazade went against the traditional role of the voluptuous and passive odalisque described by the West. For it was she who constructed an independent female character. She was highly courageous and very much the creator of her own salvation as well as the salvation of other women. Lastly, she was able to reawaken the sovereign’s amorous sentiments.
Thanks to the power of the word and thanks to her creativity she saved a whole generation.

OPEN SESAME!