To Prevent Contact & Story #725

In Paris on Friday 15 June 2007 performance artist Barbara Campbell found the words ‘to prevent contact’ in an article about Palestine in the morning’s New York Times. She painted them in watercolour and posted them on her website, http://1001.net.au. Using her three-word prompt as my starting point, I wrote a story for Campbell to perform online that evening. My story would be # 725 of a planned 1001 stories that would comprise Campbell’s most remarkable work: 1001 nights cast, a durational online performance inspired by the Arabian classic One Thousand and One Nights. For 1001 consecutive nights, from 21 June 2005 to 17 March 2008, Campbell performed at sunset (according to her physical location) a short spoken piece based on a story that had been written for her that day. Her performance was relayed as a live webcast to anyone logged on to http://1001.net.au at sunset, Campbell’s time.

Campbell is an acclaimed Australian performance artist who describes herself as a ‘non-spiritual intermediary between latent historical material and living audience’. In her work she has always been attracted to stories about certain mythologised women—Mary Queen of Scots, Lizzie Borden, Trukanini—and so she was drawn to Sheherazade, the tale-telling heroine of One Thousand and One Nights (Nights). Since 1982, Campbell has worked in her performances with the particular qualities of her chosen sites, which have ranged from museums and galleries to towers and stairways. For her 1001 nights cast, she chose the internet as her site, for its global reach, 24-hour availability, interactivity and accommodation of niche communities.

Three months after Campbell had completed 1001 nights cast, I spoke to her about how she had conceived her rich and multilayered performance, and what had drawn her to work with The Arabian Nights. Although she can no longer remember the specific instant in which her project was born, Campbell says she had been ‘harbouring the story of Sheherazade somewhere in my body probably since first seeing a B-grade movie about Sinbad or Aladdin, but with any degree of intellectual awareness, since reading Robert Irwin’s text The Arabian Nights: A Companion in 1994’. In Irwin’s companion Campbell learnt about ‘the meta-tale of the One Thousand and One Nights, its migration as a cultural product from east to west in the early eighteenth century and the structuring principle of Sheherazade’s frame story’.

This ‘frame story’ is the story that contains and structures the text of the Nights and explains why Sheherazade tells its fantastic tales: a sultan, Shahriyar, executes his first wife for infidelity and vows to slay all future wives the morning after taking their virginity. After 1000 wives, Shahriyar marries the wise and courageous Sheherazade. To avert her threatened execution, on her wedding night Sheherazade tells a tale that remains unfinished at dawn, one so compelling that Shahriyar lets her live to finish it the following night. And so Sheherazade continues, telling a stream of tales unfinished at dawn, and eventually, through her skill and dedication to her task, she is granted a permanent reprieve.

Campbell wrote her own frame story for 1001 nights cast:

Campbell deliberately wrote her frame story in the third person—she wanted to let her writers and readers decide to what extent the narrated character of her performance, the bereaved bride, is a fictional construct. This ambiguity and distance were essential for Campbell as an artist. They were also essential because, like Sheherazade before her, in 1001 nights cast Campbell was telling stories to survive death; she calls her frame story a survival story. So when Campbell asked me to write a story for her, it was an invitation I could not refuse. Above all, I wanted to give her a story. I was also fascinated by the project itself: by its evocation of the Nights and the Middle East; by the fact it was collaborative and online; and by the parameters Campbell had imposed on her storytellers.

I wrote my story for Campbell between 8 p.m. Friday 16 June and 1.10 a.m. Saturday 17 June 2007, Sydney time. I remember the details of time so precisely because they were among the several parameters Campbell required when I agreed to write for her. My story had to:

• be written on Friday 16 June 2007, Paris time (Campbell traversed continents during her performance and was in Paris for my story)

• use the prompt of the day: words chosen by Campbell for their ‘generative potential’ from a story on the Middle East in one of that morning’s newspapers, rendered in watercolour and posted online in pictorial form

• be no more than 1001 words

• be submitted no later than three hours before Campbell’s performance.

So I would have several hours in which to engage with the Middle East, its rich storytelling tradition as contained in Alf Layla wa-Layla (‘a thousand nights and one night’), its history of war and all the ‘east’ conjures up in the west of enchantment and the exotic. My direct knowledge of the Middle East is confined to a two-week visit to Turkey, where I was bridesmaid for a friend in Istanbul. The rest I have from reading—Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, The Arabian Nights in Richard Burton’s translation, various other books, and newspapers.

I approached my story with three things in mind. I wanted it to be sparked by the words of Campbell’s prompt; to connect with the Middle East imaginatively and emotionally; and to embrace whatever magic or unlikely occurrence it happened upon. And so I did not think much about my story until the afternoon of Friday 16 June (Sydney time), when I logged onto the 1001 nights cast website and read Campbell’s prompt of the day—‘to prevent contact’—soon after it was posted. I held these words in my mind, feeling the force of the verb, until I sealed myself in my study at 8 p.m. And then I read the New York Times article that had been the source of the prompt. It was about civil war: the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas gunmen, and the Fatah president’s dissolution of the unity government and declaration of a state of emergency. The prompt came from this sentence: ‘Mr. Olmert is expected to tell Mr. Bush that Israel favored sealing off the Israeli-occupied West Bank from the infection of Gaza, continuing to prevent contact between them.’

Earlier that day I’d seen two stricken women, wearing full burkha, clinging together in a shopping mall in inner city Sydney. Suddenly their image seized me, charged the words ‘to prevent contact’ and I began to write—as an outsider, as a witness to their distress, in an attempt to connect with them through words and through them to Campbell’s story, to the Middle East and the Nights. Under pressure of time, in the freefall of night, I followed the story as it unfolded: a tale told by a woman and her son about two weeping figures in a shopping mall.

My story flowed from my fingers, stalling only when my well-developed editing mind queried its imaginative leaps. But perhaps because I was writing late at night, by request of a friend, under the influence of Sheherazade, my daytime editing mind was easily brushed aside. Once I had written a story of 1000 words, I read it aloud to check its rhythms. It was only then, as I spoke the words into the silence, that I began to realise that under pressure my mind had taken flight to the stories I’d read as a child, the Greek myths, and especially to the myth that had most beguiled me: the rape of Persephone by Hades.

After I’d written the story and read Irwin’s book, I was intrigued to discover the extent to which their childhood reading of The Arabian Nights had influenced European and American writers since the eighteenth century, when it first appeared in European translation. Among the many writers who conjured its marvels and exoticism as a counterpoint to the newly industrialising world were Goethe, Coleridge, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens, Melville and Poe. In the twentieth century its complexities of form—its framing, hidden patterns, stories within stories, self-referencing—influenced Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, as well as Borges, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie. Cinema has also mined its riches, from Ali Baba to John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Pasolini’s classic Il fiore delle mille e una notte. As Robert Irwin says of its pervasive influence on the west: ‘From the eighteenth century onwards, translations of the Nights circulated so widely in Europe and America that to ask about its influence on western literature is a bit like asking about the influence on western literature of that other great collection of oriental tales, the Bible.’

But despite its status as a literary classic in the west, until modern times the Nights was neglected in the Middle East, where storytelling was seen as a somewhat disreputable pastime. It is an anonymous work of popular fiction whose origins are unknown. An early version appeared in the ninth or tenth century, and over the centuries stories were added to the original core, probably from India and Persia, until there were 1001 nights as promised by the title. To complicate the Nights’ multicultural genesis, it only found worldwide fame through its translation in France. In 1704 French orientalist and archaeologist Antoine Galland published the first two of twelve volumes of his translation Les Mille et une nuits (from an Arabic manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris) and prompted a craze for the orient in the salons of France. Its popularity in Europe eventually led to the publication of the first Arabic printed text of the Nights, in 1814–18 in India. Galland played so large a part in discovering, popularising and shaping the tales that he has been called—‘at some risk of hyperbole and paradox’ according to Irwin—the real author of the Nights.

The sway of the Nights, cast like a spell over western literature, has not been similarly felt in the Arab world. Orhan Pamuk, a child of the east, read the Nights through western eyes: ‘the first time I read the Thousand and One Nights, I read it as a Western child would, amazed at the marvels of the East. I was not to know that its stories had long ago filtered into our culture from India, Arabia and Iran.’ Pamuk attributes this lack of knowledge to his culture’s having severed ‘its links with its own cultural heritage and forgotten what it owes to India and Iran, surrendered instead to the jolts of Western literature’. In Pamuk’s view ‘there is another canon. It should be explored, developed, shared, criticized, and then accepted. Right now the so-called Eastern canon is in ruins.’

It was the many metamorphoses, translations, migrations and adaptations of the Nights, so compellingly explored in Irwin’s book, that drew Campbell to work with it. But if Irwin’s book was the beginning of her intellectual awareness of the Nights, then the catalyst of 1001 nights cast was the tragic death in a train accident of Campbell’s husband Neil Roberts in 2002. The first story of her 1001 nights cast tells of death. The prompt for the day was ‘the challenge of healing’.

‘This morning … the train line near the abattoir site … dog running on the track … in front of the train … driver saw … driver braked … then a man … reached in towards the dog … reached too far … too close … no time … hit … killed … instantly … dog too’

In the wake of Roberts’ death Campbell found it ‘very hard to keep myself in the land of the living’. Her acute awareness of the truth of the cliché of living one day at a time somehow ‘stirred up the image of One Thousand and One Nights, of keeping oneself alive by just literally doing something every day’.

But it was not until 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, that Sheherazade ‘really began to stir’ in Campbell and 1001 nights cast began to take shape as a performance. Campbell was reminded of Sheherazade because the media reports from ‘embedded journalists’ in Iraq recalled for her the nineteenth-century Middle East reportage from writers such as Richard Burton: both were partial and both attempted to ‘explain the exoticism of the east in a way that made sense to our culture’. And so to Campbell’s raw understanding that in order to survive her husband’s death she had to perform something every day was added her awareness of the media’s partial view of the war in Iraq. ‘Here, again, it was not the Middle East that we were learning about, it was the West’s relation to the Middle East that was on display.’

Once Campbell had decided to incorporate and engage in her performance with the media’s partial reports of war in the Middle East through the daily word-prompt, she realised that by taking words from a newspaper each morning she would also be irrefutably proving her existence day by day—in the same way that footage of Iraqi war hostages presented the day’s newspaper headlines, to prove the captive was still alive and therefore worth bargaining for. Unexpectedly for Campbell, the role of her unseen online audience as witness to her living each day, as verified by the prompt from the morning’s paper, became a key element in her survival: ‘It wasn’t enough that I just said to myself that I was alive—there had to be a witnessing of that process.’

The request from strangers for a story, one of the project’s most cathartic features, was the last of its elements to fall into place. Campbell had initially planned to write all the stories herself. To prepare for her writing marathon she enrolled in a writing course in early 2005—and there the fascination of hearing and engaging with other people’s stories made her realise the importance of opening out the writing process to include others. For Campbell, this became the most important aspect of the project. By its last night, 1001 nights cast had attracted 243 story contributors from around the world.

On 21 June 2005, Campbell launched 1001 nights cast in Paris, where she spent its first 99 nights. At sunset she spoke the story she’d been given that day, transmitting online only her voice and the image of her speaking mouth. By choosing to reveal only her mouth, Campbell was able to allude both to the west’s conception of the east, so often driven by ‘that partial view through the purdah’; and to the way in which the west is seen to speak on behalf of the rest of the world. She also wanted to emphasise her focus on storytelling: ‘I felt that I was a channel for other voices, so my own particularities of form weren’t all that important and it was best to play them down.’

As the performance progressed, Campbell began to book writers to ensure she had a story for each day. But initially she’d relied on random story contributions from friends and from strangers who learnt about 1001 nights cast through online networks. One of the most poignant experiences for Campbell was the ongoing contribution from Joseph Rabie in Toulouse, who stumbled across the project online and was struck by the prompt of the day, which reminded him of a coffee house in Jerusalem he’d known as a child and inspired him to contribute a story. Rabie had been ‘overcome by a necessity to engage’, as he told Campbell when they finally met in person two years later.

Rabie’s discovery of Campbell’s project and the significance for him of her prompt was just one of many instances of serendipity that occurred during 1001 nights cast. Serendipity had accompanied the project from its very first day, as Campbell recalls: ‘That prompt—“the challenge of healing”—I didn’t come up with that phrase, that was in the very first article that I read … it just seemed to be the message of the day. It was given to me like an augury. There was a sense that I was guided by those messages from … the atmosphere.’ And so the nature of Campbell’s 1001-night performance declared itself on the first day: it was about healing. Did it work? ‘Yes, absolutely. And not just because I was doing it every day, but because I’d reconnected with the world. I’d actually built this quite amazing thing, built a collection of stories and formed a community.’

Campbell attributes her healing—her survival—to the regularity of her daily storytelling and her connecting with the world through stories in 1001 nights cast. Through my own involvement with her extraordinary performance I am reminded that stories are essential to life. Our lives and our stories are inextricably linked. As Irwin says: ‘In the Nights, stories are the vehicle for saving lives … knowledge of a story and the ability to tell it may assure the survival of an individual. Analogously, it may be that in real life too knowledge of stories assists the survival of communities or of individuals within those communities.’

And so what will become of Campbell’s cyber community and archive of 1001 stories, now her performance is completed? Having rested 1001 nights cast for several months, Campbell can feel new life stirring in it, related to ‘the quite amazing quality of the number 1001, which is that it is both a sequence and a return’. During her project’s first 1001 nights, Campbell asked strangers to give her a story; now she is willing in some way ‘to echo those stories back to other strangers’. And so, like One Thousand and One Nights before it, Campbell’s 1001 nights cast is still generating stories—including this one—long after its 1001st night. For that I and Campbell’s other collaborators—writers and audience—are immensely thankful.

Story # 725

I’ll tell you what I saw today. I saw two women, well it turned out it was a girl and a woman, but it wasn’t really clear. They were wearing scarves on their heads so you couldn’t see their hair and only a glimpse of white skin. But the way they held each other it was like they were one person because they were so close together, locked in an embrace, sculpted together like they were made of black and white marble. They were standing at the top of a sweep of escalators right at the entrance to a three-storey shopping centre so you had to see them as you came in and they were grieving publicly. I was with Henry because it was the sunset hour so school was out and Henry stood there in his uniform and stared and stared at these two entwined women with the white of cheekbone and forehead shining out from the black of their scarves and their dark gowns falling to their feet. They were fused together.

They do not go forwards into the light of the shopping centre nor out into the grey dusk and rain, but stand frozen. And in her left hand the girl holds tight a lock of hair, dark hair and it catches my eye and makes me stop.

‘Henry, don’t stare at the women. I’ve told you not to stare.’

So I turn my head away as if I’m not looking any more but my eyes are caught by the girl who has raised her eyes to mine. She does not smile. But I have seen the lock of hair in her hand and I have seen her eyes. And I love her madly for her black eyes shining with tears and her red unsmiling mouth and for the way she trembles close to her mother so pale and sad. And so I cannot leave her in the shopping centre and I ignore my mother who wants to drag me away to buy socks on the third floor because instead I am falling in love with a shrouded girl who is seized in an unending embrace by her mother above rolling silver steps.

In his bag he has five sticks and two strands of wire. Henry is thirteen and he has read that thirteen is an unlucky number. Henry does not necessarily believe this piece of information about thirteen being unlucky, not because he has anything against magic but because he doesn’t believe what he reads and because he carries sticks and wire. He knows wood is lucky and holds powerful spirits and he knows that wire can be transformed into any sort of key.

And so there were these two women, you’d have to wonder what they were doing there at the top of the escalators at such a busy time blocking everyone’s way. But they were so upset about something and they were so different in their black scarves with all their hair hidden and you couldn’t see their faces to catch their eye and sort of let them know that they should move on or at least move away so people could get past. And they kept moaning and rocking right there in the shopping centre between the chemist and the bank which was a busy thoroughfare. We were all pretending not to look, sneaking looks from sliding eyes. Everyone except for Henry, who stood for a minute staring at them. And then did something that was odd even for Henry.

He walked right over to that pair of women and put his hand out to the girl.

‘Hey Henry, what on earth do you think you’re doing?’

He was rummaging in his bag with one hand and holding out his other hand to the girl, palm upwards like some kind of sign and he was staring straight into her eyes as if he could hold her there forever with his gaze.

And the old woman turned as Henry threw down five sticks at the girl’s feet. They clattered onto the marble tiles and rang out through the cavernous shopping centre and where they landed great cracks were opening in the earth. And he reached again into his bag and drew out two strands of wire and held them quivering like swords in each hand. That boy stood there in the shopping centre at the top of the escalators with his sticks cracking the earth at his feet and his swords glinting upright in either hand while the mother gripped her daughter close in grief to prevent contact with the boy who is from another world, a stranger to them both.

But the daughter continues to gaze at Henry and as she is drawn towards him a crystal tear falls to the ground and blooms as a red poppy from the marble where it is open to the earth. And the boy Henry twirls his iron blades above his head until they spin and gleam beneath fluorescent light and he brings them spinning down between mother and daughter. The metal blows them asunder, unlocking their grieving grip.

The mother wilts to the floor and the daughter picks the red poppy.

My dark-eyed girl plucks my poppy in her white left hand and I seize my sticks, one two three four five, throw them high into the moonless sky above the marble floor which slams together as four hooves clatter down and a black tail swirls through the air. My love swoons in my arms and I spin my wires around her neck and breast, peeling the black away and draping rubies across her ivory skin.

Entwined we gallop down the escalators and into the gaping earth.

And in the land of perpetual war a thirteen-year-old boy is gunned down in the southern town of Khan Younis, bringing Thursday’s death toll to at least sixteen. Collateral damage in a civil war. It is his hair the black-eyed girl holds as she vanishes into the earth.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Jane Gleeson-White.