[...]ots of earlier versions in either indian or arabic literature --> arabic as the lingua franca of the day

Kitab ajayeb al Hind, wonders of india, 10th century by iranian captain Bozorg ibn Sahriyar of Ramhormoz

(Marzolph holisitic assessment [=/= Beyzai's parochial claims of iranianness] of) middle-eastern narrative traditions = arabic + persian + otaman turkish + jewish + christian (+ several other) narrative traditions related to each other and none of which may claim an exclusive position

city of Brass
the Golden City is a legendary city built in africa by Tawil, the brother of the giant Ug, both of whom were born from the incestuous relation between Cain and his sister Anaq. having been deserted for more than a thousand years, the Golden City was later conquered by Egyptians and became the source of their fabulous wealth.

agahi آگاهی knowledge
na javan mard ناجوانمرد impudent one
farz فرض rite
sonat سنت manner
mardi مردی manly combat

[Sina, Ehsan -->] in the manner of *narrative men* --> typical for the thousand and one nights--whose protagonists of merchants (often thrift sons of rich merchants, who embark on travel after they have wasted their fortune with false friends)
•save himself by his inventiveness, strong determination, physical strength
•there is no single predestined future but a variety of options whose eventual practical course depends on the protagonist's active intervention
•(Sinbad left behind on an island where) the Ruhh has laid its eggs (spirit's eggs تخم های روح 🥚🥚🥚)
•althought most of them kill other people in order to survive, their action is spontaneously motivated by the needs of the moment
•

با هزار زحمت with a thousand efforts


customary formal “hearing is obeying”


pitfalls
“[...]When I returned home, my wife had died. They lifted her up, took me along, and brought us to that cave. With a rope they let me down and blocked the entrance of the cave. After they had lowered the [body of my dead] wife and the [bundle of] clothes and I had regained my senses, I got up and saw a tremendously large cave. I installed the wick and lit the lamp, chose a place by the side, cleaned it and made a bedstead. And when every two days they threw somebody down there alive, I killed that person with my knife and took the supplies of three days bread and water, until one day they deposited in that cave my former wife’s sister alive, together with her dead husband. When she saw me, she recognized me and consented to marry me. I slept with her and had several children with her. Some time later I started to dig the ground in a corner of the cave with my knife until I had made a [large] hole to the side of the sea. Every day I would sit there, until I finally saw a ship. I attached a piece of cloth to a stick and waved it, until the ship came close and took me and my children aboard. They also asked me the same question [i. e. why my children had heads like horses], I told them my story, and they delivered me to my country. I had many more children with that woman. This is the story of my children and their ancestry.”


moral obligation of contemporary society
...the king would use the slave girl as muslim men would do = for entertainment of all kinds (including sexual intercourse, but not eating them)


relief after hardship فرج بعد از شدت

urdu romance bagh o bahar باغ و بهار

(the considerably older) misogynous motif of the unfaithful wife
husband and sife being buried together

--> part and parcel of the **narrative stock** talented storytellers would exploit to construct their tales

intertextual references
•cannibal black men
•the one-eyed person whose one eye had been picked out by a bird (a well-known narrative from premodern arabic and persian tradition, a one-eyed character is taken as an ill omen, whereas here he figures as a friendly advisor and helper)
•
--> ***stock characters*** of premodern middle eastern literature

Marzolph --> concider texts as artful creations composed by a talented narrator =/= taking texts as the products of an anonymous popular “fold” tradition that would indiscriminately غيرمشخص lump together all kinds of material ==> belittling the creative act of a single individual

*intertextual allusions (to themes, motifs, concepts familiar to the audience) : a highly effective narative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*

...................................

*~._

all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's


عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)

[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)

[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire

}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?


the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo

sadism: the trouble of enjoying terribleness

(Lacanian) imaginary --desires--> coherence (=/= fragmentation) ==generates==> a compromise : an idealization of the self as whole, between the unbearability of interiority and exteriority
*imaginary is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence (for speaking subjects) ==constitutes==> real effects

•Borges --> imaginary --> a world in pieces (monstrous fragmentation), impossible world of ‘that’
•Lacan --> imaginary --> tentatively precariously constitutes a sense of self through alienation

(Hayward > Borgesian) ****zoo --constitutes--> a primal scene of colonial violence though which fantasy and imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articulated, organized, rendered as “elsewhere” =/=? ajayeb premodern


zoo
one of the most ancient institutions
transformed by the event horizon of modernity

(Fanon dramatizing) colonialization is animated by zoonomia as phantasy: “when the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary”

*we = sadism's children*

how imaginary beings and *fantastic zoology* always carry a colonial logic

biological essentialism : a dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic

...racial and colonial violence of slavery

prison: anti-trans necropolitical institution
+ its abolition: a critique of anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the radical potentiality of social tranformation
(=/= prison in Orange Is the New Black TV series)

[*]trans: an effect of white supremacist thinking that needs incoherent genders to make gender matter at all****
--Hayward--> when trans becomes ‘this’ (an effect of gender) then it can only serve regimes of power


[Hayward's (expected and a bit cliche)] transfigurations: (cascading provocations) suggesting questions without answering them, to break from an interpretive paradigm that demands solution-making over and against problem-generating


native
a zoological term

Derrida's blackness (skin color): unsovereign and stateless, criminal and beast

(promise of love -->) relinquishing the body to [*]flesh: pre-discoursive material, a zone of non-personhood, a state of anjection (<-- according to Hayward)
anatomo-political)

soma-politics of the body (of the racial-colonial category of the human)

carno-political question of flesh (under the regime of racial capitalism) --> human/animal divide
•animals in the afterlife of slavery are rendered as flesh (under the regime carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]

genre of animal

Gossett [...]