The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah wa Laylah) or The Arabian Nights
Since childhood, I have been passionate about reading, searching, and writing about anything. However, it brings the books to essential places to be adoring, like worship. But during that time, I found some well-known science, history, and art history books written deficient based on needing more facts and data. For some, such a narrative would be a more prejudiced opinion than today's scientific approach. That's why I pick one of the narrative books for this week.
In my artwork which is shown as a series of travel notes and observations, we as the human race will never have a permanent place or a chance to return to our home in the world of identities, cultures, and endless migrations.
The early collectors of the world were travelers. Likewise, early storytellers were narrators of fairytales. After all, fairytales were human beings' attempts to escape the fears of myths. I could define myself as a narrator due to my research experience and collector of objects, stories, and fairy tales.
My recent series is a collection of chronicles of travelers based on the generally accepted assumption that in a world of constant migration, a permanent residence and a return to home are impossible. "Home" disappeared a long time ago for me.
As in any artwork, a good fairytale analysis is limited to people's perceptions. A good fairytale has multi layers, multi-dimensions, and specified criteria. It does not serve only one doctrine or moral school of teaching. It keeps a door open for an explanation beyond time and space.
It forces us to think abstractly by transmitting things through absurd and meaningless expressions. Fairy tales encompass the multiple dimension of the human spirit and signal a free soul beyond the material existence of the body.
Storytelling has affected me since an early age. It can punch holes into the extraordinary, entertaining, mysterious, and stratified world. This became the only way for me to transcend all cultural ghettos and to see others from the holes.
I started to write and tell stories when I was seven years old. I was telling stories about my imaginary friends to the other kids. I was an introverted child, but I always had profound idealsand emotions. I never wanted to write anything about myself, but writing fiction and telling stories is an s way to describe my autobiographical journey with different characters.
Imagination is the home that you can bring with you wherever you go. Stories can pass over all boundaries, like "The Tales of Nasreddin Hodja" and "The Tales of Rumi, Seems of Tebriz," which were very popular worldwide. Good stories take us above and beyond where we live. Levels keep together all tiny pieces and glue the collective memories. We can find so many good examples from the history of humankind. One example that has affected me is "The Thousand and One Nights" stories.During the 8th century, Baghdad was a center of learning and trading. The city was a landmark for world civilization as a meeting point for different cultures, and because of this cross-cultural structure created a collection of beautiful narrative stores.
It is an excerpt from the book's first part, which serves as an introduction, and other stories are followed. All accounts start with the phrase, "Once Upon A Time," which dissolves the border between real and imaginary.
Though each collection features different stories, they are all centered around the frame story of sultan Shahrayar and his last wife, Scheherazade.His first wife was unfaithful to him; Shahrayar kills her and, with a broken heart, begins to marry a different woman each night, killing her the following morning to prevent further betrayal. Scheherazade, his vizier's daughter, has the plan to end his violence. She marries Shahrayar and then decides to tell him a story that night. However, she didn't finish the story for him to be curious. He chose to spare her to hear the rest of the stories. The next evening, she ends that story and then begins another, following the same pattern for 1,001 nights (it is not an exact number) until Shahrayar has a change of heart for all women.Each story covers different topics and subjects, such as the geographical features of a place, the population of a city, the advancements of the naval, trade etiquettes, and rules and roles of religion in society. One thousand nights is a representative number for an infinite number of stories.Scheherazade finds a way to save herself from being executed by telling the stories. Stories maintain Shahrayar's curiosity and ambition to listen to another one until the next night. In other words, the level and narrative ability bring life and save her life.Stories in the book are tragic because it based on despairs and disappointments. Despite that, there are still some sparkles of hope. Scheherazade tells the story of different countries, kings and their decrees, loves and lovers, entirely emotional separations and betrayals by pointing a moral. She injects some hope by creating stories that are her fiction.
A woman shows wisdom and sacrifice that instructs the ruler.In almost all of the stories, justice is a central component. "Typically, justice involves someone's execution; this may seem extreme to us, but the execution was a common way to address injustice and unfairness. However, justice is handed out extremely inconsistently throughout the stories. Execution is a way to preserve justice in the stories." (Thousand and One Nights 1/1, p.87)Everyone who reads the stories realizes they are not alone in their experiences. In history or at an unknown time, an individual was in the same situation and condition physically and mentally. It gives us a magnifier to look closer at others' s life before us.
This collection of stories is filled with magic, mythical creatures, and strange occurrences. For instance, genies are an important part of the fantasy, adding an air of power and magic. Also, throughout his voyages, Sinbad comes across an array of mythical creatures, including the roc, the giant, and the Old Man of the Sea. These various fantastical elements add to the adventure and mystique of the stories, particularly in the case of genies; readers imagine these things to be accurate.In one thousand nights stories, fairy tales start with the literal phrase 'there was a one, one exists.' This phrase connects space and matter with a broader look at the universe since it combines different periods with relativity.
The ambiguity of the beginning of time also refers to the singularity in Quantum mechanics. Similarly, the emphasis on the uncertainty of time (it used to exist, but it stopped living) by such expressions in fairy tales of Anatolia underlines the singularity in Quantum mechanics. There is an indication that things that we believe in their existence could be non-existent. All comes from nothing and returns tonothing. As reality is symbolized by 1, non-existent is by 0, and the two are used together to support the argument that life has not any value by itself.As humans, we are small samples of the universe from micro to macro, carrying the same material as the stars.
The creation of the universe, which is nothing more than substantial light bundles and energy, is included in stories, fairy tales, and almost all resources.Some rhymes frequently repeated in fairy tales, stories, and legends, such as "While I was swinging my grandma's cradle", "mom gave birth to my grandfather," and "my dad had fallen from his cradle," lead to the emergence of the possibility of transfer of knowledge, transmission in time of certain symbols and even materials. Such a theory supports the assumption that the events of the past, including wars and disasters, could be inklings of similar events in the future. There could even be a possibility that what happened in history is the footprints of our future ancestors in the past.
The perception of time in terms of past and future relations has been subject to debate.West has met an exotic world he never encountered before, where eroticism, platonic love, magic, genes, and magic carpet are defined and perceived differently. This unfamiliar handling perception of time, space, and happening abolished the physical limit of what the visible is. In other words, the story is timeless. Proof of this timeless feature of the stories is that she restarted the stories at the end of the book. With this recycling, she guaranteed to stay alive.It has inspired many humanistic fields, such as music, architecture, dance, opera, and literature.
The Thousand and One Nights echoed so profoundly in the West that it became an indispensable part of Western Culture. Authors and thinkers are listed here to get inspiration from it: Haruki Murakami, Voltaire, Dore, Dulak, Matisse, Karsakow, Salman Rustu, Hafiz, Gothe, Flaubert, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, etc. These inherited influences created synergy and culture in the following generations to create art and piece of work.I love to see an inquiry into the interactions over time between the West and East.These nexuses are the essence of my work. I symbolized these nexuses literally in my artworks. The material I used in my works, such as knots, strings, ropes, rocks, and stones, is connected according to this metaphoric concept. It created freedom in time and space when I tried to create art. I have a perfect main theme idea for my ZigZag Time Traveling series.