The Sand Child

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-16

Chapters 17-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “The Man”

The narrative opens with the words of a storyteller speaking to an audience gathered around him in a public square in Marrakesh, Morocco, in the 1950s. The storyteller-narrator evokes an unnamed elderly Moroccan character’s lined, scarred, pain-ridden face. Later revealed to be a woman, this female protagonist raised as a male lives out the end of his days secluded in the upper room of a large house, welcoming only the perfunctory visits of Malika, his family’s kindly old servant, bringing him food and mail. Avoiding any form of light, the protagonist likewise displays hypersensitivity in most of his sensorial organs: Noise disturbs him; his skin absorbs and reacts to everything in around him; his nose, that “of a blind man” (2), detects any smell. He whiles away his time preparing for death, which entails arranging his lengthy personal journal carrying his secrets.

Stooped with age and pain, he no longer has the dictatorial man’s gait that he acquired after taking over the household upon his father’s death. Though exhibiting signs of physical deterioration, he knows that ultimately the sense of deep melancholy that has pervaded his existence will devour him. He justifies his constant writing with the words of an Egyptian poet who claimed that one must have a journal to declare that “one has ceased to be” (5).

As he closes this installment of his tale, the storyteller rhetorically asks his listeners what his protagonist was, then indicates the deceased’s notebook, which he claims the moribund character entrusted to him prior to his death, and which he has embodied after much time spent reading and deciphering it. The notebook, surrounded by a thick wall pierced by seven gates, can be accessed by keys that open them. Through listening to the storyteller’s ongoing tale, members of the audience will learn how to procure and utilize these keys, which he insists they already possess. He bids his listeners goodbye, beckoning them to return the following day.

Chapter 2 Summary: “The Thursday Gate”

The storyteller embarks on relating the life story of the protagonist, whom he decides to call Ahmed, a popular male name in Morocco. Noting that the story’s path begins at the Thursday gate—the day of exchange at local markets—he proceeds to indicate Thursday as the day of the week reserved for the birth of male children, a remark that leads to recounting the background of Ahmed’s family’s misfortune.

Ahmed’s mother, having already given birth to seven daughters, fears another female birth, a curse in her successful potter husband’s—and society’s—eyes, due to Islamic inheritance laws, which at that time required that a father’s estate be transferred to a male heir. With every pregnancy, Ahmed’s authoritarian father, upon consulting doctors, fakirs, charlatans, and quacks, has forced his wife to undergo bizarre, cruel rituals—such as eating only dry bread, drinking witch’s potions, swallowing rare Indian herbs, and sprinkling herself with she-camel urine—to bring about a male birth, all to no avail. Ahmed’s mother, distressed at her inability to produce a male child and at her husband’s wrath, takes to striking her own belly in anguish. The only party to rejoice at her repeated female births is her husband’s brother, who under the era’s law will inherit his brother’s fortune in the absence of a male heir.

Abandoning faith in his questionable sources of advice, Ahmed’s father decides a few weeks before the birth that his eighth child will be a boy regardless of its actual sex. Justifying this decision on grounds of his wife’s “infirmity”—housing an “inhospitable womb”—the father swears his wife and her midwife to secrecy and plans a weeklong public celebration to commemorate the birth of his son Ahmed, who, despite being female, is announced by the midwife that auspicious Thursday to be a newborn boy.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Friday Gate”

With the birth of a male heir, Ahmed’s father recovers his paternal honor, and his mother is finally recognized as a true mother, recounts the storyteller. Preparations for the splendid feast are made, including the slaughter of an ox, giving alms to the poor, the assembling of an orchestra, and a half-page birth announcement published in the national newspaper. This public display of Ahmed’s birth arouses public curiosity, given its deviation from the norms of a society with established divisions between public and private affairs. The announcement’s overtly political closing line, “Long live Morocco” (19), also raises the French police’s eyebrows, as well as those of national militants.

As Ahmed’s first year passes euphorically, his father struggles with how to pull off his son’s circumcision, a public event. When the day arrives, the child’s legs are spread, the barber-circumciser slices, and blood flows; little do the spectators know that Ahmed’s father has secretly cut his own index finger to elicit blood for the sham circumcision.

Ahmed proceeds to grow up as a male, attending a private Koranic school. Like all young boys, he initially accompanies his mother—then eventually his father—to the hammam, the local Moorish baths. The storyteller then opens the notebook and reads aloud Ahmed’s own comments relating to his experiences attending first the women’s, then the men’s hammam. At the former, sitting among women for whom the weekly outings represent less the necessity of washing their bodies than the opportunity to leave the house and socialize, Ahmed finds himself bored by the women’s constant chatter. However, he quickly learns the power of words, the “savor of life” (23), as he glimpses amid the moist fog the bathing women’s private parts, which disgust him to the point that he has to devise strategies to chase away mental images of them at night. As Ahmed hits puberty and begins developing breasts, his mother binds his chest to thwart their blossoming, and it is decided that he can no longer frequent the female hammam. The “male fog” of the men’s hammam presents a remarkably different atmosphere to Ahmed: there, the men wash rapidly with few or no verbal exchanges.

As Ahmed progresses through various stages of his male upbringing, he finds himself taking part in typical societal rites of passage, such as spending time at his father’s workplace—slated to become his one day—and attending the mosque, whose male congregation’s ritualistic chanting and displays of fervor enthrall him.

The journal entry closes with a tale of “male” teaching. Upon leaving the mosque one day, Ahmed and his father stop to fetch bread. As the two continue their path home, Ahmed’s father intentionally walks ahead of him to teach him independence. Along the way, three hooligans approach Ahmed and steal the bread, causing the boy to erupt in tears. Upon reaching home, he receives a mighty blow from his father, who delivers the piercing message to stop bawling like a girl, at which point Ahmed steels himself, ready to fight.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Saturday Gate”

The storyteller explains to his audience that this third stage of the story—corresponding to the Saturday gate, the day of exchange at the market square—encompasses adolescence, a dark period during which Ahmed was no doubt taken over by his father while dealing with complicated physical and emotional changes. As he stresses that this phase of Ahmed’s development remains a “blank space left for the reader to fill in” (27), members of the audience offer their own versions of what may have transpired in Ahmed’s life, with stories ranging from imagined crisis and trauma to full compliance with his father’s dictates. The debaters begin to question the storyteller’s legitimacy, given his inability to give a decisive account of this period.

Eventually the storyteller reads the journal’s next entry, in which the protagonist speaks of “a truth that cannot be told, not even suggested” (29). Ultimately, Ahmed’s words relate the physiological truth of “his” first period, the flow of this “wound” he knows how to control with a stash of cloth he witnessed his mother and sisters silently take from a cabinet and wad up between their legs.

Closing this chapter, the storyteller notes Ahmed’s relief at the realization that, moving forward, his life will become a matter of maintaining appearances in accordance with his own—as opposed to his father’s—will.

Chapters 1-4 Analysis

Opening with what appears to be a traditional third-person narrative, The Sand Child tricks readers from the get-go; after a handful of pages detailing the deep melancholy of a solitary old man whose face—described in detail on the narrative’s first page—is lined and scarred as if wounded, a storyteller interjects a question to his silent listeners. Going forward, the tale will unfold as a frame narrative with an enriching—though potentially confusing—addition: the inclusion of first-person accounts from the protagonist’s personal journal as well as an epistolary exchange with an anonymous correspondent.

That a storyteller—and eventually multiple storytellers, all of whom will challenge the presumption of narrative reliability and stability—relates the protagonist’s woes at the close of his life signals the age-old tradition of oral storytelling in Moroccan culture. However, the tale’s general and specific locations—the country of Morocco and one of its cities, Marrakesh—are only revealed incrementally, the former in the book’s third chapter and the latter two-thirds through the narrative. Similarly, the historical time frame during which the novel’s action occurs—from the turn of the 20th century through the end of the 1950s—is exposed only gradually as the story unfolds.

The storyteller does, however, include clues as to the tale’s general setting despite his delayed pinpointing of it. For example, in his highly descriptive first paragraph detailing the protagonist’s face, he refers to skin as a “veil of flesh” (1), and in listing the many surrounding noises that have become unbearable to the sensorially hypersensitive protagonist, he notes the “strident noise of the badly recorded call to prayer emitted five times a day” (2). The word “veil” (here metaphorized to indicate skin) coupled with the mention of the call to prayer evokes, if not a specific country, at the very least an Islamic backdrop, and it also symbolically announces two of the novel’s overarching themes: gender complexity and female oppression occasioned by Islamic law in general and traditional Moroccan values and mores in particular.

If an initial aura of enigma surrounds the novel’s setting, such is likewise the case regarding the protagonist’s gender. Designated exclusively by the masculine pronoun “he” in the work’s first chapter and in general as the plot ensues, Ahmed, a common Arab name the storyteller decides to call the protagonist, enters the world as a newborn girl, as is revealed in the second chapter. However, given the shame that Ahmed’s father has experienced in siring seven female offspring, he has decided to take charge of his life’s narrative—and his eighth daughter’s—by deeming her a boy.

His properly subservient wife, having taken to striking her own swollen belly while pregnant after having endured his ongoing abuse for allegedly causing a suite of female births, willingly accepts his ruse. At the infant’s ritual circumcision, the father clandestinely slices his own finger, bringing about his own blood to serve as Ahmed’s offering from his would-be penis. From The Sand Child’s opening Chapters, then, pain and bodily mutilation figure as prominent topoi.

Bodies loom large in the novel, with Ahmed’s at center stage. In weekly trips to the hammam—initially with his mother, as is customary for all young boys—Ahmed, with the disgust of “bitter discovery,” glimpses adult women’s nude bodies amid ladies’ gleeful chatter in the moist vapor of the baths, the only area where women of the era were permitted to congregate outside the home. There he also learns the power and materiality of language as he watches syllables and full words rise and fall in the steamy air, hitting the hammam’s ceiling and melting down. Here, in the storyteller’s introduction of the first-person narrative sections from Ahmed’s journal, magical realism makes its way into the novel, creating an intertextual web between The Sand Child and other 20th-century works. As Ahmed develops breasts—which his mother binds—the parents decide that the time has come for him to frequent the male hammam, where few words are pronounced. In the juxtaposition of these radically distinct experiences, Ahmed learns sexual difference at the same time that he intuits the extent to which words wield power. Henceforth, Ahmed’s father concentrates on ensuring his “son’s” traditional male upbringing, including sending him to Koranic school, taking him to pray at the mosque—a space/activity reserved for men, and whose ritualistic fervor Ahmed loves—and teaching him business principles and self-defense.

Having likened the story to a desert—a reference to the work’s title—the narrator deems the account of Ahmed’s adolescence, marked by “his” first period, a “blank space.” As members of the audience chime in offering their accounts of how this time must have transpired, the storyteller begins to read the blank pages of the book, whose first-person narrative marks the novel’s first instances of one of its key symbols, the mirror. Here, just prior to describing the advent of “his” menarche, the protagonist claims to avoid mirrors, as they inevitably reflect the truth of his biological sex, which cannot be uttered.

The Sand Child's status as colonial (and post-colonial) fiction finds a whisper in the father’s birth announcement, as the proud patriarch publishes a large-print newspaper statement indicating his son’s birth followed by the words, “Long live Morocco!” (19), which the narrator mentions irk the French police. National and religious politics, present as early as the narrative’s early indication of the call to prayer having devolved into “an incitement to riot” (2), become increasingly prominent and intense as the tale unfolds.