Tahar Ben Jelloun was way ahead of his time. The Sand Child feels as if it were written at some point in the last decade—or even the last five years. It is an examination of the nature of gender identity, gender confusion and all the associations with the trans community that were relevant in 2015 despite it being published in 1985, a full three decades earlier. Making this accomplishment even more striking is that the story is set in deeply fundamental Islamic Morocco. Even had it been set in deeply fundamental evangelical Montgomery, Alabama, it tells a story that could not feel more out of place in 1985.
As if peering into a crystal ball, Jelloun wrote a novel that takes as the foundation of its theme the radical concept that gender is something which can be imposed by sheer force of will. For at least a good 4,000 years or so, this was not an idea that seemed absolutely carved in stone. It was nothing less than inconceivable that few “crackpots” might consider otherwise. But with the words describing the state of mind a husband whose wife has already given birth to seven girls and no boys at the realization of an eight pregnancy, this is exactly what the author is conceiving as the premise of his story: “His idea was a simple one, but difficult to realize, to main in all its strength: the child to be born was to be a male even if it was a girl!” Nature, however, has decide—as it so often does—that it is not going to easily facilitate this assertive expression of faith by actually delivering a baby with a penis. The baby is born with all the requisite reproductive parts assigned to female, but the faith has been expressed and the assertion will not be denied.
So, what we have here is a story that is actually not entirely separate from the zeitgeist of the time which had produced the movie Tootsie just a few years earlier and would produce the Broadway play M. Butterfly just a few years later. Both the movie and the play feature a story about a man who tricks others into believing he is a woman, but for the most part masquerades are trickery and the stories are, for the most part, told in a straightforward way. This is not the case with The Sand Child which is a novel in which everything about identity is skewed off-kilter and given an added tweak or twist. For instance, the story doesn’t start out a simple objective narrative, but is framed as tale told by an itinerant storyteller who audience is ready to express skepticism at the more unlikely details. Things get even murkier when the storyteller claims his evidence of the truth of the story is based on a journal that the child would grown up to maintain. Added to this mix is correspondence between the child and a friend who also expresses some doubts and skepticism about the true nature of the child’s identity. And then, deeper into the novel, things really take a spin: the storyteller vanishes from his role and the journal gets lost,
Along the way to that ending, the child who is alternately referred to as Ahmed and Zahra is forced to marry a female cousin with the fortunate happenstance of being an invalid in order to carry out the masquerade. Upon the death of the wife, the story becomes an expression of gender confusion that needs straightening out once and for all until it reaches a conclusion that is unsatisfying to the listeners because it remains too ambiguous. At which point the ultimate tweak and twist of the plot is introduced: some of those who had listened to the storyteller relate the beginning and middle of the story begin creating their own individual versions of how things end that are far less ambiguous. Some provide happy endings while other view the story as inevitably leading to tragedy.
Clearly, The Sand Child takes the issue of gender-bending far beyond the limited scope of Tootsie or even The Crying Game. It is a story that fundamentally shifts the power of self-identity even to the seemingly non-malleable aspect of gender to others. The story of the baby girl transformed into a boy purely for economic reasons becomes a meditation on not just the nature of identity, but how the degree to which society institutes every single aspect of it, ultimately raising the possibility that self-identity maybe, like free will, only another way that man (which is meant humanity) willingly deceives itself.
