Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

I spent Saturday afternoon at the Noor Iranian film festival with my friend Johanna to see Nasseredin Shah and His 84 Wives.  The documentary, made by a Norwegian director, combined animation with a photos taken by Nasseredin with the camera he received from Queen Victoria in 1842.  Much of the film centered around political and familial intrigue between the women as they rose and fell in their husband's favor.  (For a brief interlude he preferred a cat to all of them, but it met an untimely end.)

One striking thing about the group photographs of the women, aside from the fact that the photos exist at all, was that it showed a standard of beauty for the time that's markedly different from the one I'm accustomed to.  Although they came from different regions and ethnic groups in and around Persia, many of his beauties were heavyset and most had dark facial hair, with their "mustaches" and "monobrows" being coveted features.  During the Q&A after the film one of the festival organizers said she'd researched this and learned that these traits suggested a woman who would give birth to strong sons. 

This preference is a far cry from modern-day Seattle.  Certainly there are men who fetishize ample women's bodies (many of whom say so in rather tactless ways).  The opposite seems more common though.  Just this week I skimmed a dating profile where a man specified that his future girlfriend's BMI (body mass index) would need to be less than 24, "otherwise don't bother."  (He didn't appear to be particularly fit himself, but she needs to fall in the "normal" category to be considered.  I can't imagine why he's still single.)  His online brothers content themselves with the more straightforward description "slender", the encoded HWP (height weight proportionate) or the euphemistic "takes care of herself."

Another source of ideas about ideals is that's been on my mind lately is Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. I've been reading the Shahrazad stories a few at a time over the summer.  The Penguin edition has an introduction that says the stories owe their origin to three distinct cultures: Indian, Persian and Arab.  "They can be regarded as the expression of the lay and secular imagination of the East in revolt against the austere erudition and religious zeal of Oriental literature generally."

I expected desert tales and was surprised how many shipwrecks and islands there were.  Apart from sailing, mules and camel caravans, travel is expedited by tricking a giant mythological bird called a Roc into carrying you or by calling upon the power of a jinnee.  I was less surprised by the way beautiful women are described.  Here are sisters from The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad ("city of peace"):

p. 243 "A young woman, dressed in rare silks and cloaked in a gold-embroidered mantle of Mosul brocade, stopped before him and gently raised her veil.  Beneath it there showed dark eyes with long lashes and lineaments of perfect beauty..."

p. 244 "...the door was opened by a girl of surpassing beauty.  Her forehead was white as a lily and her eyes were more lustrous than a gazelle's.  Her brows were crescent moons, her cheeks anemones, and her mouth like the crimson ruby on King Solomon's ring.  Her teeth were whiter than a string of pears, and like twin pomegranates were her breasts."

p. 244 "A third girl, slim and exquisitely beautiful, was reclining on the couch.  Her face was radiant as the moon and all the witchcraft of Babylon was in her eyes.  A paragon of Arabian grace, she was like a star twinkling in a cloudless sky or a golden dome shimmering in the night."

I'd like to see a classroom full of young writers have fun with this - perhaps a description of their society's ideal, or a subverted version of it, or a translation of it into more lyrical language...