Forced Insults
Nights 320-342
The first story ends with some graphic violence and sex. The woman who pretended to be a king dispatched her enemies: the first was “flayed and his skin stuffed with straw and hung up over the gate to the arena. A pit was . . . dug outside the city in which his flesh and bones were . . . burned, with dirt and filth being thrown over them.” (p. 57, Night 321). Two more enemies suffer similar fates in Nights 322 and 323, with the last one also “stretched out and beaten with a hundred strokes of the whip on each foot and a thousand strokes on his body” before meeting the same end as the others. When the woman is later reunited with her lover, he first thinks she is a man. She forces him into sexual encounters, and he is at first panicked about what he thinks will be a homosexual encounter. He is delighted when he finds out who she is, with some detailed descriptions of their anatomies and silly euphemisms for their intercourse (pp. 67-68, Night 327).
From there we start a bunch of short stories. The first is pretty forgettable; its best features are a love poem filled with food metaphors (p. 74, Night 330) and a delightfully Arabian Nights end to its love story: “He embraced her as the letter alif embraces the letter lam” (p. 81, Night 333). The second is mean-spirited but funny, with a slave-owner ordering his beautiful slaves to “praise herself and find fault with her opposite” (p. 86, Night 334). This leads to plenty of problematic insults, the worst of which is “Everyone agrees that blacks are stupid” (p. 87, Night 335). There’s a solid paragraph or two of fat shaming that is at least more creative than usual insults: “When you piss it is like spurting water and when you shit you are like a bursting wine skin or an elephant changed into a woman. When you go to a lavatory you need someone to wash your private parts for you and to pluck hairs there, and this is the height of laziness and the sign of weak-mindedness.” (p. 92, Night 336). The non-black, non-plump girls get their share of insults too (the thin one is called “the wood on which men are crucified”), but the ones quoted above seem most cruel.
The story continues with the slavemaster losing his six girls, then regaining them. My week finally ends with two short stories: an odd tale about a dog that brings good luck (Nights 340-341; it needed something more to be worth recommending), and a fable about a master thief. They felt very light after all the violence, sex, and ruthless insults that precede them.