The Sand Child

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-16

Chapters 17-19

Character Analysis

Themes

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Important Quotes

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Themes

Gender Identity and the Struggle for Self-Expression

Inspired by a miscellaneous news item, Ben Jelloun chose as The Sand Child’s core the story of a family’s eighth daughter whose father, devoured by shame at having sired exclusively female offspring, decides to raise his yet unborn child as a boy, regardless of its biological sex. The tale of Ahmed’s life unfolds against the backdrop of his ongoing confusion as to his gender identity, which ultimately constitutes his individual identity within his family and society.

Because in traditional Moroccan culture the binary division between maleness and femaleness—the only recognized gender options—is so deeply rooted, with the former finding societal validation and the latter degradation (despite its biological necessity in the scheme of producing male heirs), Ahmed clings to his male identity. However, noting anatomical sexual differences at the female and male hammams as a child, he gradually begins to question his own gender identity. Deeming female secondary sex characteristics that he glimpses at the baths revolting, Ahmed all the while finds himself enraptured by women’s free-flowing language, which he later as a grieving young adult transposes from the hammam’s spoken realm to the written page as a means of self-discovery.

As Ahmed himself matures into a woman, “he” can no longer deny his biological sex, whose secret is never so much as whispered in his household. Nevertheless, he adheres to his identity as a Muslim man, initiating marriage proceedings and exhibiting the “worst” traits of patriarchy as well as overt signs of mental illness. With the death of his household’s patriarchal presence, Ahmed assumes that role, growing increasingly tyrannical toward the women around him and relishing his imminent nuptials, after which he will be in a position to dominate and control the unwell Fatima. Only upon her death is Ahmed able to inch toward confronting not only his female body, but also his female desire. This journey first unfolds through an epistolary correspondence with an anonymous other—likely created in Ahmed’s own psyche—then through autoerotic sessions in front of the mirror and in the bathtub, where he assumes a female identity and dreams of being ravished by his male correspondent.

As a necessary part of his process of becoming a woman in the world, Ahmed leaves the familial nest and joins the circus, whose topsy-turvy environment affords him the freedom to live in an unrestricted wonderland in which he can float between genders, thereby mirroring his life condition. The circus also provides an apt setting for the storyteller to slide between male and female pronouns when designating Ahmed; this linguistic freedom parallels Ahmed/Lalla Zahra’s nascent sense of liberty as an individual living out their gender fluidity.

In this carnivalesque world, Um Abbas functions as a strong—albeit brutal—female figure who offers him maternal-like protection, all the while transgressing society’s limits on women.

As the story’s various alternate endings unfold, Antar and Fatuma emerge as similarly transgressive figures, both of whom, like Ahmed, enjoy male privilege while living their femaleness in some manner. Ultimately, the message communicated in The Sand Child is that gender identity, while fixed by the rigid boundaries of traditional Moroccan society, finds fluidity in marginalized spaces. However, only in these parenthetical worlds can this culture’s women experience even vestiges of freedom from patriarchal rule.

Oppressive Patriarchal Domination in Traditional Moroccan Society

As a result of his society’s repressive, male-based inheritance laws prohibiting female heirship, the protagonist Ahmed, the eighth of eight daughters, is deemed a boy at birth by his father and raised accordingly. Ahmed’s father cites his silent, submissive mother as the cause of the couple’s suite of female births, qualifying her womb as inhospitable. Though a woman herself, Ahmed’s mother, having suffered her husband’s physical and emotional abuse, adopts misogynistic behavior, striking her own pregnant belly and resenting her daughters’ existence. At one point in the novel, the father laments his coping mechanism for having only girls—acting as if his daughters didn’t exist—wishing that he had had the strength of his forefathers, who promptly buried female babies at birth.

Ahmed grows up enjoying male privilege to the point where he absorbs the worst elements of patriarchy. Over time behaving increasingly tyrannically toward his mother and sisters, he assumes control of the household—as is expected of him—upon his father’s death, displaying his loathing of the female condition by barking at his sisters to submit in silence. Upon deciding to marry his epileptic cousin Fatima, he gleefully anticipates the prospect of controlling her emotions. Less revolted by his society’s commanding women to silence than by women’s passivity in accepting their miserable lot, Ahmed rules as oppressively over his house of females as do authorities toward the country’s marginalized peoples and French colonial powers toward indigenous Moroccans.

This framework of male domination is destabilized when Ahmed’s father and wife die. Unsettled by repressed desire, Ahmed begins to come to terms with his own female body, first by gazing at it in his mirror, then through autoerotic exploration. Eventually, after a bout of depression, he joins the outside world, where his gender complexity grants him the freedom to live as a woman performing as a man in the circus.

The carnival director’s mother, Um Abbas, provides a portrait of a woman who tramples over society’s misogynist rules, as does the third alternate storyteller, Fatuma, who lives outside of the dictates of patriarchy as a childless single woman. Like Ahmed—no doubt because she may in fact be the protagonist in his later years—she spent parts of her youth in male garb to enjoy the freedom deriving from male privilege. That Fatuma—the only female storyteller in an otherwise all-male group—accedes to that role and speaks frankly to men in a public setting is in and of itself noteworthy in a society in which women are traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere.

Physical Suffering and Bodily Mutilation

Throughout The Sand Child, the work’s major characters undergo some form of physical suffering. The protagonist Ahmed spends his pubescent years with his chest bound by tight cloth bands to thwart the growth of his breasts—the outward manifestation of his femininity. His mother suffers physical abuse at her husband’s—and even her own—hand, and Fatima, whose body violently wars with itself, dies young; during the brief time that she lives with Ahmed, he curiously peers at his wife’s sex under the covers, expecting to find signs of female circumcision or labial stitching (instead he discovers a chastity belt). Even the authoritarian patriarch suffers self-inflicted physical mutilation when he slices his own finger to provide fresh blood for Ahmed’s sham circumcision.

If most bodily suffering in The Sand Child manifests itself in women, it’s to emphasize traditional Moroccan society’s deep-seated misogyny. Ironically, the female half of the population is vital to the perpetuation of the species—even the favored male births—such that Ahmed’s father’s utterly neglectful treatment of his daughters, a seeming improvement over his forefathers’ ritual murder of girl babies, is not only cruel, but nonsensical.

That most of The Sand Child’s characters bear a wound—the work’s most pronounced motif employed to designate female and essentially all suffering—of some sort makes its way to the political arena. In her narrative, Fatuma describes authorities shooting protesters to maintain their authoritarian grip on the country; after their brutal treatment of those demanding better living conditions—whose bodies also undergo agony—they roam the streets seeking out those whom they’ve shot, not to help them recover, but to arrest them. In this instance, the power-bearing forces inflict suffering on the have-nots, only to round them up and redouble their pain-inducing tactics.

Ultimately, inflicting pain on others—also known as torture—is an age-old mechanism by which the powerful maintain their ranks in society. In the cases of Ahmed’s parents, both of whom harm their own bodies, the iron-clad patriarchal system informing the totality of their culture’s practices has so infiltrated their own self-identity and comportment that they self-mutilate to uphold their society’s strictures. Every instance of physical suffering also sows concomitant emotional pain, details of which find elaborate expression in the work, especially through Ahmed’s first-person narrative.