The Sand Child

Though the initial storyteller isn’t fleshed out as a character, he nevertheless occupies a significant role in the work in that he initiates the nonlinear tale of Ahmed’s life. Moreover, his presence throughout the narrative—along with that of other storytellers who regularly step in and usurp his role—highlights the prevalence of oral storytelling as a prominent motif in the work. That he is infinitely replaceable suggests the timeless and constantly reiterative nature of storytelling throughout lands and cultures.

Following his disappearance near the work’s dénouement, the storyteller is found dead clutching the empty manuscript of Ahmed’s journal. His death arises contemporaneously with the modernization of Marrakesh’s center, for which authorities whisk away centuries’ worth of local color, but the tradition of storytelling—portrayed as a central component of Arabic culture—lives on through the series of voices who take over after the initial storyteller’s demise.

The traditional Muslim patriarch, Ahmed’s father feels deep-seated shame at his inability to sire male offspring to perpetuate his lineage and inheritance. A well-off potter by trade, the father criticizes his wife for his unfavorable situation, abusing her and ignoring his daughters’ existence. When his wife falls pregnant with their eighth child, he chooses proactivity, outright deciding that no matter what, this next child will be male.

Entrusting the secret of yet another female birth to only his wife and her midwife, the father goes to great lengths to disseminate this falsehood of his invention, publishing a large announcement of his son Ahmed’s birth in the national newspaper and cutting his own finger to produce blood for a sham circumcision ceremony. Raising Ahmed never to cry when hurt and to stand up for himself in all situations, the father is perplexed when his young adult son conveys his wish to marry his ailing epileptic cousin, Fatima, especially since he and his brother—Fatima’s father—are rivals. Ahmed’s father dies prior to his son’s betrothal, leaving behind a legacy of patriarchal brutality and disingenuousness that contaminate Ahmed’s and his mother’s lives.

Having given birth to Ahmed and seven other daughters, Ahmed’s mother suffers mental and physical abuse from her husband, who cites her “inhospitable womb” as the reason why he has no male inheritor and consequently is himself shamed within their family and society. Ever the subservient, obedient Muslim wife of her era, the mother complies with her husband’s wishes, eventually blaming herself—and even striking her own belly in self-loathing—for bearing only girls, whose presence she, too, begins to resent. When her husband informs her that their newborn child will be a boy regardless of its biological sex, she acts in full complicity with Ahmed’s deceitful upbringing as a male, binding his chest as he hits puberty to perpetuate the lie.

Illiterate and mentally ill, the mother grows increasingly isolated within the family house after her husband’s death. Ahmed treats her with disdain from his place of feigned superiority—given that he is in reality female—viewing her acceptance of her lot in the family and in society as a sign of weakness and resignation. Near the novel’s close, Ahmed reflects on his mother’s condition with a sense of compassion and pity.

Ahmed’s limping, epileptic cousin, Fatima is alternately ignored and disparaged by her family—her father is Ahmed’s paternal uncle—due to her illnesses. Relegated to a section of her familial abode where her convulsive fits won’t disrupt her siblings’ happy lives, the tiny but powerful woman spends her days in agonizing boredom and melancholy when she’s not physically contorting as a result of a seizure. Despite Fatima’s face having grown lined at an early age due to her fits, her eyes nevertheless house a “soft, gentle light” (54). Permanently disfigured by her spasms, her mouth holds a fixed grimace in the shape of “an enormous comma on a white page” (54).

Prior to his father’s death, Ahmed concocts a plan to take Fatima as his wife, confounding both his parents—since they know he’s a woman passing as a man—and Fatima’s family, who has long held grievances against Ahmed’s father. Moreover, Ahmed, abundantly aware of the privileges conferred upon him by living as a man, seeks to use Fatima—whom, given her condition, the protagonist presumes has no sexual desire or physical ability to have sex—to cover up his true gender.

When Fatima comes to live with Ahmed, she thanks him for facilitating her escape from her family’s oppressive household. Clinging on to him at night in bed, she takes to falling asleep relaxed, sucking her thumb. Over time, Ahmed internally questions whether she knows his secret. Curious to see if she’s undergone female circumcision or had her labia sewn together, he peers under the covers one night while she’s asleep, discovering that she wears a chastity belt.

Over time, Fatima’s presence begins to disturb Ahmed, who relishes his solitude. Banishing her to a room on the other side of the house, he grows to hate her “special kind of intelligence” (57), as well as her slow, stubborn march toward extinction, which he begins to wish for. On her deathbed, she evokes the “wound” of female existence in their society, sharing that she’s always known his secret. Over subsequent years, Ahmed thinks frequently of Fatima, lamenting his poor treatment of her. At the novel’s close, she reappears “cured” before the blind troubadour, claiming that now no longer ill and able to focus on the violence around her—as opposed to that ripping her body asunder—she notes the country’s worsened plight.

Um Abbas, an errant woman whose tribe expulsed her for her transgressions, is the mother of Abbas, the circus showman. Sensing Ahmed’s gender confusion when she first sees him, she confirms her suspicions by examining his sex under his jellaba. She takes him to town to perform an alluring dance act as a woman, renaming him Lalla Zahra, the dancing Princess of Love. Through this new circus role, Ahmed finds liberation as a woman while enjoying Um Abbas’s protection.

According to hearsay, Um Abbas still suckles her grown son at her breast, thus serving as a warped yet potent mother figure. In Salem’s account of the tale, she engages in violent physical brawls with Abbas. Despite her harsh manner, Ahmed recognizes her as a woman who transcends their society’s barriers, inciting others—even men—to respect and fear her.

The brutish, tyrannical Abbas and his mother, Um Abbas, live a peripatetic lifestyle, subsisting on elaborate schemes and their circus act, which he directs. Fiercely bound to his overtly independent mother, whom he alternately adores in the manner of a small child—allegedly he still nurses from her—and engages in violent physical altercations, he treats others—namely the young orphans whom he trains as acrobats—with relentless brutality.

According to Salem, after fights with his mother, Abbas takes to anally raping Lalla Zahra/Ahmed, causing the protagonist such trauma that he retreats to silence, losing his glory as the dancing Princess of Love to instead assume the role of bearded woman in a cage to whom onlookers flock in curious revulsion. In Salem’s proposed ending of the story, Ahmed commits murder-suicide by placing razor blades scornfully thrown into his cage between his backside’s cheeks such that, when Abbas comes to rape him, their private parts are both cut, and they die of blood loss.

The first of the novel’s alternate storytellers, Salem is the son of a Senegalese slave whose status as a Black man is accentuated, underscoring race-based hierarchies in Moroccan society. Salem justifies his appropriateness as a storyteller in having grown up in servitude in a large house like Ahmed’s. His version of Ahmed’s final days involves the protagonist’s dethroning from his role as celebrated dancing lady in Abbas’s circus to an object of derision as bearded woman in a cage.

Salem’s account ends with Ahmed’s murder-suicide while in the throes of his last sexual violation by Abbas. Recounting the narrative of Ahmed’s family’s shocked reactions when the deceased body’s unveiling reveals that Ahmed was a woman, Salem concludes by evoking the odd breast/buttock-like statue erected on Ahmed’s tomb by an anonymous builder, noting that Ahmed swiftly became a fertility saint upon his death. Amar accuses Salem of playing out his own twisted fantasies in this ending, seizing the storytelling role to offer another version of the story.

Amar, The Sand Child’s second alternate storyteller, is a retired schoolteacher who claims to have salvaged Ahmed’s manuscript. Adamantly refuting Salem’s proposed ending of the story, Amar offers passages he claims to read from Ahmed’s journal, interspersing them with his own inventions and conjectures regarding the story’s ending.

Amar relates Ahmed’s parting from the circus and subsequent drifting, during which he falls into a deep depression as he comes to grips with the horrors of his upbringing coupled with those imposed on women by society. First suggesting that Ahmed died a stowaway at sea, Amar then contradicts himself, insisting that the protagonist died peacefully in self-imposed isolation in his family home. Due to his shifting narrative, Amar emerges as an unreliable narrator despite his putative possession of Ahmed’s journal.

The work’s third alternate storyteller, Fatuma, comes from a family that celebrated her being female. As the only girl in her school, this literate, wrinkled old woman adopted none of her society’s traditional female roles—wife, mother, grandmother—instead opting to roam the land to destinations as distant as Mecca. Though strong and independent, she wears a veil, less out of submission than to obscure her identity, which a passer-by at the café questions, insisting he knows her from Mecca.

Having remained silent during Salem’s and Amar’s accounts of Ahmed’s final days, Fatuma frames her tale with the claim that “in this country a woman is used to keeping quiet; if she does speak out, that’s an act of violence in itself” (125). While she recounts her own story, Fatuma weaves in details—inhabiting a room overlooking a terrace, the potter, the cry of a young epileptic woman lodged in her chest, a razor blade, an old mirror—that suggest that she is herself Ahmed, living out his final days as a woman. This interpretation finds corroboration in Fatuma’s repeated insistence that she entirely invented the story, having realized that she could don a jellaba and pass as a man.

Toward the end of her account, she slides into political discourse, speaking of marching with starving families living in shantytowns and being shot by authorities who then seek out the wounded to arrest them, thinking that they will cleanse the country and prevent new riots. Lamenting her country’s ever-worsening political landscape, she speaks of a lost notebook in which she recorded her life’s events.