1001 Nights Cont....

I decided to write my paper on racial inequalities and prejudice in the stories that we had read in class. I really found some of my research to be quite interesting and learned a great deal about how Europeans viewed Middle East culture and some of the issues that sparked racial tension between the two groups. Some of this tension still is present today between Middle Eastern countries and the United States. The follow is an excerpt from the rough draft of my paper:

The infamous One Thousand and One Nights also presents several racial references. When King Shahryar’s younger brother catches his wife in bed with “a black cook of loathsome aspect and foul with kitchen grease and grime” he immediately executes them both. The question I find interesting is, had the man been white, would the same measures been taken. The plot thickens when King Shahryar’s own wife is caught in the same circumstance with “a big slobbering black moor.” It can be argued that the circumstances leading up to both wives execution was simply infidelity. Clearly, though, the issue of racial sexuality is truly more disgraceful than the affair alone. According to Katherine O’Sullivan’s review on Charles Stember’s book Sexual Racism, the “sexual self-image of black men is one of ‘impurity’ and inferiority.” This leads to the conclusion that by committing adultery with a black man, the wives are tainting themselves, which is a far greater disgrace than anything else imaginable. In the eyes of the kings, the only way to remove the stain from their reputation is by execution.

It was also interesting to read a few more stories from 1001 Nights as well.
The first one I read was The King's Daughter and the Ape. This has to be the most provocative story in the entire collection. It discusses the Sultans daughter, who has a sex addiction that can only be fulfilled by the black slaves. When her father discovers that she is keeping a black slave locked in her room, he plans to execute her. She escapes only to have he slave killed by a butcher who misunderstands her circumstance. He plans to replace the black man as her sex slave, but cannot perform at the level to fulfill her. He meets with an old woman and with a series of herbal remedies, they are able to fix the daughters sexual addiction. All in all the story was pretty bizarre and sexually explicit.

The other story I read was called The Miller and His Wife. This story was about a Miller who had an evil wife and a thing for the guy next door, who cannot stand her. The miller has a dream about where a pile of riches is buried, and tells his wife about it, making her promise to keep it a secret. The wife, in turn, tells the neighbor, hoping to win his favor. The two go and dig up the treasure, but greed overcomes the neighbor, and he kills the miller's wife, burying her where the treasure was. The next morning the miller comes out to where the ass rotates the mill wheel and tries to get him to move, but when he doesn't because he knows the millers wife is buried below him. The miller becomes enraged and kills the ass. He then discovers that his treasure is gone, his wife and ass are dead, and is saddened by all of it.