Abstract
In Richard Francis Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights (The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night) (1885) Sinbad’s story of the Old Man of the Sea relates the sailor’s fifth voyage during which he encounters the monstrous Old Man of the Sea who fastens himself on his back and will not let go, clinging to Sinbad so that he cannot shake him off, riding him day and night until Sinbad would welcome death. Sinbad’s story introduces a fundamental motif and trope of one’s encounter with another: the motif of carrying another on one’s back. Featuring a relationship in which one is fatally dependent on the other, the encounter consequently entails pain. I am interested in how Sinbad’s story (his encounter with the Old Man) plays with the ambiguity of the master and servant roles and in what sense it can be read as a (post)colonial encounter of two, culturally and racially different participants. I want to look at the nature of this encounter, how it comes about, how the two parties participate in it, and what the outcome of their encounter is. I am interested to see in what sense their story can be seen as an act of origin of the encounter between two human beings (or as an originary act of intersubjectivity) and what relevance the story has in a postcolonial context.