ABSTRACT
Helma Sanders Brahms: Yes, it is very important, since |here| we are mainly among women, to think that the greatest cultural deed in mankind – for the very survival of mankind from day to day, year to year, century to century and millennium to millennium – is that women teach their children to speak. They teach the children to walk erect, and they teach the children to speak, and if they did not teach the children to speak or to walk, you can see that it would be very difficult for human beings to become human. As most of you are women, I think that is the thing you should remember, it is the most important cultural thing, even more than museums, theatres, and films. It's a fact that women teach language. The ability to speak and the ability to walk erect, this knowledge is passed from generation to generation by women. One of my favourite books is The
Arabian Nights, because for me the true heroine in the history of mankind is Scheherazade, the woman who teaches a man culture. I don't know whether you know the story, it is the story of a man who has been deeply disappointed by his wife and because of that he cuts off the heads of all the women that he has slept with, the morning after. He is a big sultan, a big Raja, so he can do that. One day he meets this woman who has studied all the sciences of the time and knows the history of mankind. She decides to marry this man because she thinks she can put an end to his barbarism. So she starts to teach him what mankind is. She tells him stories, storytelling is the means to teach this man human language, that means not killing. Understanding is another theme of their dialogue. It's about speaking, teaching how to speak, not to kill but to speak. I found out about Scheherazade when I was seven years old, when my parents gave me a book inherited from my grandfather, the complete edition of The Thousand and One Nights. My parents thought it was just a collection of fairy tales but it was the unabridged collection. 1 was just seven years old, and I read all about men making love with men and men making love with their horses, women enchanting men into storms so that they could beat them, and all kinds of sexual obsessions. When I started to meet my first lovers at the age of fifteen, you know, with pimples, I expected from them something that would come up to my standards. And that was impossible, just impossible. So, when I was nineteen I went to Paris, and I bought a ticket to the Folies Bergères because I thought at last I would see something that would come up to this standard. But again I was disappointed because it was just naked women, and I felt: "My God, humanity has lost a lot of knowledge of these things." But this is another story.
