I think it’s interesting that it was doable then, but now we’re all afraid of our and each other’s genitalia… My imagined Arab world is more run by desire than by acquired constructs, and to me, different types of sex can help out with that.” A Tunisian Hafsid ruler commissioned the job at the time. The title of the project, The Perfumed Garden, is in reference to the fifteenth century erotic manual. We’re interesting when we’re naked and run by instinct. I really think it’s very interesting to observe our egos while fucking. I too felt inquisitive as to what so many sexual allusions were attempting to express, and I don’t think I can explain it any better than the author himself By now you might be thinking that you accidentally wandered onto a review of the Kama Sutra, but bear with me. Thus, the setting is also heavily elaborated on through the use of sexuality. You’re probably wondering what the defining characteristic of such a place might be? It is not simply a place identifiable by the environment, but also by those who occupy and exist within it. The only constant is the place: the Arab world as The Perfumed Garden.” Secondary characters mesh with supposedly primary characters.
As the chapters roll forward, protagonists disappear, and others reappear. I later want them to learn to love the place by seeing its potential through a fiction that is not really or entirely fictional. When asked to elaborate on his stylistic decision for The Perfumed Garden, Majzoub described his intention “I want readers to fall in and out of love of the characters until their hearts are exhausted.
I had the pleasure of reading the first chapter of The Perfumed Garden, and found its blended narratives and sexual exposure to add both symbolic and literal depth to Majzoub’s fictitious world.Īnother detail revealed whilst reading the completed excerpt from the novel was how the narrative includes a fast paced fluctuation of subjects and characters that the protagonist encounters along his path. However, unlike your token oh-my-days-I-painted-a-breast-and-am-therefore-the-new-Picasso-of-my-time, Majzoub is able to respect the fine line between relevance and overuse. You see it all the time, established and up-and-coming artists’ desperate and gratuitous uses of sexuality to sell art these days, particularly in the Arab world. It’s no new feat to use sex as a subject in art for shock value, or at least this is the opinion I hold.
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The title is itself adopted from Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Nafzawi’s 15 th century Arabic sex manual and work of erotic literature, furthering the significance of sex in Majzoub’s work.
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Entitled, The Perfumed Garden, the novel is an autobiography of an Arab world that is free from the confines of sexual taboos and stringent boundaries that are ever apparent today. What offers such a research methodology particular profundity is the way in which reality is used to inspire a world of fiction. Sometimes I fall in love with a character and decide to import them into the novel as they are, and other times I fall in love with a sentence or a physical gesture and decide to combine them in different character collages.” Majzoub himself describes the transcription of documented research into literary content “I am very interested in ways of transferring reality into different forms of narratives, so casting people for my novel through video seemed like the obvious thing to do. These documented interactions are then placed within the context of the novel, inspiring the setting, character traits and appearances, and narratives with a dose of reality. These experiments include films and interviews with a random selection of personas from across the Arab world.
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A character is a caricature.” Emulating such a view, Lebanese writer, architect, and artist, Raafat Majzoub, is involved in an ongoing creative process to complete a novel that is informed by a series of multimedia experiments. Ernest Hemmingway once said, “when writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters.
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