Reading notes: Stories from a parrot, part A
For this week's first reading, I read the first half of the Tales of a Parrot unit. I thought these stories were pretty comical -- in each, a woman is about to go see her lover, when the parrot distracts her with a story and she ends up listening to the parrots tale instead of cheating on her husband.
The parrot is clever: Another bird tells the woman honestly that she shouldn't go see her lover because it would be unfaithful to her husband, so the woman kills that bird. The parrot realizes he can't speak freely or the woman, Khojisteh, will kill him, so he dissuades and distracts her through his stories.
In the story of the goldsmith, carpenter, taylor and hermit, the four men each contribute to adorning a woman's figure carved out of wood, and the hermit's prayers bring it to life. Each of them fall in love with the woman once she's brought to life, which reminded me of the story of Pygmalion and how he fell in love with a statue he carved. Each of them talked about having a "right" to the woman because of what they contributed, and I thought it'd be funny if she woke up and told them none of them had any "right" to own her. I think I always just want to take feminist twists on these stories.
Some of the parrot's tales had an Aesop's fable vibe to them -- they didn't explicitly state a moral of the stories, but for example, in the story about the four rich men who became poor, the folly was being too greedy rather than being happy with what each of them had. I could see it being written like a fable, with one of the simple morals at the end.
Story source: The Tooti Nameh or Tales of a Parrot, by Ziya'al-Din Nakhshabi (1801).
The parrot is clever: Another bird tells the woman honestly that she shouldn't go see her lover because it would be unfaithful to her husband, so the woman kills that bird. The parrot realizes he can't speak freely or the woman, Khojisteh, will kill him, so he dissuades and distracts her through his stories.
In the story of the goldsmith, carpenter, taylor and hermit, the four men each contribute to adorning a woman's figure carved out of wood, and the hermit's prayers bring it to life. Each of them fall in love with the woman once she's brought to life, which reminded me of the story of Pygmalion and how he fell in love with a statue he carved. Each of them talked about having a "right" to the woman because of what they contributed, and I thought it'd be funny if she woke up and told them none of them had any "right" to own her. I think I always just want to take feminist twists on these stories.
Some of the parrot's tales had an Aesop's fable vibe to them -- they didn't explicitly state a moral of the stories, but for example, in the story about the four rich men who became poor, the folly was being too greedy rather than being happy with what each of them had. I could see it being written like a fable, with one of the simple morals at the end.
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| Photo of a Blue-Fronted Amazon. Web source: Wikimedia Commons |
Story source: The Tooti Nameh or Tales of a Parrot, by Ziya'al-Din Nakhshabi (1801).
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