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Whose Best Tricks? Makr‐i Zan as a Topos in Persian Oral Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Margaret Mills
Margaret Mills*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University
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Extract

After the Recent Work of Merguerian and Najmabadi, Najmabadi, and Milani (in this volume), it can be little surprise that the topic of women's tricks (makr-i zan) is explicit and pervasive in traditional oral narrative in Persian-speaking communities. In afsānah or fictional folktales, makr-i zan serves as a generic title for a large, but shifting, corpus of individual tales which are perceived by their tellers as primarily concerned with the topos (though the tales may be otherwise identified or characterized by other sources, including literary ones). Indeed, from the general perspective of a strongly patriarchal popular ideology which promotes male authority over female action, any and all female-initiated action (“female agency”) may be construed, explicitly or implicitly, as subversive of the ideal order of patriarchy. While the female actor and female agency are marked as “other” (than ideal) by the topos (or stereotype), women as well as men perform tales about makr-i zan. This paper begins the task of sorting out perspectives on this “otherness” and agency as reflected in the repertoires of various male and female traditional storytellers, in individual oral performances in which makr-i zan are central.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2: The Uses of Guile: Literary and Historical Moments , Spring 1999 , pp. 261 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

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References

1. Merguerian, Gayane and Najmabadi, Afsaneh “Zulaykhā and Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story’?” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29 (1997): 485-508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Mills, Margaret “Akhond Mulla Mahmud, ‘Women's Tricks,’” Chapter 10 in Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 229-54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Cf. Merguerian and Najmabadi, 1997; Malti-Douglas, Fedwa Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Goldman, Shalom The Wiles of Women / The Wiles of Men: Joseph and Potiphar's Wife in Ancient Near Eastern, Jewish and Islamic Folklore (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).Google Scholar

4. Mills, Margaret “Women's Tricks: Subordination and Subversion in Afghan Folktales,” in Honko, Lauri ed., Thick Corpus, Organic Variation, and Textuality in Oral Tradition (Helsinki, 2000) (forthcoming).Google Scholar

5. Nafs is one of three components of the traditionally conceived human personality or nature, the other two being ˓aql and rūḥ. Nafs may be conceived as the earthly component of the soul, those natural desires/needs for food, sex, etc. which characterize life on earth for both humans and animals. ˓Aql is distinctly human reason, and rūḥ, is the spiritual soul, the part that can be reunited with the Divine. ˓Aql is the capacity which keeps nafs from dominating individual motivation in everyday life. Nafs is conceived to be stronger in women, and capacity for ˓aql weaker, than in men.

6. Within this (psycho)logic, Zulaykha's superior social power relative to Yusuf may be reason enough for her defeat, and the underdog dynamic another basis for the necessity of her later abjection leading ultimately to her success, in Jami's tale. Tuti in Ṭūṭīnāmah is of course telling tales to save his own life while protecting the interests of his master against his mistress (and it is Tuti who has all the guile, not the would-be erring, but clueless, mistress). By contrast, as Najmabadi has pointed out, in Sandbādnāmah the lustful servant girl mounts an eloquent critique of male character through her own counter-stories, and almost carries the day: here it seems as though the pull of her structural underdog status almost outweighs the reprehensibility of her incestuous behavior and her exploitation of her temporarily superior powers of speech. There is at the same time room in the Sandbādnāmah frame tale, however, for a simultaneously horrified and delighted male engagement with the servant girl/nurse's lust for her foster child as a projection of the male child's erotic interest in the mother or mother surrogate.

7. Classical theories of the trickster, as developed mainly by European and American psychologists, comparative mythographers and folklorists, have assumed the essential maleness of the archetypal trickster figure, though gender-bending is often prominent among his tricks. Gender distribution in Middle Eastern oral tradition illustrates the inadequacy of existing theories of the trickster, among other things. See Babcock, Barbara “ ‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (1975): 147-86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with bibliography.

8. de Certeau, Michel “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life,” trans. Jameson, Fredric and Lovitt, Carol Social Text 3 (1980): 6.Google Scholar

9. Margaret Mills, “Black and White,” chapter 13 in Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling, 289-97.

10. Cf. Mernissi, Fatima “Morocco: the Merchant's Daughter and the Son of the Sultan,” in Women's Rebellion and Islamic Memory (London: Zed Books, 1996), 13-20.Google Scholar

11. Mills, Margaret “Sex Role Reversals, Sex Changes, and Transvestite Disguise in the Oral Tradition of a Conservative Muslim Community in Afghanistan,” in Jordan, Rosan A. and Kalcik, Susan J. ed., Women's Folklore, Women's Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 187-213.Google Scholar

12. “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124-51.Google Scholar