Bojangles Won't Dance

In the pages (or hours) before Abū al-Qāsim's superhuman vaunt, he appears to me the most human, or the most ‘of meat and bones’. In these pages the narrator informs us that Abū al-Qāsim grows increasingly intoxicated and physically exhausted, and in these pages he interacts with the other guests more than anywhere else in the narrative. This is to say, the other guests do here occasionally get a word in edgewise. On page 334 of al-Shāljī's 391- paged edition of the Ḥikāya (Ḥ), our (anti-)hero, already well into his cups, and having thoroughly exhausted the game of arbitrary praise and blame, recites a poem in a voice choking with emotion (ṣawt shajin) and then wistfully declares: ‘Tomorrow, by God, we'll resume this party and its pleasures!’ The best way to greet a new day, he explains, is with more drinking and revelry. This suggestion transgresses normative partying behaviour, and sets a theme for the denouement of the Ḥikāya, in which Abū al-Qāsim repeatedly strives to extend the pleasures of the party beyond the human capacity for enjoyment, with limited and ambiguous success.

Continuing to drink, Abū al-Qāsim praises a beautiful female singer, and then fiercely insults her guardian, in many ways a typical praise/blame sequence for the protagonist, though earthily connected in this case to the bodies of people in the room and his physical responses to them (his lust for the singer is obvious, and she rebukes him for it later in the narrative). His expression of hatred for her guardian is even more fulsome in its invective than usual, so when Abū al-Qāsim ends with a quick couplet wondering if, perhaps, he has left too much unsaid, a fellow guest understandably bursts into laughter.

In the song Mr Bojangles – whose titular character was, like Abū al-Qāsim, said to be based on a real man – a tragic figure, an avowed alcoholic prisoner perpetually in mourning for his dog, is repeatedly asked to dance by his fellow inmates. And what if he chose to refuse? Abū al-Qāsim, though widely identified by scholars as a popular performer singing for his supper, emphatically refuses to be laughed at.