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 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 17 Summary: “The Blind Troubadour”

An uninvited, blind, self-proclaimed “biographer of error and lies” joins the three alternate storytellers at the Marrakesh café (135). Claiming that the secret is at once sacred and ludicrous, the blind troubadour explains that he’s spent his life falsifying and altering others’ stories, inventing them as he touches a listener’s face.

Evoking their present setting—April 1957—he speaks of his life six years prior in Buenos Aires, where he one day received the visit of a thin Arab woman whose deep yet shrill voice so strongly struck him that he wondered if the visitor was a castrated man or a wounded woman. Somehow knowing his passion for old coins, she proffers a rare Egyptian 50-centime piece from the mid-19th century. As the two sit in his library, the woman’s gaze falls upon an Egyptian handwritten Koran from which she begins to read. Remarking that he views books as labyrinths designed to confuse men, the blind man experiences a vision of a tormented man whom he senses is his visitor’s father.

Staring at the Koran, the mysterious woman cites her need for truth, forgiveness, and justice. While listening to the woman, the blind man is aroused by an odd sense of desire, which brings him back to the visit 30 years prior of another woman who came to borrow books from his library, leaving brusquely with a copy of Don Quixote after their bodies brushed in a passageway between two shelves. Since then, the blind man has suffered from nightmares featuring this woman.

More listeners gather around the blind man in the café, begging him to reveal what the woman who gave him the coin said. In his recounting, she explains that she followed a wealthy merchant to Buenos Aires as a way out of her country. Confessing that she is guilty of “living someone else’s life, leaving someone to die, and lying” (147), this woman seems more like a riddle than a criminal to the blind man, who claims now to the crowd that her face was the last image he saw before losing his sight at the age of 55.

Compelled to abandon his bookish life, the blind man undertook his search for that woman’s face, which he intuits covered a tormented, enchained soul. Armed with a collection of metaphorical objects—a ring containing keys to the city’s seven gates, a handless clock made in Egypt in 1951 (the same year the coin was minted), a prayer mat with an erotic design, and a 10th-century poem altered in handwritten scrawl to relay a dream—the blind troubadour embarked on his journey to the Orient.

Chapter 18 Summary: “The Andalusian Night”

In his dream, the blind troubadour wanders through a Buenos Aires shantytown seeking a dark braid of hair, only to be transposed into the medina of an Arab town where the currency is the rare coin the female visitor gave him.

Having awoken and crossed Europe to Andalusia, the blind man spends the day in the Alhambra palace, where he hides himself at sundown, reveling in being locked inside for the night, which he spends in disturbing bliss. Feeling the strong hands of a being of undiscernible origin and sex—but wearing a long wig—trying to strangle him just before dawn, the blind man awakes with an aching neck. Afterward, he wonders where he is and if he dreamt the Andalusian night.

Chapter 19 Summary: “The Gate of the Sands”

Upon awakening from the sidewalk in front of the café, a man with small grey eyes and a blue turban draws from his briefcase a notebook he declares contains everything. He indicates the blind man, asserting that many dreams, stories, and countries will perish with him. The grey-eyed man says he’ll be with the audience for just a few days, then indicates his notebook of empty pages, claiming that their ink was effaced by the full moon.

The blind man wakes up and is directed to a story circle led by a woman in white. The blue-turbaned man continues his tale on the other side of the square, speaking of their city’s seven gates corresponding to the love of seven saints. Having dared recount the story of an eighth birth, this storyteller brought the destiny of death, which seized his main characters and dispersed his followers.

Having wandered to the south of the country, he now encounters the characters of his invention as he makes his way back to his starting point. He sees Ahmed’s father, who forces him to recount the story otherwise, and his mother, who spits from a wheelchair. He then meets Fatima, who, now cured, reproaches him for killing her off. Noting that since she’s no longer ill she can now focus her attention on the pain of tormented children around her, she bemoans the country’s violent, authoritarian forces. He ingests magic dates Fatima offers him and sees with clarity, noting the parallelism between a story and an old house.

He recounts having spent his life stealing stories until he received the visit of a poor woman from Alexandria who singled him out as the only one capable of telling the tale of her uncle who was in reality her aunt. Once in possession of Bey Ahmed’s journal, he admits having grown fearful when it was effaced by the full moon but now asks his followers to take pen to paper and ask the full moon to tell them the tale to transcribe. As for him, he plans to go read the Koran at the deceased’s tombs.

Chapters 17-19 Analysis

At once filling in essential plot details and upping the aura of mystery and confusion permeating the story, the blind troubadour who joins the other alternate storytellers at the café is generally considered to be the renowned 20th-century Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. Known for having popularized magical realism in Latin American literature, Borges, whose works typically include mirrors, dreams, labyrinths, and libraries—all present in The Sand Child—lost his sight at the age of 55, as did the blind troubadour. His celebrated 1945 short story “The Aleph”—whose title indicates the first letter of Semitic-language alphabets—finds echoes in Ben Jelloun’s repeated mention of alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, which in Arabic culture represents an ancient writing instrument. Borges’s 1977 story “The Book of Sand,” a tale of a book with an infinite number of pages, clearly serves as a literary parent for The Sand Child.

While the blind man’s oneiric, labyrinthine tale literally relates his journey in search of the mysterious woman who visited his Buenos Aires library, it literarily suggests an eastward journey to the cradle of civilization, the site of sunrises, the origin. In the context of this work, that starting point coincides with the onset of Ahmed’s story. Ultimately, however, given the multiplicity of instances in which The Sand Child ’s storytellers allude to other literary texts coupled with mentions that their own manuscripts of Ahmed’s journal contain empty pages, the singularity of “the origin” appears illusory. All texts emerge as products of an ongoing process of intertextuality, and no text is fixed. Rather, as if written in sand, stories disappear with a gust of wind, then find rebirth through whichever storyteller remembers them and tells them next, adorned with their personal flourishes.

The Sand Child winds down with the revelation of its source, the old Egyptian woman whose uncle’s life much resembled Ahmed’s. This elucidation is accompanied by an autoreferential nod to the work’s own composition and structure, namely the various gates whose names appear in many of its chapter titles. The final storyteller alludes to their city’s seven gates and their saints, which suggest the Islamic concept of paradise—Jannah—often depicted as “seven heavens.” Recounting the story of an eighth birth embodies an act of transgression in and of itself, as it contradicts the holy book’s accepted truth. That this eighth child emerges as a woman enjoying the privileges of maleness in an authoritarian patriarchal society—and furthermore becomes a saint—represents the ultimate blasphemy. With the blind troubadour’s admission that he’s spent his life inventing memories and “falsifying or altering other people’s stories” and the resurrection of a cured Fatima (134), the entire enterprise of storytelling in the work relates its own transgressive nature, as well as its artificiality. Still, hungry listeners crave these stories, just as the public attending Abbas’s visibly fake circus acts comes back for more.