Disoriental negar djavadi6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() ‘These pages won’t be linear,’ says narrator Kimiâ Sadr, a young woman whose family fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to settle in France. There is already a hint of Scheherazade in the prologue of the 2018 novel Disoriental, by Iranian–French author Négar Djavdi (translated from the French by Tina Kover). We can imagine the King (and the reader) greedy to hear the ending of each story, the storyteller using the equivalent of a ‘cliff hanger’ to keep the narrative-and herself-alive. The stories were gathered from across Arabic, Egyptian, Indian, Persian, and Mesopotamian folklore and literature so we can imagine Scheherazade using suspense as a narrative device to retell a range of stories that were far from linear or cohesive. ![]() In the seminal Middle Eastern work One Thousand and One Nights, noblewoman Scheherazade-in order to avoid being executed-tells the King a new story every night, postponing the conclusion each time so that he keeps her alive in order to hear the end. ![]()
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