The Sand Child

With his repressed female identity having begun to surface during the period of isolation following his father’s and wife’s deaths, Ahmed arrives at a point where he confronts the need to emerge from seclusion. Explicitly deeming his correspondent—the epistolary recipient of his outpourings of nascent desire—“the other in myself” (83), Ahmed recognizes that in order to know himself, he must experience the outside world. Once again engaging with his female desire, the protagonist removes his chest bandages and masturbates before taking to the streets with only pocket change and his manuscript in tow.

During Ahmed’s meanderings, his female identity takes center stage as he encounters two older women, both of whom question his identity and his biological sex by manually inspecting his private parts under his jellaba. While in his isolation Ahmed has just grown familiar with his own sexual body—which he continues to explore before a mirror in a hotel—that body now enters the realm of exchanged currency along with the protagonist’s foray into the public sphere. Recording his recognition of experiencing momentary pleasure when the first woman he encounters suckles as his breast, Ahmed notes feeling pain when the second woman, Um Abbas, inserts her finger into his vagina. Well aware of female suffering within his family and in society—a misery from which his upbringing as a male has shielded him—Ahmed here learns both the pleasure and the pain associated with his female body being manhandled, ironically in these instances by women.

Passively—in accordance with the female code in his society—Ahmed accepts being led by Um Abbas to the circus, where he takes over the act of Malika, an unshaven man who entices men by performing as a woman. Flipping the script, Ahmed, a woman noticeably and shoddily dressed as a man, hits the stage. Abbas explains to Ahmed that the public revels in their acts’ falsity, which they make no attempt to mask. Similar to the storyteller’s likening his tale to a sham house, Abbas’s highlighting his popular circus acts’ fundamental inauthenticity underscores the triviality of telling the truth when it comes to entertaining the masses. On a broader philosophical level, Abbas’s and the storytellers’—as these recounters of oral history have become multiple—comments suggest that “truth” as a monolithic entity may not exist.

Ahmed—now to his pleasure called Lalla Zahra—undertakes his lucrative new role, his body proving itself an invaluable asset on the market of odd spectacles. Here in the “anything goes” ambiance of the circus, Zahra experiences pure joy as the carnival’s main attraction, performing erotic dances by day as a man and by night sleeping in the women’s tent, where Abbas and his mother watch over her. As the protagonist finds happiness and levity switching freely between genders, so does the storyteller capture the fluid reality of this time by shifting pronouns within the same paragraph:

He danced and sang. […] She hid herself to write. […] Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, our character was moving toward the reconquest of his being. He no longer slept with the acrobats, but in the women’s tent; she ate and went out with the other women (96).

In quiet moments, Ahmed/Zahra steals away to write, inventing newfound freedom on “white spaces,” literally his/her journal’s pages and figuratively the work’s titular sands, evoking the protagonist’s metaphorically traversing a desert toward freedom.

The work’s gender and pronoun shifting amid Abbas’s multilingual mishmash—all of it recounted by various storytellers and narrative techniques—converge in a polyphonic discourse reminiscent of the “carnivalization of literature” as proposed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984). If the carnivalesque in literature often accompanies a dismantling of power structures, here, despite Ahmed’s newfound freedoms, these structures remain at least nominally in place, as seen in Abbas’s brutal treatment of the circus’s acrobats, all of whom are young orphans, society’s marginalized, unclaimed youth. In words that recall the operation of a totalitarian society, Abbas explains to Ahmed how he keeps the acrobats in line: “When they get on my nerves, I beat them. That’s how it is. In this country, you put others down or they put you down” (92).

The potency of society’s patriarchal grip on Ahmed’s psyche emerges in haunting dreams in which his father’s reproachful voice accuses him of betrayal, claiming he wishes he had had the resolve to bury his newborn daughters upon birth in following with his forefathers’ example. Ahmed’s nightmares also feature his mother, who, physically and mentally ill, appears with lips silently moving in a desperate, futile attempt to speak. Also glimpsing the unfortunate Fatima in her grave, Ahmed forcefully counters these images with those of “women in this country who step over all barriers, dominate, command, guide, trample others underfoot” (101), in particular Um Abbas.