The Thousand and One Nights is the supreme kingdom of insomniac readers. Entering this book, one wanders through a fabulous Islam that today we would struggle to recognize. The book of nights is a collection of stories that are structured, fitting into each other, around a main story. The appearance of a character invariably involves the interruption of the previous story in favor of a new story. Like Russian matryoshkas, the stories are nested inside each other. The Thousand and One Nights is told by a female voice. Something feminine pervades her nocturnal stories. The motto of the Thousand is “either a story or life”. Telling is equivalent to living. It begins with the betrayal of the wife of the king of Persia. Before the betrayal nothing happens, there are no stories, there are no words.
Betrayal breaks an order; that order which in this work is on page zero, before the voices and din of the stories are heard. The Nights are full of betrayals: queens who betray with slaves, white with black, beautiful with deformed. Shahrazad recognizes betrayal as the place of choice for the birth of language, of enchantments, of enchantments cast and dissolved. Isn’t the history of man inaugurated by Eve’s betrayal?
