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The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() No one else in the family knows the secret named Ahmed, (s)he is dressed as a boy, treated as a boy, and speedily inducted into the ways of the patriarchy. This bewildering, hallucinatory book begins with the fairytale-like story of an eighth daughter who is raised by her father as the male heir he never had. ![]() A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. ![]() As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. ![]()
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