The Sand Child
The Sand Child
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in Morocco from before 1956 to the early 1980s; published in French (as L’Enfant de sable) in 1985, in English in 1987.
SYNOPSIS
A girl raised as a boy by her Moroccan family starches for her female identity through a series of physical, psychological, and erotic adventures.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Born in Fez in 1944, Tahar Ben Jelloun attended the French lycée in Tangier, where he moved with his family at the age of 18. He went on to study at the University of Morocco in Rabat and participated in the publication of the radical political review Souffles. After graduating, Ben Jelloun taught philosophy in Tetouan and then in Casablanca. During this time he published his first poems and a novel, Harrouda (1973). Afterwards he studied social psychiatry in France, writing his doctoral dissertation on case histories of North African immigrant workers. He worked with North African immigrant patients for three years at the Dejerine Center for Psychosomatic Medicine, basing his second novel, Solitary Confinement (1976), on this work. A poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, and playwright, Tahar Ben Jelloun frequently speaks out against injustice, racism, and discrimination against North Africans and Palestinians. In The Sand Child, his sixth novel, he focuses, among other issues, on gender relations and the plight of females in Moroccan society.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Locating The Sand Child in history
From the novel’s allusions to certain social and political events, such as the presence of French police, we can date the beginning of the action at a time prior to 1956, the year France relinquished its claim on Morocco. The Blind Troubadour, one of the storytellers in The Sand Child, mentions 1957 as the year in which he gathers with others in a Marrakech square to speak of the destiny of the protagonist, Ahmed/Zahra (Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child, p. 136). From their discussion one can surmise that she was born in the late 1930s. Later, the Troubadour gives 1961 as the year in which he met a mysterious Arab woman (probably Ahmed/Zahra) in his library in Buenos Aires (the English translation erroneously gives the date as 1951). Near the end of the novel, another storyteller speaks of meeting in a vision Ahmed/Zahra’s dead parents and wife, Fatima, who tell him of the people being cruelly oppressed, rising up, and being massacred by “the army” (Sand Child, pp. 162-63). One can surmise that the violence occurs, and the novel concludes, in the late 1970s or early 1980s under the repressive neocolonial regime of Hassan II.
The novel alludes, usually indirectly, to several social and political issues: the questions of colonial rule and the imposition of French culture on Morocco; the Moroccan writer’s use of the colonial French language; the various authoritarian power structures during and after French rule; and relations between North Africans and metropolitan France (in particular regarding immigration). The novel’s allusions also reflect the customs and mores of contemporary Moroccan society, as well as a preoccupation with the Islamic holy book, the Qur’an (or Koran). Of particular importance are the issues of gender identity and women’s sexuality under Morocco’s application of Islam.
Historical background
A brief historical summary establishes the longstanding presence of Islam in Morocco, and the rivalries that led up to the European colonial and postindependence periods.
680s: Following the advent of Islam in 620, the Arab conquest sweeps across North Africa, reaching Morocco.
788: Morocco becomes an independent state but later breaks up into competing ethnic states.
1056: The Almoravids establish a kingdom in Morocco. With successive rulers come continuing conflict and disunity.
1660: The present ruling dynasty, the Alaouites, assumes power.
1700-1800s: Along with other North African countries, Morocco serves as a base for pirates preying upon Mediterranean trade. European powers begin to encroach upon North Africa, laying the foundation for colonization.
1830s: France occupies neighboring Algeria.
1840s: Advancing from the south, France defeats the Moroccan sultan Abd-ar-Rahman.
1904: Rivalries among European powers vying for control over Morocco lead to a secret treaty between Spain and France wherein the two European nations partition Morocco between them.
1905: In the face of German objections, France demands protectorate status over Morocco from its sultan.
1906: The Algeciras Conference results in Morocco becoming a de facto protectorate under France and Spain.
1912: The sultan agrees to an official French protectorate, whereupon the French and Spanish divide Morocco into three zones: the northern and far southern peripheral areas administered by Spain and the considerably larger midregion administered by France. The French government appoints Louis-Herbert Lyautey as governor, which he remains until 1925.
1940-42: France falls to Germany in World War II; France’s Vichy government controls Morocco; Allied invasion ends Vichy control.
1945: France resumes its prewar control of Morocco; Sultan Sidi Mohammed supports Istiqlal, a powerful nationalist independence movement.
1953: The French ban Istiqlal and depose the sultan.
1955: Following insurrection in Algeria and disturbances in Morocco, the French restore Sidi Mohammed.
1956: France relinquishes its rights to Morocco, Spain surrenders its protectorate, and Morocco achieves independence.
Immigration
Alluded to in The Sand Child is the migration of North Africans, especially males, to France in search of work. The issue of migration and immigration have, particularly in the past three decades in France, stirred enormous controversy. On one side are Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front, which grew out of the ultraviolent “New Order” movement in 1972. With its slogan “France for the French,” the National Front has fought fiercely against immigration and has supported anti-Semitism. On the other side, writers of Semitic origin, like Tahar Ben Jelloun, champion immigration, pointing out that it enriches French society by promoting cultural diversity.
The novel alludes to the harshness of immigration when Fatuma, one of the narrators, speaks of the emptying of her country: “[M]en and history, plains and mountains, meadows and even the sky are disappearing. Only the women and kids remain. It looks as if they were staying to guard the country, but there’s nothing to guard” (Sand Child, p. 131). Here she refers to the problem in North African coastal societies of widespread emigration of the adult male population to Europe, and the consequent social decline at home. A survey of the southwest Moroccan region of Wedinson has shown, for example, that in 1978, 227 of 297 households included members who migrated to Europe for work. About 60 percent of these migrants went to France; the remainder migrated mainly to the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia (Najib, pp. 102-104).
In The Sand Child, after the narrator Fatuma speaks of the departure of men seeking work in France, she goes on to describe the poverty and plight of those left behind:
Those who have been driven out of the countryside by drought and irrigation projects roam the cities. They beg. They are rejected, humiliated; they go on begging, snatching what they can. Children …[m]any of them die, far too many, so more are produced, more and still more. To be born a boy is the lesser of two evils.
To be born a girl is a calamity, a misfortune that is left at the roadside where death passes by at the end of the day.
(Sand Child, p. 131)
While poverty and insufficient social and educational programs have plagued Morocco since independence in 1956, mass migration of the male population has exacerbated the situation. Left to suffer the intensified problems, as indicated in the novel, are women and children.
The law of inheritance in the Qur’an and in The Sand Child
The Sand Child turns on the Islamic law of inheritance as dictated by the Qur’an. This law of inheritance appears differently in the novel than in the Qur’an. As decreed in the Qur’an, the law of inheritance states:
Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children’s (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females: if only daughters, two or more, their share is two-thirds of the inheritance; if only one, her share is half.
(The Holy Qur’an, 4:11; trans. ʿAbdallah Yusuf Ali)
The law, which accords the male child twice as much as the female, must be viewed within its social and legal framework. As explained by Haifaa A. Jawad in The Rights of Women in Islam,
[T]he wife [in Islam] is to be cared for by her husband, even if she is wealthy enough to maintain herself. By law she is entitled to claim maintenance from her husband. At the same time she is not obligated to spend any of her wealth on the household. In addition a Muslim woman receives at the time of her marriage a considerable sum of money. This money, which the husband is obliged to pay, constitutes her dowry, or mahr, which belongs to her alone. She is free to use, spend or invest it in any way she likes. Therefore, as a wife she adds to whatever she receives through inheritance in her capacity as daughter and that, too, without any legal commitment to support either herself or her children.
(Jawad, p. 66)
According to Islam, it is the male’s responsibility to earn money in order to support his wife and children. Furthermore, it is the male’s responsibility to give his wife a mahr or dowry upon marriage. As Jawad makes clear, women are entitled to claim maintenance from their husband and are not obligated to spend any of their own wealth on the household. Since the male bears the financial burden in society, the Qur’anic law of inheritance grants him twice as much as the female in order to balance the flow of wealth by ensuring that the male can adequately provide for his family and that the female can provide for herself.
The following example further elucidates the situation:
[I]f you [a male] were to inherit from your father one thousand dirhams, and your sister 500 dirhams, at her marriage she will take another 500 dirhams as dowry, making her share one thousand; whereas when you marry you will give 500 dirhams as dowry that shall leave you with half of what your sister has received. In this manner, the Divine Law would produce the result [it] desire[s] and hint[s] at.
(Engineer in Jawad, pp. 66-67)
Thus, a strict application of the Islamic law of inheritance is not as unfair as it might at first seem to Western readers.
The law of inheritance as presented in The Sand Child differs somewhat from the Qur’anic text: a man’s son shall inherit two-thirds of the family wealth upon the death of the father. The son, furthermore, becomes the central authority figure who rules over all females in the family, including younger and elder sisters as well as the mother. Should the family lack a male heir the daughters inherit one-third of the family wealth and the father’s brothers inherit the other twothirds. In Ben Jelloun’s novel, there is no male heir so the father, in order to keep his brothers from inheriting his wealth, raises his eighth daughter as a boy.
As reflected in the novel, then, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between pure Qur’anic law and particular Muslim societies. While the Qur’an states that if there is no son and more than one daughter, the daughters inherit two-thirds of the father’s wealth, the novel states that only one-third would be inherited by the daughters. The difference between the Qur’anic declaration and the law as presented in the novel is the difference between theory and practice. Qur’anic law is the theory; the reality is that in Muslim lands, various legal systems—Islamic, colonial, bureaucratic, and perhaps republican—operate in piecemeal or amalgamated form. Their application is affected by the social realities of today’s Muslim societies. Most are developing countries with rampant illiteracy, entrenched social customs, and limited access to higher education. Discrimination against women in these societies is commonplace.
The status of women in Morocco
According to some scholars, there is strong evidence that Morocco’s commitment to wholly integrating women within society falls far below that of nearby Algeria and Tunisia (Griffiths, p. 9). Although the Moroccan constitution guarantees “every child, male and female, the right to primary education in a state-funded school,” barely “50% [of female children] reach that mark” (Griffiths, p. 11).
The situation of women in Morocco must be understood against the backdrop of entrenched traditional attitudes as well as colonial notions of gender. Traditionally secluded in harems, Islamic women were kept out of sight of the male world. Harems were abolished in Turkey in 1909, but the practice continued for several years in other Muslim countries. The harem system as such no longer exists in present-day Morocco; however, associated social and psychological attitudes persist. In its sacred usage, the word haram in Arabic refers to something that is unlawful and forbidden to the nonfaithful—in other words, something that is to be protected from non-Muslims. One example is the consecrated area around the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which is closed to all but Muslims. In its secular usage, haram denotes the portion of a man’s living quarters in which women, children, and servants are kept in seclusion. In Morocco, especially in rural areas, there are still traditional households in which Moroccan women live in seclusion, speak out only when they attain an advanced age, and never refer to themselves in the singular.
Generally the Moroccan woman in a traditional household has no voice in decisions that affect her life. Her acquiescence to marriage is through a male intermediary who speaks in her place: “Her body censured, her desire repressed, her word forbidden, her image veiled, her reality denied under the mask …woman in the Maghreb [Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria] generally ceases to undergo oppression by male society only when she becomes a mother” (Ben Jelloun, La plus haute des solitudes, p. 92; trans. J. Erickson). In the novel, the storyteller Fatuma says:
Yes, I’ve said nothing, because in this country a woman is used to keeping quiet; if she does speak out, that’s an act of violence in itself. I’m old now, which is why I can sit around with you [the other storytellers and audience]. Thirty years ago, or when I was about thirty, do you think I would have dared to be seen with you in a café?
(Sand Child, p. 125)
The position of women has also been affected by power relations between France and North Africa. In their historical encounter with North African society, France and other Western colonial powers often attempted to influence malefemale roles and relationships. In Algeria, for example, a campaign initiated by French colonial authorities to unveil the Arab woman rested on the breaking down of traditional indigenous mores. While the act of unveiling may seem “liberating” to Westerners unfamiliar with customs of Muslim societies, one must remember that the French colonizers also brought male chauvinistic attitudes that contributed to the Moroccan woman’s being thought of as a second-class citizen. In “the development of women’s rights, and the history of social-policy,” notes Clare Griffiths, “France trailed far behind the anglophone countries” (Griffiths, p. 9).
In sum, women in Morocco have confronted obstacles to self-affirmation extremely more pronounced than those of their male counterparts. These obstacles arise from the effacement of the woman; she is confronted by an ethos of male superiority in all domains—from education to occupation to marriage. To put it another way, the distinctions and privileges accorded to males in Moroccan society place the woman in a position of inferiority.
The Novel in Focus
Plot overview
Not told in straightforward chronological order, The Sand Child unfolds according to the following structural overview. In the introduction, or frame narrative, the protagonist, Ahmed/Zahra, is alive and in seclusion, but it is nearly the end of her life. When the initial storyteller commences Ahmed/Zahra’s story, the protagonist has already died (the storyteller talks about a great notebook she left behind). The various storytellers of the novel go back in time, leading us to the point when Ahmed/Zahra leaves home to wander. At the end of the tale four storytellers—Salem, Amar, Fatuma, and the Blind Troubadour—present different, sometimes contradictory, versions of Ahmed/Zahra’s fate from the day she leaves home to the end of her life. We surmise that she eventually went into seclusion, which is where we found her at the beginning of the novel.
The plot in detail
The Sand Child opens with a speaker who describes in considerable detail an enigmatic person whose facial features have been ravaged by time, and who has voluntarily secluded “himself” from the rest of his family. The person, Ahmed/Zahra, is referred to as “he” at first. The speaker talks about how Ahmed is afflicted by the incursions—the sights, sounds, smells—of the outer world and goes on to tell us how he prepares for his impending death. The narrator also alludes to the outline of a story, as told in Ahmed’s private and enigmatic journal (Sand Child, p. 3).
After five pages, a blank space marks the conclusion of the introduction or frame narrative and signals the beginning of what turns out to be the narrative proper. This opens with the question: “And who was he?” The following words introduce a storyteller who purportedly possesses Ahmed’s journal, the secret to his identity. “The secret was there, in those pages, woven out of syllables and images,” the storyteller claims as he starts telling Ahmed’s tale (Sand Child, p. 5).
The tale begins before Ahmed’s birth when his father feels a malediction weighing on him because all his offspring are girls. His shame at having only female children grows as each successive birth elicits jeers from his younger brothers who, given his lack of a male child, stand to inherit two-thirds of his wealth. Obsessed by the need for a male heir, the father consults doctors, quacks, healers, and sorcerers. He puts his wife through a frightful regime of spells and cures until she is completely worn out. Despite all these efforts, each new birth brings another girl and, with her birth, despair. The father finally decides to defy fate by making sure the next child is a boy. With his wife’s complicity, he arranges for an old midwife to declare the newborn a male, regardless of its gender. At the birth of his eighth child, the midwife announces a boy. The father, though observing that it is a girl, goes through with his plans and rejoices at finally having a male child.
The girl, named Ahmed, is dressed and raised as a boy. She is doted upon, and passed with great ceremony from one stage of masculine development to another, including circumcision in infancy—which the father arranges with the connivance of a barber and blood provided by the father’s own slashed finger. Growing up according to the dictates of her father, Ahmed enters fully into the deception that is her life: her chest is bound tightly to prevent her breasts from growing, she sneaks towels from her mother’s and sisters’ closet when she menstruates, and she strives to emulate men in both speech and bearing. To all intents and purposes, she becomes a he.
A would-be brother, Ahmed asserts his authority over his sisters and, to his parents’ consternation, insists on marrying. Upon the death of his father, he becomes master of the house and takes his cousin Fatima, a lame epileptic, as his wife. He then begins living with her in seclusion from both their families. Fatima accepts a life without sexuality, sensing, and finally learning, Ahmed’s secret. Ahmed comes to hate Fatima’s presence; meanwhile, she loses her will to live and finally dies through self-neglect. After her death, Ahmed withdraws into his own seclusion.
At one point in the narration of the story thus far, a fight occurs between storytellers. The storyteller of the moment is accused of making everything up, of pretending to read from Ahmed’s journal, but reading instead from “a cheap edition of the Koran” (Sand Child, p. 49). This first storyteller, not to be confused with the narrator of the frame story, is then replaced by a second storyteller who claims to be Fatima’s brother. This storyteller relates the next installment of the story, which begins to appear more and more tenuous. What seems clear is that Ahmed eventually decides to forego his life of deception in order to discover the woman within him, the truth of his/her being. By one account, he/she wanders and finally joins a circus. When a male dancer who masquerades as a woman quits, the circus head, Abbas, proposes that Ahmed replace him. Ahmed appears on stage dressed first as a man but leaves to reappear as a femme fatale, Lalla Zahra. Zahra becomes the main attraction of the circus.
At this point, when we are more than threefifths of the way through the story, the latest storyteller disappears and his tale is taken up by three aged persons—Salem, Amar, and Fatuma—who were a part of the audience and now tell their own versions of Ahmed’s/Zahra’s story. Each person’s version of Zahra’s last days diverges markedly from the others.
Salem tells how Zahra was brutalized by Abbas, the circus owner. One night, knowing he was about to attack her, she cuts him and, as he bleeds to death, he strangles her. In Amar’s story, Zahra escapes from the circus and wanders throughout the country; eventually all trace of her is lost. Amar reads from writings he attributes to her, writings in which she expresses her desire to leave home. But then Amar contradicts what he said earlier by stating that he believes Ahmed/Zahra “never left his room high up on the terrace of the big house,” where he/she died a “gentle death” (Sand Child, pp. 123-24). Salem objects, saying that since the character of Ahmed/Zahra “is in himself an act of violence …only a great act of violence—a suicide with lots of blood—can bring this story to an appropriate end” (Sand Child, p. 124). Fatuma, in her turn, tells how she has journeyed through many countries, but admits to having invented those journeys “in a tall, narrow, circular room …overlooking the terrace” (Sand Child, pp. 127-28). She speaks of a pilgrimage she made to Mecca in the disguise of a man. She tells of learning to be in a dream, “to make of [her] life an entirely invented story,” while living in “the illusion of another [male] body” (Sand Child, p. 132). While Fatuma never mentions Zahra in her story, she alludes to being Zahra herself, telling her own story, and living now as the old Fatuma.
To these several tales, the Blind Troubadour adds his own version about Ahmed/Zahra’s end. He tells of how a woman, probably an Arab, visited him in the library in Buenos Aires where he worked. She gave him a rare Egyptian coin called a battene and explained that she had sought him out because he alone was capable of understanding her. She had been wandering, she said, a fugitive wanted “for murder, usurpation of identity, abuse of confidence, and theft of inheritance” (Sand Child, p. 141). While the Blind Troubadour tells his tale of the mysterious woman visitor to listeners on the great square in Marrakech, we come to know a little bit about him. We learn that once he was not blind, but then he lost his sight and decided to travel in search of the unknown woman with whose identity he has become obsessed, the woman whom he calls “a princess who has escaped from a fairy tale” (Sand Child, p. 145)
The last chapter tells of the departure of the Blind Troubadour after the first storyteller returns to the square and delivers the final words of the novel. He carries the notebook that supposedly belongs to Ahmed/Zahra and explains that, after he had left them, Ahmed/Zahra appeared to him on a sleepless night and reproached him for betraying her secret. Another time he fell asleep and awakened in a cemetery. The characters he thought he had “invented” appeared and called to him. “Ahmed’s father locked me up in an old building and forced me to go back to the square and tell the story in a different way” (Sand Child, p. 162). Fatima, Ahmed/Zahra’s lame wife, also appeared and said “I am the woman you chose to be your hero’s victim” (Sand Child, p. 162). She gave him palm dates. After eating them, a dazzling light appeared and the characters vanished.
This first and last storyteller informs his listeners of a visit later from a poor Egyptian woman of Alexandria. She told him that he would be able to tell the story of her uncle who was in fact her aunt, whose true identity was discovered upon his/her death. She proceeded to recount the story of Bey Ahmed and left the storyteller a large notebook containing Bey Ahmed’s journal. In his wandering, the storyteller left the book open one night and the pages were washed clean of their writing by the moonlight. He confides to the listeners that “[n] either you nor I would ever know the end of the story”—if they want to know how the story ends, they will have to ask the moon when it is full (Sand Child, p. 161).
The Blind Troubadour
Despite the intricacies of a novel that uses multiple storytellers who often contradict one another, the storytellers, according to Marie Fayad, share a common trait: “they all seem to fit into the general Moroccan context of the story, they are part of the multifaceted, multicolored but predictable crowd that gathers on the square in Marrakech” (Fayad, p. 291). The only exception, which stands out rather boldly, is the Blind Troubadour. He is strange and different not because he is blind, but because he comes from another country, “from afar, from another century, thrown into one tale by another tale” (Sand Child, p. 135). “His sudden appearance in the novel is surprising since he does not seem to have a logical reason for being there” (Fayad, p. 291).
The Blind Troubadour is both mysterious and decipherable—mysterious in that no one knows exactly who he is or why he has suddenly appeared, decipherable in that his character points to his identity as a real person. Although he is never named, numerous allusions link him to the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, as pointed out and discussed in print by scholars (John Erickson in 1991 and Marie Fayad in 1993). When the Troubadour is introduced, we are told he is blind, tall and thin, does not seem to carry a cane, and wears a dark suit (Sand Child, p. 134). This is almost an exact physical description of the real Borges. In addition, the Troubadour speaks of his vocation as a writer, his life in Buenos Aires, his knowledge of Spanish, and his occupation as a librarian.
Furthermore, as the Troubadour continues to tell his story, he uses words taken from Borges’s own writings or interviews. Readers are alerted to Ahmed/Zahara’s fate being a type of unresolvable game by the Blind Troubadour’s words “The Secret is Sacred but is always somewhat ridiculous,” a line imported into The Sand Child from the genuine Borges short story “The Sect of the Phoenix” (Erickson, “Writing Double,” p. 114). Likewise, the Troubadour says, “I have spent my life falsifying or altering other people’s stories…. When I was young, I was ashamed to be someone who loved only books, not a man of action” (Sand Child, pp. 134-35). Again his words echo those of Borges: “Borges used almost exactly these words when he commented on his debut as a writer of fiction: ’[I was] a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting …the tales of others” (Fayad, p. 292).
Perhaps the most intriguing connections to Borges are the use of names and motifs taken from his fiction. The Troubadour’s use of the name “Stephen Albert” echoes a character from Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Sand Child, p. 142). His reference to a coin called the zahir recalls Borges’s story “The Zahir” (Sand Child, p. 138). Likewise, his fascination with things of Arabic origin, his mention of the tales of The Thousand and One Nights, his love of Don Quixote, and his preponderant interest in esoterica all connect the Troubadour with the real personage of Jorge Luis Borges. Yet the connection is never certain, for many other allusions in the story make pinpointing the Blind Troubadour’s identity problematic.
The Blind Troubadour operates on several levels. First, in the event that he is a fictional replica of the real Borges, the Troubadour functions as one of the storytellers, a character in the tale of the first-level narrator who is outside the story. Moreover, the Troubadour functions outside the narrative in his role as a character in other stories. At one point, the Troubadour speaks of himself as coming from and having lived a story in which he is the main character, a magician, who reaches his ultimate goal of dreaming a man only to find out, years later, that he himself is the dream of another (Sand Child, p. 136). Here the Troubadour, a character in Ahmed/Zahra’s story whom we believe to be the author Jorge Luis Borges, becomes a character in one of Borges’s stories, “The Circular Ruins.” Thus, the Blind Troubadour is not merely a figure in the story of Ahmed/Zahra, but in other stories as well. He, in other words, brings the world outside the story inside of it.
The Blind Troubadour, then, is the device whereby story levels are displaced, characters put on the same level as their creators, and the authenticity of the main narrative of Ahmed/Zahra called into question. The pivotal figure in the Troubadour’s story is an unknown woman visitor who bears a strong resemblance to Ahmed/Zahra, the protagonist of The Sand Child.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 24, 1899, Jorge Luis Borges became the undisputed giant of Latin American letters, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century. Shy and bookish, a librarian by profession, Borges looked very much like the Blind Troubadour: tall and thin, wearing dark glasses and a dark suit. At around the age of 55, Borges became completely blind and then began to travel a great deal. Crossing boundaries in his mind as well, Borges reflected on notions of myth, fiction, and reality. He was, in particular, attracted to myths and narratives from Spain and the Arab world, citing both Don Quixote and The Thousand and One Nights as two of his favorite works of literature. Much of Borges’s fiction operates by blurring the distinctions between reality and fiction, whereupon he mingles factual narratives with fictional characters and factual characters with fictional narratives. Complex intellectual levels of organization and storytelling and references to esoteric knowledge also characterize his stories.
His visitor speaks of similar episodes in her life, of similar misfortunes and flight, and the Blind Troubadour has a vision in his mind of her tormented father. In a passage omitted from the English translation, the Troubadour even refers to this visitor as being from Morocco (Sand Child, p. 144). Yet later, the original storyteller casts doubt on the Troubadour’s veracity, saying Ahmed/Zahra is an invented character, based on an Alexandrian woman’s uncle/aunt, Bey Ahmed.
Jorge Luis Borges died in June 1986, only a few months after The Sand Child’s publication. Given this fact, the figure of the Blind Troubadour may be Tahar Ben Jelloun’s way of paying a last tribute to one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Much of Borges’s fiction worked by “falsifying or altering other people’s stories” and by using real characters in fictional stories and fictional characters in real stories (Sand Child, p. 134). There is perhaps no better way to pay homage to Borges than to do it in Borgesian fashion, by using Borges, a real person, as a fictional character in a novel (Fayad, p 298). The Blind Troubadour himself states, at one point: “What an odd situation! I felt as if I were in a book, one of those picturesque characters who appear in the middle of a story to throw the reader off the scent” (Sand Child, p. 139).
Oral storytelling in The Sand Child
The story of Ahmed/Zahra is related by a succession of storytellers in a public square where a crowd gathers to listen. This type of storytelling still exists today in the public squares of cities and towns, such as the famous Square of the Dead in the medina, the native quarter, of Marrakech. For an audience that is in large part illiterate, such storytelling provides instruction as well as entertainment. The storyteller passes on to the public the history, legends, myths, moral tales, and popular stories of the past, keeping the people’s legacy alive through oral transmission. In The Sand Child, Ben Jelloun inserts pauses between the tales of different storytellers, which suggests a parallel with the phrase qala al-rawi (”the storyteller said”), a narrative technique used in The Thousand and One Nights to indicate the end of a story.
The oral nature of Ben Jelloun’s novel does not, however, mean that he has simply transcribed oral narratives. Rather, The Sand Child does something much more complex. It takes a European storytelling genre, the novel, and modifies it by using storytelling techniques borrowed from Arabic culture. By employing multiple storytellers, many of whom speculate and contradict one another, and multiple levels of narrative, the novel confuses the levels, the different storytellers, and ultimately the reader. The demands put upon the reader push illogic and contradiction to the limit. With multiple narrators who contradict one another and speculate about what they think happened, we are refused the possibility of getting a definite fix on either the characters or the storytellers. Furthermore, since most of the storytellers are not wholly reliable and themselves figure into the story on some level, one gets the impression that they making up the story as they go along.
One comes to understand that these differing versions, which present glimpses of a fleeting and contradictory reality, demonstrate that all life stories, including so-called objective “history,” are in large part invented by storytellers who select what to include in accord with their own aims and desires. Ultimately, the story of Ahmed/Zahra shows how the phenomenon we call “reality” is not merely elusive and unseizable, but in itself fictional. By using unreliable narrators, multiple levels of storytelling, and narrative devices that are deliberately confusing, The Sand Child calls attention to its own fictionality, making clear that the story it tells is just that: a story.
Sources and literary context
By the time Tahar Ben Jelloun was 18 and graduating from high school, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were newly independent countries. Their colonial pasts left indelible marks, however. One consequence of the colonial protectorate period in Morocco was the imposition of the French language and culture upon Moroccan subjects. With the exception of religious schools, formal schooling of the population was conducted in French and modeled on France’s educational system; thus, most Moroccans who later became writers were educated in French. Struggling to find individual and collective voices that would express the now postcolonial Moroccan experience, these writers confronted the problem of expressing themselves in another culture’s language while trying to preserve and express their own culture and beliefs.
One group of young writers and intellectuals congregated around a literary review called Souffles. These writers included the journal’s founder Abdellatif Laabi as well as Mohammed Khair-Eddine, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Mostafa Nissaboury, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Souffles set out to tackle the problem of postcolonial language. While many of these prominent intellectuals advocated Arabic as the appropriate language of Moroccan literature, this language shift did not occur. However, the nature of Moroccan and North African writing in French began to take a revolutionary turn.
In tackling the dilemma of how to adapt the French language to their own needs and desires, these writers began to violate genres and conventions of the French language. For many, this violation amounted to a more basic rejection of French language and culture than using Arabic would have. The “revolution” spilled over from language to content; their narrative questioned current structures and hierarchies of power—political, religious, social, or cultural. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s writing must be understood within this context.
PREMISE OF THE SAND CHILD
“[A] book—at least that’s how I see it—is a labyrinth created on purpose to confuse men, with the intention of ruining them and bringing them back to the narrow limits of their ambitions.”
(The Blind Troubadour in The Sand Child, pp. 139-40)
From The Thousand and One Nights the novel adopts the notion of the embedded narrative, that is, the enclosure of one story within another. In so doing, The Sand Child, much like The Thousand and One Nights, creates tales that free themselves from boundaries, gyrating in unforeseen directions and even turning back on themselves. The Sand Child attacks the notion of narrative closure typical of the traditional European novel and the reductionist tendency of European philosophy (its preference for rationalism, for example). By leaving the story open-ended, in characteristic North African oral storytelling fashion, the novel rejects the usual denouement of the selfcontained story in which everything is neatly tied together. Ben Jelloun reformulates the notion of a novel, countering European notions of storytelling, modifying the novel into a genre that fits with traditional Arabic storytelling and non-Western literature.
Reviews
The Sand Child met with a generally favorable reception in France and the English-speaking world. Like other reviewers, Barbara Harlow commended Ben Jelloun for challenging “the authority of religion and the colonizer [over] women and other subject groups” (Harlow, p. 49). The work, noted Jean-Louise Thatcher, is “sensitive and perceptive” when describing “Ahmed [’s] …struggle with the feminine side of ‘his’ nature. The work is also violent, fantastic, convoluted in style, rich in images” (Thatcher, p. 483). Many critics felt that the novel’s complexity challenges a reader’s understanding. Marie-Noelle Little likened the storyteller’s tale to “a crossing of the desert with its oases and mirages” and compared the novel to tales of The Thousand and One Nights that “live longer than the [authors] and embellish our days” (Little, p. 832).
—John Erickson and Faisal Azam
For More Information
‘Ali, Abdullah Yusuf, trans. The Holy Qur’an. Brentwood, Calif.: Amana Corporation, 1989.
Ben Jelloun, Tahar. La plus haute des solitudes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979.
_____. The Sand Child. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Erickson, John D. Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
_____. “Writing Double: Politics and the African Narrative of French Expression.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 15, no. 1 (winter 1991):101-22.
Fayad, Marie. “Borges in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable: Beyond Intertextuality.” The French Review 67, no. 2 (December 1993): 291-99.
Griffiths, Claire. “Social Development in Francophone Africa: The Case of Women in Gabon and Morocco.” Working Papers in African Studies, no. 211. Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1998.
Harlow, Barbara. “She Took a Wife,” review of The Sand Child, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. The New York Times Book Review, 25 October 1987, p. 49.
Jawad, Haifaa A. The Rights of Women in Islam: An Authentic Approach. London: Macmillan, 1998.
Little, Marie-Noëlle. Review of The Sand Child, by Tahar Benjelloun. French Review 1986: 831-32.
Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil. Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society. New York: Schenkman, 1975.
Najib, Ali Ben Salah. Migration of Labour and the Transformation of the Economy of the Wedinoon Region in Morocco. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 1986.
Thatcher, Jean-Louise. Review of The Sand Child. The Middle East Journal 42, no. 3 (summer 1988): 482-83.