Craft Lesson: Nested Storytelling
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website | instagram | linktree | NEW! order the glade | order the bruising of qilwa | order the white guy dies first | tip jar Welcome to the Tuesday Telegrams, a semimonthly newsletter from award-winning author Naseem Jamnia. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, where I update you on projects, offer behind-the-scenes looks, delve into craft, and other publishing and writing topics. This weekend, I gave the longest iteration of my cultural storytelling class for the Carl Brandon Society. It was a smash success, which is good because I spent all of last week in a haze updating it and being shocked at how much more I have to say about an idea I've been teaching since 2023. In one section of the class, I walk through a couple of non-Western story structures. I thought I would share one of these with all of you, and that is stories within stories, also called nested stories. Stories within stories are exactly as they sound. One layer deep, they're often called a story with a frame narrative—that is, the main story is being told in the frame of a larger one. James Cameron's 1997 movie Titanic is an example of a story with a frame narrative—where Rose is telling her story to her granddaughter and a treasure hunter over eighty years after the events of the story take place. But frame narratives are the most simplistic type of nested story. The purpose of the frame narrative is usually the same as with a reflective first-person perspective; that is, a reflection back on whatever the main story is. That is not the only use for them, but it tends to be a common one. Furthermore, frame narratives don't convey the heart of stories within stories, which is to say: the importance of storytelling as a mode of communicating culture, values, and lessons. The most famous example of nested stories is 1001 Nights. It's an artifact that many cultures lay claim to, although scholars tend to agree that the origins were likely Persian, with much of the original Persian text and stories later replaced by Islamized Arabic ones. Scholars also note there is also a clear Sanskrit influence on the stories told. 1001 Nights is often misnomered as the Arabian Nights, because of the first English translation in the 1700s, and because Orientalism was well and alive by then and 1001 Nights as a title wouldn't have sold as hotly. Since then, a variety of tales have since wormed their way into much of Western consciousness (see: Orientalism), often with stories that were reincorporated into the Nights but weren't originally there (Aladdin and Ali Baba were both stories that the first translator to bring it to the West, a Frenchman named Antoine Galland, added in, claiming to have heard them from a Syrian storyteller). The first story layer of the 1001 Nights story is the frame of Shahrazad telling Shahriyar a story every night to spare her life. The story begins with the great king Shahriyar and his brother both finding that their wives have been unfaithful, and Shahriyar, in the throes of trauma, declares to never marry again, and so begins the tradition of sleeping with a wife and executing her the next morning at the hands of his vizier. His vizier, in a desperate search for virgins to marry to the king, has two daughters, and the older, Shahrazad, offers to marry the king—and promises that she can save everyone. Despite her father's protests (and some initial nested stories), the marriage takes place, and that first night, Shahrazad asks for her sister to join her and the king to tell a story. (Scheherazade is bastardization of her name, incidentally.) Thus begins Shahrazad's titular 1001 nights, and her first stories are those that exemplify just how nested a nested story structure can become. The first story Shahrazad tells is that of the fisherman and the jinn, wherein a fisherman who casts his net four times a day pulls up an old bottle and, upon uncorking it, releases a jinn. The jinn, having been caught for several hundred years, grants the fisherman one mercy: to name how he shall die. And the fisherman cannot get the jinn to agree to let him live, and tricks the jinn into returning into the bottle and resealing it. With the roles reversed, the jinn pleads for freedom, and the fisherman remarks that this is similar to the story of King Yunan and the Sage Duban. The story of King Yunan and the Sage Duban goes as such: King Yunan has an affliction that no one can cure, except for one man, the Sage Duban. The king's vizier, jealous of the sage, tries to convince the king that Duban is an assassin, and that the king should kill Duban. King Yunan clocks his vizier's jealousy and remarks that this is similar to the situation between King Sinbad (no relation to sailor) and Sinbad's vizier. In this brief layer, we learn the story of King Sinbad, who readied to kill his own son because of another envious man. But Sinbad's vizier told him to reconsider, lest Sinbad be like the husband in the story of the husband and the parrot. In this fifth and final layer, we learn the story of a husband who believed his wife to be unfaithful, and set his parrot to spy upon her. The wife, catching onto the plan, tricks the parrot into reporting something untrue, and in his anger, the husband killed the parrot. He learned that his wife was indeed being unfaithful, and mourned the loss of the parrot. So let’s take a look at this. The story of the husband and the parrot is being told to King Sinbad by his vizier to illustrate the vizier’s point of not making rash decisions out of envy and mistrust. And that is a lesson that King Yunan is giving to his own vizier to avoid executing the Sage Duban. But the story of Yunan and the Sage is being told by the fisherman to the jinn, which Shahrazad is telling to Shahriyar to stay her execution. The beauty of nested storytelling is the ways in which the lessons of each story is changed in light of another one. They illustrate cultural values, ask us to consider complexities, and connect us to others across generations. They show an understanding of the world as wondrous and terrible, supernatural and under God's will. They speak truth to power, showing the folly of kings and the wiliness of their advisors, for good or for ill. And they are prized enough that often, a story is traded for a life; in Shahrazad's case, she trades 1001 stories to buy the life of her, her sister, and any other women the king would have executed. Nested stories are, at the end of the day, about the power of storytelling, and their form should be used to illuminate that function. Solidarity CornerIf you have organizations or causes you'd like me to spotlight here, please send those links my way. We get through these things when we do so together. Below are some places you can donate and other actions you can take. If you end up donating money, scroll below to claim a book.
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