The Sand Child

As the storyteller details the young adult Ahmed’s alternately brutishly violent and uncommunicative behavior—citing witchcraft, a leitmotif in the novel, as a potential cause—the portrait of an angry, depressed post-adolescent emerges. The protagonist attempts to have an honest conversation with his father about his situation, only to have it fall on deaf ears. In tiptoeing toward voicing his desire to marry, Ahmed taunts his father by dancing around the reality of his biological sex, which of course prohibits him from being a husband in a traditional society that would measure him by his capacity to sire children (preferably males). Moreover, in justifying his wishes by citing the dictate that Muslim men must marry, Ahmed pushes his father into a corner from which he cannot escape.

In differing articulating his choice of Fatima as his bride, Ahmed delivers the final humiliating blow, ostensibly to punish his father for having perpetuated the lie of his biological identity for two decades. In that the truth of Ahmed’s sex is never uttered within the family, his father is forced to accept the most heinous of crimes in their society and its religion: that his female daughter will marry her female cousin. Even worse, Ahmed will marry the least desirable girl of his uncle’s brood: Fatima the epileptic. Ahmed anticipates his betrothal as an opportunity to dominate and oppress, perhaps subconsciously seeing himself equally the “sacrificial woman” as he does Fatima. In this story where the most minute of details often take on supernatural levels of significance, it might appear that Ahmed’s brutal retaliation against his father’s denial of his biological femaleness activates a contagiousness of deceit and repression that invades the latter like an illness that ultimately takes his life.

In psychological terms, it would seem fitting that it’s precisely at this juncture—as his father is moribund—that Ahmed’s epistolary correspondence begins. If, as the storyteller suggests, Ahmed’s anonymous correspondent is in fact he himself writing from the depths of his isolated desperation, it would make sense that he might develop a strong alter-ego voice—or even a split personality—that would serve as a conduit for his anger, grief, gender complexity, and sexual repression. Within the space of these erotically charged letters—initially blank spaces like the titular desert sands—Ahmed can be himself, verbally unleashing his own desire—which he qualifies as a galloping mare—and imagining that of his other voice, whom he sees “lie down naked in the white pages of this notebook” (42).

Upon his father’s death, citing his father’s indelible imprint on him, Ahmed assumes control of the house, taking on the worst traits of patriarchy, as he commands his sisters to “submit and live in silence!” (46), as Moroccan women have accepted to do throughout time. Curiously, he underscores that neither God—whom the storyteller qualifies as indifferent—nor the prophets have dictated female subservience; rather, women have consented to this fate.

Ahmed speaks in increasingly odd, rambling musings. With his confused, nascent female desire emerging amid outwardly misogynist sentiments and his adoption of the most brutal elements of patriarchy, gender complexity and confusion give rise to narrative confusion. This chaos deepens as an angry man claiming to be Fatima’s brother steps forth, asserting that he relayed the tale to the storyteller, who has deformed it, feigning to read from Ahmed’s journal although it is in reality a cheap copy of the Koran. Not only does Fatima’s brother’s usurpation of the storytelling role challenge narrative stability and veracity—as well as suggesting that anybody can take on the role—to a work whose many narrative voices already create confusion, but his insistence that the primary storyteller is delivering his jumbled tale from their society’s holy book suggests an authorial degradation of the text held as sacred.

The account of Fatima’s brief role as Ahmed’s wife prior to her death marks an intensified attack on traditional Moroccan patriarchy, whose customs dictate that a young woman be “handed off” to her husband, becoming his property. After the storyteller depicts the process of Fatima’s transfer, Ahmed’s voice resumes narrating, wondering whether Fatima may or may not know his secret. Over time, their friendly, almost parent-child relationship devolves as Ahmed remains awake night after sleepless night watching Fatima sleep. The girl’s agonized breathing, inscrutable gaze, and absent sex—due to being locked up in a chastity belt—disturb Ahmed to the point that he moves her to a separate room, where she wastes away. While, despite the uncanny discomfort that her presence causes him, Ahmed does not fully recognize Fatima as his foil—though he does write of observing her in her sleep as if looking in a mirror—she, with her “special kind of intelligence” (57), clearly understands their bond. Prior to dying, as she confesses her awareness of Ahmed’s secret, she pinpoints their common plight as unwanted women: “We were both born leaning over the stone at the bottom of the dry well, over infertile ground, surrounded by unloving looks. We are women before being sick, or perhaps we are sick because we are women…. I know our wound; we share it” (58).