The Sand Child

“The father had no luck. He was convinced that some distant, heavy curse weighed on his life: out of seven births, he had had seven daughters. The house was occupied by ten women—the seven daughters, the mother, Aunt Aysha, and Malika, the old servant woman. The curse was spread over time. The father thought that one daughter would have been enough. Seven was too many; tragic, even.” 

Here, the narrator expresses lament surrounding Ahmed’s father’s situation. Having sired only girls and living solely with his wife, her sister, and their family servant, he is surrounded by women, a situation that in the Moroccan society of his time is considered humiliating and emasculating. This passage thus demonstrates the misogynist views of early-20th-century Maghreb culture.

“I saw some words slowly rise and hit the damp ceiling. There they melted in contact with the stone and fell back on my face as drops of water. It amused me. The ceiling was like a writing table.” 

For the first time in the narrative, the storyteller reads directly from Ahmed’s journal. In this passage, the protagonist speaks of a childhood visit to the female hammam, where he sits in boredom as his mother and her cohort engage in animated chatter. Not only does his mention of visible, traveling words serve as an example of magical realism, but it also underscores the primacy of language in Ahmed’s life and in the novel. That Ahmed senses the power and materiality of words—as his own voice emerges for the first time in the narrative—precisely while he first glimpses and reacts to naked female bodies marks the intermingling of language and desire explored throughout the work.

“I am both the gaze that sees itself and the mirror. Does my voice come from me, or is it that of the father who breathed it into me mouth to mouth as I slept? Sometimes I recognize it; sometimes I reject it. It is my finest, subtlest mask.” 

In this passage from Ahmed’s journal, the protagonist reflects on his identity, one of the novel’s primary themes. By way of oft-repeated images—the gaze, the mirror, and the mask—he communicates his singular situation as a woman raised as a man; when he looks in the mirror, Ahmed gazes from the point of view of one gender and sees the reflection of the other, which situates him at the mirror’s “neither/nor” space. He also notes his “male” voice—the voice of patriarchy—which he will assume as master of the house, questioning whether it’s truly his own. Negotiating between accepting and rejecting this male voice serves as a mask for Ahmed, a shield through which he can act in society without being seen. 

“I ask them so that you and I can face up to things. Neither of us is taken in. I don’t just accept my condition and endure it. I actually like it. It is interesting. It gives me privileges that I would never have known. It opens doors for me, and I like that, even if it then locks me in a glass cage.” 

Having just posed his father a series of questions pertaining to his identity, 20-year-old Ahmed attempts to lay the truth of his sex on the table. He goes on to express his predominantly positive views—despite his entrapment in a “glass cage”—on his bizarre condition, which he realizes affords him opportunities he would not otherwise have. Ahmed will close the conversation by stating his desire to marry, leaving his father speechless.

“From this day on, I’m no longer your brother; I’m not your father, either, but your guardian. I have the duty and the right to watch over you. You owe me obedience and respect. […] if in our house women are inferior to me it’s not because God wishes it or because the prophets decided it thus, but because the women accept this fate. So submit, and live in silence!” 

Speaking to his sisters after their father’s death, Ahmed establishes himself as the man of the house in following with societal norms. Commanding his sisters to submission and silence, Ahmed sardonically displays his brutality. His incisive comments on women’s passivity in accepting male domination display his disdain for the patriarchal framework in which they live. However, he blames women themselves for their plight more than he reproaches society.

“That wounded creature at my side, that intrusion that I had myself installed inside my secret, private life, that grave, desperate woman who was no longer a woman, who had traveled a painful path, that woman who didn’t even aspire to be a man, but to be nothing at all, that woman who almost never spoke, murmuring a sentence or two from time to time, but enclosing herself in a long silence, reading books on mysticism, and sleeping without making the slightest sound, that woman prevented me from sleeping.” 

Upon marrying Fatima, Ahmed becomes filled with resentment. Not only does his wife’s presence encroach on his solitude, but it also keeps him awake at night. Like Ahmed, Fatima bears wounds, though of a different order. “No longer a woman” because her illness robs her life of normalcy, Fatima is further “de-womanized” by the chastity belt that bars her access to her own desire. While Ahmed, too, lacks the means to articulate and explore desire, he at least enjoys the power of being considered a man within his household and in the public sphere. Fatima, on the other hand, aspires to nothing, barely speaking. The repetition of the word “woman” in the passage underscores the problematics of female life in Morocco at this time, and particularly for Ahmed, a woman raised as a man, and Fatima, a woman deemed worthless by her family and society.

“We are women before being sick, or perhaps we are sick because we are women…. I know our wound; we share it.” 

On her deathbed, Fatima utters these words to Ahmed, whom she has told that, always cognizant of his reality, she chose to become his wife to die near him. Literally ill, Fatima evokes the infirmity of the general female population in their midst, in which it’s impossible to separate “woman” from “illness.” Fatima’s depressingly perceptive comment speaks to the female woundedness that she and Ahmed share, but also to its extending far beyond her own and Ahmed’s specific circumstances.

“This story has traveled to different countries and times. It has come down to us today somewhat transformed. Isn’t that the destiny of all stories that circulate and trickle down from the highest sources? They live longer than men and bring beauty to our days.” 

Here the storyteller has just finished recounting the tale of Antar, the ruthless leader whose female identity was discovered at his death. Having seized the crowd’s attention and resumed speaking after a member of the audience expressed dissent with him and initiated the Antar narrative, the storyteller supplements the initial version with choice details, notably regarding Antar’s cultivating mystery by appearing veiled before his troops as well as his sex life. In this passage in particular, the storyteller notes the power of stories, which transcend time, national boundaries, and human lifespans, and which change with each retelling. Stories about people take on lives of their own as they circulate among people, to whose existence they bring beauty.

“Since I withdrew to my room, I have been progressing over the sands of a desert where I see no way out, where the horizon is little more than a blue, ever-receding line; I dream of crossing that blue line and walking through an endless steppe, without thought of what might happen.” 

In this passage from his journal, Ahmed portrays his isolation after Fatima’s death by way of a metaphor whose mention of sand refers to the work’s title. Traveling across a desert from which he cannot escape and glimpsing in the distance the horizon that remains out of reach, Ahmed paints his current situation as futile, yet at the same time as inspiring him to continue to dream of crossing the threshold into the unknown realm of his femaleness.

“I have lost my body’s language; indeed, I never possessed it. I ought to learn it, starting out by speaking as a woman. Why as a woman? Am I a man?” 

After having fallen asleep in the bathtub and had an erotic dream involving a visit from his anonymous correspondent, Ahmed explores his newfound awareness of his own desire as he writes in his journal. Questioning his own identity as male or female, Ahmed realizes that to gain access to his own desire, he must first learn to speak as a woman, in accordance with his body.

“You know very well that my homeland is not a country, still less a family. It is a look, a face, an encounter, a long night of silence and tenderness […]. We shall exchange our syllables until our hands may touch…” 

Here Ahmed addresses his anonymous correspondent as he utilizes the metaphors of country and family to convey his sense of belonging—or not belonging. Rejecting the constructs of country—a political designation—and family structure as he has experienced it, the protagonist situates his homeland in relation to his nascent desire: in a glance and its potential aftermath, a night of intimacy whose realm of communication transcends language. Since Ahmed’s correspondent’s identity remains a secret, Ahmed invests passion into words as a prelude to physical contact.

“Fragmentary, but not without meaning, the event is stamped on my consciousness. The manuscript I wanted to read to you falls to pieces whenever I try to open it and free its words, which poison so many birds, insects, and images. Fragmentary, it possesses me, obsesses me, and brings me back to you, you who have the patience to wait.” 

The initial storyteller addresses his audience here, emphasizing the fragmentary nature of both his story and the physical object—the manuscript—containing it. His mention of liberating the words it contains, which fly out and potentially cause harm to the natural world as well as to images they create, exemplifies the magical realism genre attributed to many 20th-century fiction writers, notably from South America. This mention of the power as well as the transitory and elusive nature of words converges with many such passages throughout the work to create meta-discussion on the operation of language itself and on storytelling within the story.

“My body was that page and that book. In order to awaken, it had to be fed, wrapped in images, filled with syllables and emotions, maintained in the sweetness of things, and given dreams.” 

Having taken refuge in an elegant hotel, the protagonist contemplates his odd encounter with a witchlike woman who questioned his gender and suckled his small breasts. At this awakening of desire, Ahmed repeatedly explores his body at the hotel while gazing at himself in a mirror, before and after which he takes pen to paper to record the experience. In this way, the birth of Ahmed’s identity as a woman arises as much through the written word as through gaze and touch.

“Everything is false, and that’s what we’re about. We don’t hide it. People come for that, for Malika, who is no more a dancing girl out of the thousand and one nights than I’m the man in the moon.” 

In an unidentified coastal town, Ahmed, escorted to the local circus my Um Abbas, meets her son Abbas, the show’s master of ceremonies. Ahmed has just witnessed a popular act in which Malika, an unshaven man with fake breasts, cheap perfume, and badly applied make-up, excites the male public with his “woman’s dance.” At the act’s close, Abbas—by way of referring to The Thousand and One Nights, a cornerstone of Middle Eastern folklore—comments the circus’s blatant inauthenticity, which not only isn’t lost on the public, but also attracts them all the more. At this point Ahmed learns that, with Malika’s imminent departure, he will take over her show.

“Before Islam, Arab fathers threw an unwanted female infant into a hole and covered her until she died. They were right. In this way they rid themselves of misfortune. It was an act of wisdom, a brief pain, an implacable logic. I have always been fascinated by the courage of those fathers—a courage I never had. I did not bury them, because they did not exist for me.” 

Reveling in his newfound freedom by day, in the depths of the night Ahmed is haunted by echoes of his long-deceased father’s voice, which speaks reverently of his country’s former custom of killing newborn females upon birth, which the latter deems wise and logical. If the advent of Islam in Morocco—which occurred around 680 C.E.—ameliorated young Moroccan girls’ lot, it was only marginally, as death was traded for submission, silence, and invisibility.

“If you keep refusing to speak, I’ll hand you over to the police. Our police have a way of making the dumb speak….” 

Having been repeatedly raped by Abbas—as recounted by Salem, one of the three alternate storytellers—Zahra, dethroned from the circus’s dancing Princess of Love to its object of perverse curiosity as the bearded lady in the cage, has taken to silence, which Abbas and his mother find disturbing. Here, the latter speaks to Zahra, attempting to coax her out of silence by threatening to take her to the police, who have a reputation for tormenting those who refuse to divulge information. Um Abbas’s threat brings the personal tale of Zahra/Ahmed to the political sphere, as it metaphorically references the French colonial government’s brutal measures taken in thwarting revolts by indigenous Moroccans seeking independence from imposed colonial power. The threat furthermore points to the silencing of women under Islamic tradition.

“I know that in this country a single woman is doomed to every kind of rejection. In a moral, well-structured society, not only is everyone in his place, but there is absolutely no place for him or her, especially her, who consciously or erroneously, betrays the established order […]. My country’s violence is also to be found in those closed eyes, in those diverted looks, in those silences, which stem from resignation rather than indifference.”

In this alternate version of Ahmed’s fate recounted by Amar, the protagonist, having consciously come to terms with his female body, reflects on his status as an unmarried woman living in a country that fails to recognize this category of the population. Ahmed’s musings move from the general to the specific: First indicating the workings of a structured, hierarchical society in which everyone has and remains in their designated place, he comments that anybody who consciously or accidentally veers from their preordained role ceases to exist, emphasizing that if that outlier is a woman, she is ever more prone to society’s rejection. Ahmed ultimately views Moroccan society’s failure to acknowledge single women—and its subjugation of all women—as tantamount to an act of violence, which plays itself out in women’s resignation to their fortune.

“In this way I learned to be in the dream and to make of my life an entirely invented story, a tale that recalls what really took place. Is it out of boredom or lassitude that one gives oneself another life, puts it on like a wonderful magic jellaba, a cloak cut out of the sky and studded with stars?”

In the storyteller Fatuma’s alternate account of Ahmed’s fortune, in which she hints that she herself is the aged Ahmed, she highlights the creative process involved in recounting her life, citing ennui and exhaustion as reasons for which one would be tempted to invent the tale of one’s existence. As she waxes poetic, she justifies sliding from veracity to pure invention by reference to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition’s common tale of Joseph’s overcoat—here rendered culturally as a jellaba—as well as by mention of occupying a dream, recalling the biblical Joseph’s sharing his dream of the sun, moon, and stars bowing down to him as a means of communicating his power.

“In my retirement, silent and motionless, I witness my country’s removal: men 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 […] 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 right on begging, snatching what they can. Children… Many 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 […]. My story is an old one, from before Islam.” 

The aged Fatuma laments the post-colonial wave of indigenous Moroccan emigration to France—the colonial oppressor—for economic reasons. With so many male adults driven away by economic despair, only the even more underprivileged and those with no voice at all—women and children, respectively—remain, rendering the country a space where there’s ultimately “nothing to guard” (131). Returning to the prevalent discussion of gender, Fatuma recalls the misfortune of living in their country as a female—a condition that predates her existence, as well as that of patriarchal Islamic law.

“I have lived in the illusion of another body, with someone else’s clothes and emotions. I deceived everybody right up to the day when I realized that I was deceiving myself.”

In a prelude to relaying her account of being shot during a political protest rally, Fatuma outlines the path that got her there. As a result of coming to terms with having lived the lie of maleness, she speaks of shedding her inappropriate garb—through which she deceived others and ultimately herself—to seize not only her own truth, but that of those around her. Upon liberating herself from her false role, she gained a clear perspective of the tumult in her society and joined forces in assisting others.

“All my life I had contrasted the power of words with the strength of the real and imaginary, visible and hidden world.” 

Having just evoked mankind’s widespread fear of mortality, the blind troubadour cites his life’s work of seeking stories credible enough to soothe people’s anxiety surrounding their inevitable demise. Citing the power of words amid juxtaposing real to imaginary and the visible realm to its hidden counterpart, he underscores words’ capacity to make the imaginary appear real, and likewise render the hidden visible.

“She seemed to me to be someone on the run, wounded, on the edge of a cliff. She spoke of disappearing, of merging into the sand. […] When she stopped complaining, she added with a sigh, ‘After all, I don’t even know who I am!’” 

In relaying details from the mysterious Middle Eastern woman’s second visit to his Buenos Aires library, the blind troubadour remarks that, while she revealed no secrets, the woman alluded to fleeing peril. His use of the specific adjective “wounded” and mentioning her desire to blend into the sand repeat the novel’s oft-employed lexical and thematic items, suggesting that the woman visiting him was no doubt Ahmed/Zahra. Describing the woman as figuratively “on the edge of a cliff” lexically creates the narrative energy of a “cliffhanger,” as the question surrounding her mysterious identity—as well as Ahmed’s fate—intensifies throughout the work’s final pages.

“People spend their lives being abused; every day they are humiliated, and they don’t react; then one day they go out into the streets and smash everything. The army intervenes and fires on the crowd to re-establish order. Silence. They did a big ditch and throw the bodies in. It’s becoming chronic.” 

The cured/resurrected Fatima, speaking some 30 years later than in her initial appearance in the novel, laments the state of her country, which she’s now able to witness since being delivered from her cell-like room and the misery of her own suffering. In overtly political discourse, she reproaches her society’s longstanding pattern of ritual abuse. Over time, she claims, the state’s authoritarian stance toward its people has grown even more brutal; should they dare protest their miserable conditions, citizens risk being shot, killed, and tossed into ditches.