In my adult life, I am a storyteller, artist, and educator in Hawaiian culture and arts. As a girl, I had terrible asthma. There was really no good treatment at the time, so many nights I sat up in bed with a steam pot of Vicks Vaporub beside me to ease my lungs as I struggled to breathe. My mother taught me to read on those painful nights, and I worked my way through stacks of books. “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights” was among my favorites and I traveled with Aladdin and Sinbad, and on the magical ebony horse. I eased the pain in my chest by living within the lush illustrations of Arthur Rackham and Walter Crane. When I was adventuring with Aladdin and his kind, I did not hurt.
Where to find me:
Leilehua’s class is titled “Decolonizing Aladdin”:
The handout can be downloaded by clicking this link.
Authorship of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp is, today, a controversial subject among scholars who study such things. What we do know is that is not part of the original canon of 1001 Nights. It, and many other tales, were added by Antoine Galland at the behest of his publisher. We do know that Anṭūn Yūsuf Ḥannā Diyāb (اَنْطون يوسُف حَنّا دِياب), a Syrian, met with Galland and shared many stories with him. We do not know how closely Galland kept to the stories Diyāb shared. Galland’s version, and the English translations of the tale, are rife with orientalism, anti-semitism, and xenopnobia.
In my presentation, I am not going to address these issues, however. What I am going to address is the Western assumption that although the author repeatedly cites China as the setting, the tale cannot be set in China because Aladdin is described as Muslim, and the city in which he dwells has what some critics have called, “a mishmash of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures” which supposedly shows that the city is made up, and that the storyteller knows nothing of China. If such a one admits to Muslim presence in China, the excuse is made that one cannot expect a Syrian storyteller to know the geography and history of Chinese cities.
I am going to address this by positing that:
1) If the city is in the Taklamakan portion of the Silk Routes it will, indeed, be a Chinese city, predominantly Muslim, with a mishmash of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. Virtually any Middle Eastern or Asian merchant—and Diyāb’s dream was to be a cloth merchant—would have knowledge of the Silk Routes. Such knowledge would have been common to merchants dealing in Silk Route goods for at least a millennium before Diyāb’s time. To not hold such knowledge would make as much sense as for an importer of Chinese goods today to not know what ports their goods were shipped from. Then, as now, customs, duties, taxes, passports, purchase orders, and invoices all applied to (legally) imported goods and those who transported them. In fact, such paperwork, whether on bamboo slips, clay tablets, parchment, or paper is a treasure trove for all manner of demographic data on those who lived before us, providing information on everything from migration patterns to crop yields.
2) The role of a storyteller is to know things. Traditional storytellers were, and are, the libraries of their cultures. Like libraries, they contain the classics, the most recent best sellers, and the newspapers of their cultures. Like libraries, some specialize and some are more general in their acquisitions. To decide that storytellers are ignorant of other lands and do not know what they are talking about is like deciding that if a library contains books about places beyond the city limits, those books are inaccurate. As a storyteller, I feel a certain kinship with Diyāb and his ilk, those sitters in the coffee houses who spin tales for pleasure and profit. Like him, when telling the tales with which I have been entrusted, I must choose between the need to preserve a story as it has been told and handed down for generations, and the need to freshen that story by adding, spices and colors as it were, to suit the taste and attract the eye of the current generation.
Because we have not yet found earlier written accounts of the story, we cannot know what choices Diyāb made in his telling, and how those choices were interpreted and edited by Galland, but we can look at the history of Chinese cities on the Silk Routes and try to see them from the viewpoint of ʻAlāʼ ud-Dīn, (علاء الدين) and the lady Badr al-Budur (بدر البدور).
Who would they have been? What would their lives have been like? Their homes? What would they have eaten? How would they have dressed? Chinese cities had been doing business on the Silk Routes for 1,700 years by the time Diyāb shared the story of ʻAlā ud-Dīn. I am honored that you want to join me in exploring the answers to these questions!
Costumers of Color 