Taher Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan writer whose present conviction for writing came later in life. Writing, according to the writer, did not come as a vocation to him as a young child. After having been thrown into an army disciplinary camp in 1966 for participating in student demonstrations in Rabat, Ben Jallon began writing what he calls “survival poems”. These little bits of paper and ink that were sewn secretly into his faux pocket later found the light of day with his release and were published in the Moroccan literary magazine Souffles. From then on, writing and literature approached him in the form of a flood, one that came to him “after a drama, after a difficult trail”.  

The Sand Child has been credited as one of Ben Jelloun’s best-known works, primarily because it has been translated into English from French and has been welcomed with high praise into what we now call world literature. In the Sand Child (1985)  Ben Jelloun uses what Western literature typically calls the “frame” narrative, where the retelling of a story occurs in the form of an embedded story; stories within other stories. However, in Sand Child, Ben Jallon describes this as the “storyteller narrative”; the storytellers’ rendition is usually orally expressed and publicly practised. In the case of Ben Jelloun, given that he comes from an oral tradition too, his orality takes its form in the written word. The Sand Child tells the story of Ahamad/Zahra, the eighth child of a father whose intentions were to subvert his fate, a fate he describes to be haunted by a curse. Out of seven births, the hajj was only able to conceive girls, but on the mark of his eighth child, the situation would be forcefully “corrected”. Thus the hajj’s eighth child’s gender and destiny were predetermined, the child would be male and would efface his father’s shame, efface his years of endured misery. The novel is articulated in a hallucinatory fashion, surreal, unchronological, abrupt and out of place. The narrative of the storyteller allows for turns and diversions, it gives space for these storytellers to project with prejudice the story of Ahmad/Zahra through the discovery of his/her journal. 

These events are retold through a series of storytellers, each denouncing the other for their falsification of Ahmad/Zahar’s story. They retell the story of an irreconcilable split androgyne, a born female who was gendered male, one who left a journal that somehow made it to the hands of our storyteller. In the first chapter titled “The Man”, we witness Ahmad’s retreat into a wilful solitude, one that’s marked with isolation and writing, a latent process towards revelation, both to himself or an eager enough reader one day. To Ahmad/Zahra, the process of writing himself will be the self-same process of killing himself – by shedding the lie and wording it on paper.

“One day he heard that an Egyptian poet had justified keeping a journal with the following argument from however far one comes, a journal is necessary to say that one has ceased to be.” His aim was precisely that: to say that he had ceased to be” (p.5). 

As the book progresses, we are guided through all different “gates” leading us aimlessly towards Ahmed/Zahra’s discombobulated story. We witness the unfolding of his/her being through a lens of contradictions. In one instance, Ahmad is brought into a women’s hammam as a young child and realizes the woman’s omission of taboo words, sufficing with mere noises to describe the word penis or sex – something unfamiliar in the realm of men. Ahmad, at this point, says that he is pleased that he does not have to be limited to their world, a world that does not exist beyond oral articulations and taboo speech. However, as he/she matures, the confrontation between his subjective and perceived gender devours them, it psychologically impedes them, and physically it manifests in the forms of ticks or simply in the way they walk, the way they talk, what becomes allowed and what becomes forbidden? In his/her journal the relationship between text, the body’s entrance into gendered subjectivity and the paternalized order of language is frequently explored and interrupted half by their reflections, the prejudice of the storyteller and the exaggerated nature of the experiences Ahmad/Zahra go through. From joining a circus to marrying a rich merchant in Andalucia-all potential truths that the reader is never entirely sure of.

Ben Jallon draws inspiration from legendary folk tales like One Thousand and One Nights, which he attempts to reproduce in a fantastic and sometimes orientalized lens. Ben Jallon however maintains that his works deal with his present and that the writer’s function should partially act as that of a witness. The book is considered to be a critique on the condition of women in Islamic societies and perhaps even the fanatic attachment of certain Arab or Muslim societies to collective histories which safeguard their presents into a perpetual return back to archives, back to scripts, back to former constructs that discourage progression. Whether it indeed acts as an eyewitness account to present-day realities is arguable. However, the question of women in Arab societies is a preoccupation that is found in many of ben Jallon’s works, in the Sand Child inquiries into the sexual repression and suspended existence of women in patriarchal frameworks through the story of Ahmad/Zahra brings us, albeit fictionally, closer to some aspects of truth about the often radicalized “Orient”.