Chapter 11: Storytelling

“My djinn [genie] told me, when they come together in the realm of Djinn, they tell each other stories. Stories are like breath to them. They make meaning. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘That’s just how it is with us [humans].’ Each story we tell is a fragment in an endless shape-shifting mosaic.”

Alithea (Tilda Swinton), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Imagine if your life depended on your ability to tell an engaging story. That was the plight of Scheherazade, the teller of the famous 1,001 tales of Persian legend. As the tale goes, king Shahryar had a wife who betrayed him, which made him so mistrustful of women that he married a new wife every night, and then he had her beheaded the next morning. When it was Scheherazade’s turn, she knew how to keep herself alive: tell a story with a cliffhanger ending, which was so compelling that Shahryar put off her execution until he heard how the story turned out. As soon as she wrapped up the first tale the next night, she immediately began another one, leaving that one unfinished. She told a thousand stories in a row (including the story of Aladdin and the lamp), and by the time she finally ran out of stories to tell, the king had fallen in love with her and spared her life.