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.

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. 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. These events are retold through a series of storytellers, each denouncing the other for their falsification of Ahmad/Zahar’s story. 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. The novel is articulated in a hallucinatory fashion, surreal, unchronological, abrupt and out of place. 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. 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”. 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.

In the case of Ben Jelloun, given that he comes from an oral tradition too, his orality takes its form in the written word. However, in Sand Child, Ben Jallon describes this as the “storyteller narrative” the storytellers’ rendition is usually orally expressed and publicly practised. In t he 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. 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. 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”.

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. 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”. Writing, according to the writer, did not come as a vocation to him as a young child. Taher Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan writer whose present conviction for writing came later in life.

The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun