FRUITS OF THE MARAZION QUAKER LIBRARY (21) - JEANETTE WINTERSON (2025) 'ONE ALADDIN TWO LAMPS'

 Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester to a 17 year-old mother who looked after her for six weeks in a mother and baby home. Jeanette was then adopted by Mr and Mrs Winterson whose home was in Accrington. They were Pentecostal evangelical Christians who brought up Jeanette to be a Pentecostal missionary. That did not work out, as you can discover by reading Winterson's magnificent first book - Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - published when she was 26. In 1975 when she was 16, Jeanette fell in love with another girl, a convert to the local Pentecostal church; her parents found out; Jeanette left home and somehow supported herself through A-levels at a local technical college. By the time she was 19, she had been accepted at my Oxford college, St Catherine's (Catz), to read English Literature. Three years later, she emerged with her degree. 

Jeanette Winterson

The story got even more personal for me as I watched a TV documentary about this contemporary star of English Literature who is now the Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. The camera shot half-way through the programme took the viewer into the inner quad of the college. This was the view from her room at college. I swear it was my room in my first year, back in 1967-68: Room Number 4:12. I had a definite frisson of recognition and excitement.   

Jeanette spins her tale around the stories in The Arabian Nights, including Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. The Nights begin with a Sultan called Shahryar who discovers that his wife and his brother's wife have both been unfaithful. In an appalling act of misogyny, Shahryar decrees he will marry a fresh virgin every night and then execute her the next morning. And so the slaughter goes on until it's Shahrazad's

turn to be the next virgin sacrifice. As the Sultan's bride she starts to tell a story which continues to daybreak - and Shahrazad is spared the ritual beheading. This pattern continues, night after night. There is no time to die.

Published in 2025 - Jeanette Winterson's latest work 

For Jeanette, Shahrazad's genius is that she can dismantle the ticking madness of the Sultan and replace it with the sanity of a story. Stories are like magic carpets, opening worlds that seemed closed. Jeanette is able to dodge the path decreed by the Wintersons through access to literature. Jeanette borrows The Arabian Nights from the public library; her world is transformed. As she says, 'I can change the story because I am the story'. Those words carry the seminal message of 'One Aladdin Two Lamps'. 

Jeanette rejected the life her mother was determined that she followed. We all have such autonomy if only we recognize that fact. 'Not What is. What if?' (p.67) 

• 'Biological essentialism - this is a woman, that is a man - has never been a story for everyone.'
• 'AI in its pure form has no skin colour, no biological sex, no gender'.  

Conjuring up genies - the triumph of imagination 

Jeanette recognizes that the failure of this world is that 'so many people live in scarcity and lack.' So many millions don't have the breathing space to reflect on bigger questions, except perhaps via a religious creed that answers the questions for them. We all have the capacity to ask those bigger questions - and answer for ourselves, if we are spared the struggle for existence. This is why literature is so valuable. 

• Reading is time set apart to get closer to ourselves. Alienation is the modern disease (as Carl Jung recognized in his analysis of what cripples the soul) 
• What we think is real isn't reality. Jeanette cites Plato's story of the shackled captives in the cave who imagine that the shadows they see, cast by firelight, are the real and true world - and Prospero's words in The Tempest: 'We are such stuff as dreams are made of'. What you see is never the whole story. 
• Stories can celebrate 'the most potent shape-shifter in the world - love'. Love can change me. Love can find forgiveness where there is none. In the end, Shahrazad can save Shahryar from his own empty heart. 

Plato's analogy of the Cave - can we trust what we see?

Another message from Jeanette is that what you risk reveals what you value. If you value yourself enough, you will risk fighting the 'enemies' within: the power of the neglectful/bullying figures in our life that we have allowed to become internalized within us. 

Cruel disappointment is universal - but it is not the only story. Liberal changes did bring new hope in the 1960s; life afterwards gave new opportunities for women in education and the arts. Jeanette was able to go to Oxford University and forge a career as a writer - but getting on in life is never just about talent and hard work. Her opportunities came from the political work of others. 

Jeanette explores our capacity to be deceived and manipulated. Tellingly, she cites the origin of Facebook: 

'What did Mark Zuckerberg say, in 2004, when he realized he could sweet-talk people into giving him their data, by calling it sharing? 

"The dumb fucks."

Who then can we trust? 

Jeanette responds: 'I trust words. Not because they are free of error, or ambiguity, deception even; not because they never falter and fail. I trust them because of these things. They are incomplete like me. That incompleteness allows the gaps to speak. The not-words as well as the words.'

Yet Jeanette is mindful that we are perhaps on the cusp of an evolutionary leap - we don't know how being raised by a smart phone will affect our story; in the future, human beings may be redefined by intelligent machines. 

In our present time, we are faced with portals - doorways into new experiences. Art's function is to act as a portal. And when we fall in love, our powers of perception are heightened - another portal is opened; we are more alive. Shahrazad and her stories offer a doorway out of madness, a portal into sanity.

Jeanette becomes the historian, teasing out the significance of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution. More equal and open societies became possible and if the Industrial Revolution brought squalor in the pursuit of profit that outcome can still be reversed.

'Everything new begins with an act of imagination.  

 A global economy that works for the many is not a childish dream. It is within our power. (p.209)

The alternative is the mythic City of Brass where money and the lure of profit creates madness, the madness of crypto currency for instance. (p.227)

For Jeanette, Shahrazad's task is to correct Shahryar's one-sided patriarchal perspective. He has fled from feeling. He has only power. He has banished female wisdom and influence.' (p.249)

The City of Brass - with imagination we can dissolve its structure

Aladdin is Jeanette by another name; he has been given the power of the lamp which can reveal when rubbed true magic in the form of love.

Jeanette concludes this wonderful book with these words:

'Shahrazad sees past what is into what is not... Imagination is our only way to see beyond the present emergency. Imagination allows compassion, even to those who do not deserve it... Imagination is the power of change.

King of the World, what follows is more marvellous yet . . . (p.258)

 A book for all to read. A book that Quakers will relish.