The Sand Child

Repeatedly likening a story to an old house, The Sand Child ’s various narrators—and notably its initial storyteller—refer to a house’s construction, its nooks and crannies, its doors and tunnels. While some of these elements are vital to a house’s continued existence—its stone foundation, for example—others may arise as useless flourishes added throughout the years. Certain hallways in a house may lead directly to a desired destination whereas some of its passageways may be labyrinthine; on a textual level, some elements of a plot prove essential to a story’s unfolding, while others constitute red herrings inserted to confuse readers. Constructed and inhabited by people, houses serve as testaments to human lives and stories. As such, they act as theatrical sets for the telling of family tales, which, woven together, constitute communities, societies, and nations. What transpires in the public and political sphere trickles down into the domestic realm, as is manifested in Ahmed’s family abode, the locus of much of The Sand Child ’s activity.

Functioning as a symbol of the story’s very articulation, one of The Sand Child’s titular terms finds heightened meaning throughout the story. In a work taking place in a region where deserts abound, sand fittingly appears in the initial storyteller’s words: “For this story is also a desert. You will have to walk barefoot on the hot sand, walk and keep silent” (7). Here he frames the listening experience as one of patient and often painful silence. When Ahmed takes to his room after his father’s and wife’s deaths, he writes of traversing “sands of a desert” from which he sees no way out as he addresses his stifled female desire (65). Finally, in the work’s closing chapter entitled “The Gate of the Sands,” the last storyteller speaks of an “anonymous poet who became a saint of the sands, which cover up and hide” (164). With sand in general symbolizing the blank space in which stories are created, its prominence in these citations signals at once the storytelling process, an oppressive space of repressed desire, a space of dissimulation, and the process of life—and death—itself, especially in a society that demands silence and submission from more than half of its population.

A recurring motif in The Sand Child, storytelling—an ancient practice in Islamic cultures—finds prominence in the work not only as its primary narrative device, but also as regards its questioning of narrative authority and dominant discourse. While the plot’s initial stages unfold through the voice of a primary storyteller, others butt in, claiming that in fact they—rather than the primary storyteller—possess Ahmed’s journal, and therefore the accurate version of the tale. As a result of this narrative polyphony, the notion of the tale existing as a monolithic “truth” is undermined.

That the initial storyteller perishes with the city market square’s modernization in the late 1950s speaks to modernity’s attempts to silence old-world customs. However, with the emergence of the three alternate storytellers and eventually the Borgesian blind troubadour near the work’s close, the practice of storytelling, so woven into the cultural fabric that it essentially constitutes that cloth, survives.

The fact that so many characters assert their claims to be in the know also speaks to the work’s political subtext. Any given society’s reigning forces are fundamentally those whose narratives usurp the dominant discourse. In The Sand Child, the prevailing “stories” shaping both Morocco’s traditional and its emerging modern landscapes reside in the Koran—from which religion has been used to inform legal and cultural practices—a common literary culture (one repeated example: The Thousand and One Nights), and colonial/postcolonial narratives.