The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun

The English translation of
The Sand Child was published
in 1987

Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Morocco in 1944. He studied philosophy at Rabat University and wrote many pieces for the Moroccan literary magazine Souffles. In 1966 Jelloun was sentenced to carry out military service, as a punishment for taking part in a student rebellion against the oppressive practices of the Moroccan police. 

In the 1970s Jemmoun moved to Paris, where he received his doctorate in social psychiatry. It was also here that he began writing poetry, much of which was published in Le Monde. The Sand Child was his first novel published originally (like all his work) in French as L’Enfant de Sable, even though his first language is the Arabic dialect of darija. The Sand Child won many awards and launched Jelloun's literary career.

The Sand Child follows the life of Mohammed Ahmed Suleyman, a girl who was raised as a boy after her father could not stand the shame of having an eighth daughter but no son.

I found the first half the novel to be excellent, easily five stars. Gender identity is presented in a nuanced and thoughtful manner. The structure of the novel is complex, but works extremely well. It vacillates from first person with extracts of Ahmed's journals, and third person with a narrator presenting these excerpts and relating them to an audience, and the audience themselves at times become involved, as if this is a transcription of an oral performance. There are also hints that the first person extracts, and there discussion by the narrator are not always trustworthy, which raises questions of the knowability (for want of a better word) of who someone truly is. Are the lies people tell themselves more true than the lies they tell others?

Tahar Ben Jelloun is still 
writing (as of 2025)

However, in the latter half of the novel, things began to crumble. The structure of the narrative of Ahmed's life begins to falter, and without this frame work off which to hang the digressions and asides which at first illuminated the novel, everything gets a bit messy. There is no forward motion to the second half, and it becomes bogged down in the rhetoric of the narrator and his audience. 

The language, which at first flipped between the elegant and stylish narration, and the plainer vernacular of Ahmed's recounting of his/her own life, looses this contrast and becomes very heavy, not quite a chore to read, but certainly slowing everything down.

I suppose there is a sense of loosing who Ahmed is or was, which raises some interesting questions about identity, but the lack of framework in this section makes it hard to draw meaning.

The pentagram on the Moroccan flag 
represents the five pillars of Islam

Overall, after after much deliberation The Sand Child gets ★★★★☆ and just misses out on a 'Highly Recommended' tag, though it did come damn close.