The Sand Child

The original storyteller’s death occurs along with Marrakesh’s modernization projects, which strip the city’s center of its quirky characters: “There are no more snake charmers, no more donkey trainers or apprentice acrobats, no more beggars […] No more charlatans, no more swallowers of nails and needles” (103). By means of a nearly two-page string of anaphoric repetition of the words “no more,” Ben Jelloun captures the soul of the old city, erased by “necessary” modern flourishes such as a fancy fountain spraying water as it blasts classical music’s best-known chordal progression. That the charm of the city’s traditional local character is swept away, only to be replaced by a tacky, ridiculous construction reeking of European culture, screams colonial domination, as does the mention of a nearby office for Club Med—a French travel destination chain established in the 1950s. This section of the narrative takes place at roughly the time when the country’s then ruler, King Mohammed V, initiated the process of demanding Morocco’s independence from France. Viewed in the context of Moroccan history, the “sanitization” process of downtown Marrakesh that Ben Jelloun paints may amount to a last hurrah on the part of the colonial government wishing to leave its final imprint on a colony it will soon no longer control. Alternately, perhaps a clueless newly empowered local government has decided to marry a hackneyed European relic of yesteryear to the fountain’s mechanized water jets, thinking that this utterly un-Moroccan addition will somehow embellish its city’s image. Either way, the storyteller, a fixture of Morocco’s past, has clearly lost his place in his city’s makeover.

The story must, however, be told to its end, and it therefore requires a voice—or in this case, voices. With the emergence of three new storytellers, the narrative’s direction changes dramatically—perhaps in alignment with the city’s metamorphosis—as Salem, Amar, and Fatuma compete in offering their listeners endings to Ahmed’s story. This vying for narrative authority recalls the postmodern notion that no fixed truth exists.

Salem’s perverse version of Ahmed’s final demise is not without notes of humor, first with Ahmed’s enraged, wheelchair-bound uncle finding himself propelled face down on top of his nephew’s—in reality his niece’s—nude cadaver. Furthermore, the image of a massive memorial statue of undetermined—but decidedly female-body-part-inspired—form to commemorate Ahmed’s unlikely ascension to sainthood adds another laugh-out-loud tidbit to Salem’s account. Ben Jelloun’s emphasis of Salem’s blackness and his status as the son of a slave suggests that perhaps, as an underprivileged minority in the country, Salem creates a sensationalized, attention-grabbing ending as a means of garnering power by offering listeners the sort of ending they want to hear.

The retired teacher Amar, lamenting their society’s lust for sexual gossip—a result of governmental suppression of sexualized discourse—rejects Salem’s ending, framing his own story with a scathing rebuke of the country’s hypocrisy along with comments about mounting political unrest. Amar offers a more traditional ending, nevertheless contradicting his own account by offering yet another end-of-life narrative for Ahmed at the end of his storytelling session. In so doing, he perhaps invalidates his own narrative voice, or suggests that through metaphorical maneuvering, both endings could simultaneously find validity.

While the two men argue their respective cases, the mysterious Fatuma—whose silence mirrors the female condition in her society—finally chimes in, noting that her highly unusual position in society affords her the rare opportunity to be speaking openly to men in a public setting. That she recounts her own story rather than Ahmed’s and that her elliptical tale includes so many fragmented yet blatant evocations of Ahmed’s—as well as objects the protagonist has repeatedly mentioned in his own writings—suggest that Fatuma may in fact be Ahmed.

Ben Jelloun’s consistent attention to the materiality of words throughout The Sand Child finds another instance of expression in his naming of characters. After he adds Amar to the list characters whose names begin with the alphabet’s first letter—along with Ahmed and Antar—the author’s choice to name the female storyteller Fatuma encourages readers to see a near onomastic match for Ahmed’s short-lived wife Fatima. Fatuma, noting that she bears the cry of a young epileptic woman in her breast—which corroborates the reading that Fatuma is in fact Ahmed, who mourns his nasty treatment of his wife—shares an unrelated yet notable story of bodily suffering, suggesting the common wound of the female condition.