The Sand Child

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s 1985 novel The Sand Child highlights struggles with gender identity and obfuscation in traditional patriarchal Moroccan society while also portraying the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism in Morocco. The author continued the story of this novel's protagonist in his 1987 novel The Sacred Night, which garnered him France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. Ben Jelloun has long enjoyed renown as an essayist, author, poet, and painter. His works draw inspiration from his native Morocco, where he spent his childhood and early adulthood. This guide refers to Alan Sheridan’s translation of The Sand Child published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2000 and, in following with both the original French text and Sheridan’s translation, designates the female protagonist with male pronouns, except when otherwise noted.

The Sand Child ’s non-linear plot details the arduous path of Ahmed, an eighth daughter born in the first half of the 19th century into a traditional Moroccan family. His authoritarian father, given the customs of his society, decides prior to his newborn’s birth to raise the child as a boy to boost his masculinity and to ensure the presence of a male heir. The narrative of the protagonist’s life is delivered primarily by way of storytelling, a traditional practice in Arabic cultures. With the work’s main storyteller initiating the tale, others jump in along the way, contradicting his account of the story’s events. The various storytellers’ third-person narratives are interspersed with first-person accounts allegedly from Ahmed’s journal as well as an epistolary correspondence between the protagonist and an anonymous—and likely imaginary—correspondent whose sex at first remains obscured, but who is eventually revealed to be male. Ben Jelloun’s use of a frame narrative along with his layering of conflicting storytelling voices puts textual narrative authority into question, similarly weighing the validity of “truth” as a philosophical given. The work is divided into 19 chapters, seven of which bear the name of a gate, suggesting the seven gates of heaven as represented in Islamic tradition.

Plot Summary

The Sand Child opens with a description of a man’s enigmatic, scarred face as it appears near the end of his tormented life. As the work’s primary storyteller—who emerges a few pages into the narrative—reveals select details of Ahmed’s seclusion in his old familial abode, he foreshadows the protagonist’s unlikely ascension to sainthood after his death, despite his transgressive existence. Working backward from Ahmed’s imminent demise to tell the story of his life, the storyteller begins in the period prior to his birth, emphasizing the family patriarch’s deep-rooted shame at having sired only female children, which he blames on his wife, abusing her physically and emotionally for her alleged deficiencies. As a means of salvaging his public honor, bolstering his sense of paternal masculinity, and ensuring that his brothers cannot inherit his wealth in his nuclear family’s absence of a male heir, the father resolves that, no matter what, his eighth child will be a son.

When another girl is born, Ahmed’s father—sharing the secret only with his wife and their midwife—sets off raising his “son” from the get-go, sacrificing his own blood to serve as Ahmed’s ritual circumcision offering. In following with his society’s upbringing of males, the father sends his son to Koranic school and eventually to the mosque, an all-male environment that bewitches the protagonist. The young “boy” also attends first the female hammam with his mother, then the male baths with his father. In the former, he glimpses and develops a strong distaste for the female anatomy, simultaneously reveling in women’s free exchange of florid language in one of the few public settings they’re allowed to frequent. By contrast, men in the male hammam wash quickly with little or no conversation, the boy notes.

Raised by his father to suppress all displays of emotion, Ahmed continues on this “male path,” undergoing his mother’s binding of his chest when breasts begin to develop and experiencing “his” first period as an awakening to his “wounded” female condition. Imitating examples of maleness in his family and culture, Ahmed grows increasingly authoritarian as he reaches young adulthood, also exhibiting signs of repressed rage and mental illness. At his failed attempt to frankly discuss the long-held secret of his sex with his father, he confounds the latter by announcing his desire to marry—claiming that he only wants to fulfill his obligation as a Muslim man—choosing his sickly, epileptic cousin Fatima to be his bride. After his father’s death, he takes over the household as his sisters’ guardian, behaving like a tyrant and blaming them for their female submissiveness. Although he relishes the idea of dominating Fatima upon their betrothal, she ultimately overpowers him with her silent presence. Within a short time, she dies, declaring on her deathbed that she has always known his secret and recognizes the wound she and Ahmed share as women.

With his father and wife now deceased, Ahmed isolates himself in his room. Deeply depressed and prone to muttering gibberish, he begins an epistolary correspondence with an unknown “other” as he explores his female body, first gazing at it in a mirror, then caressing it in the bathtub. As he gradually comes to terms with his repressed female identity and sexuality, he leaves home, where two mysterious women question whether he is a man or a woman and invade his genitals to learn the answer. The second woman, Um Abbas, leads him to the circus her brutal son directs. Renamed Lalla Zahra, Ahmed lives as a woman and performs in a ludicrous but lucrative act as a dancing woman in shoddy male garb. Experiencing freedom in his gender complexity for the first time, Ahmed is nevertheless plagued by horrific nightmares in which his enraged father accuses him of betrayal while his mother’s lips desperately try in vain to emit audible sounds.

At this point in the tale, the initial storyteller dies as local planners empty Marrakesh’s market square of its traditional local color to make way for modernization projects. Determined to finish the tale, three alternate storytellers convene at a nearby café, where they offer conflicting versions of Ahmed’s post-circus fate. These two men’s and one woman’s renditions of the protagonist’s fate differ dramatically, yet all present more noticeably politicized points of view. With the arrival of the blind troubadour—clearly meant to represent the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—the tale reaches its climax as the latter recounts a story of an enigmatic Egyptian woman who visited him in his Buenos Aires library and whose apprehension, displayed on her face, constituted his final moment of eyesight. Currently on an eastward journey to seek out this mysterious woman, whose life story serves as the source material for the tale of Ahmed, the blind troubadour reveals the ever-circulating, ever-fluctuating nature of stories, all of which involve transgressions. Characters live, die, overtake each other, and change roles and countries, but their stories live on and evolve for eternity.