The Sand Child: An Interpretation

Dear Tahar Ben Jelloun,

I have continued to think about your book, The Sand Child and am ready to posit an interpretation. Tell me what you think. Of course I am not sure, but my thoughts feel like they are swarming closer to the center of what you are trying to say, and, perhaps, that is something.

My former post, Ben Jelloun Draws Such Strange Words in the Sand, helped me think through my initial ideas.

The father figure in the book is Western Colonial Influence. I, at first, thought this a difficult metaphor, yet it makes sense in relation to the patronizing attitudes of colonialists. Certainly, colonial forces always assume the role of father to the countries they inhabit. There is a line in the book that talks about the father lying with Zahra(F)/Ahmed(M)and the forms coming together. This relationship of father trying to form child in his own image is a fascinating one. It is complemented by all the allusions to Father bringing the child into the world of men and power.

Meanwhile the relationship of Zahra(F)/Ahmed(M) to the Mother figure, a representation of Mother Morocco or Mother Maghreb (Northern Africa, the area West of the Nile and North of the Sahara) is distant and especially so after the death of the father, i.e. the end of colonial rule. The child is left alone and unable to find a definitive path in the current world. Abandoned by all, including the storyteller, the child is first (or primarily) isolated from both the modern world and from tradition, and second (or secondarily) without a sure path forward, exemplified by the surrealist multiple storied ending.

There are oddities in the tale that I am unable to unscramble. The traveling gypsy episode may have some cultural roots and interpretations that escape me. I have heard and read that transvestite entertainers are part of standard issue Arabian fun. That is out of my realm of experience, but may play in here somehow. The rapes that occur in that section could speak to the psychological reality that one lives through rape over and over, hence its placement after what I have identified in my mind as the death of colonialism (i.e. the rape of one culture by another) is showing that the effects of the ravishing of a culture does not cease when the last ship leaves the dock.

The story hasn't ended. The end has not been written for North Africa or for Zahra. Perhaps the presence of Jorges Luis Borges in this book gives a clue to how it should be understood.

"The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." — (dogma of a fictional religion in "Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv".) Part of this quote (See paper by Beauvais Lyons) or perhaps another version is attributed to a heresiarch of Uqbar in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". "Mirrors and copulation are abominable since they multiply and extend a visible universe that was an illusion, or more precisely a sophism."

History and existence are not locked down. Perception of history and culture is what we have. Who is telling the story? The gender, seemingly the most predetermined of the elements of a being is undermined, put in question, made into an incompetent parody. In the case of the Sand Child, the being is Morocco, and it has lost its footing in the sand, lost more than its footing, it has lost its shape, its gender, and must redefine itself. The story will be told, but those who must tell it have yet to find their voices.

OK. That is my attempt at interpreting The Sand Child. Next I'll read The Sacred Night.

Betsy

Free Dr. Haleh Esfandiari

Dear Dr. Esfandiari,

Please come home to us. But, oh. . oh. . they won't let you. I have signed the petition asking them to free you, but still they won't let you come home.

Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a dual Iranian-American national, was arrested in Tehran on May 8 and incarcerated in the Evin Prison.

I worry about you and other Middle Eastern artists and scholars who stand for free speech and well, reason, in general. See post by Laila Lalami, May 15, 2007, On Interpretations.

Our prayers are with you.

Betsy DeGeorge

Ben Jelloun Draws Such Strange Words in the Sand

Dear Tahar Ben Jelloun,

Sand Child, your book of storytellers and gender shifts in Morocco was a bit difficult for me to understand. No, it was very difficult for me to understand. It is a puzzle. It reminded me of the first time I tried to solve a cryptogram in a newspaper. I looked at those coded letters believing solution to be impossible. No one could do this, I was sure, and then I began the process of finding the answer. My early attempts at cryptograms were halting and frustrating, as have been my first brushes with your book.

Immediately, I believed the book was a critique of gender in the world of Islamic Morocco. I tried to understand the movement of the book in that context and though it seems there is some comment on that issue within the text, I think I would be mistaken to believe that the presentation of gender is more than the model or symbolic metaphor you have chosen as a vehicle for a very different message.

Fortunately, my friends from the book club have been feeding me ideas. One said that she thought the imagery carried the weight of colonialism and the response of Morocco to the intrusion of Western will upon the culture. Is that it? I know very little of the history of this land, so fitting that jigsaw together would be daunting. Then I found some things on Laila Lalami’s blog (affectionately remembered as moorishgirl.com) that suggested an even more intellectually complicated ending. Then I followed the track of Borjes, gathering more evidences of how, perhaps, you expect this book to be interpreted.

Then I read your biography on your official Web site http://www.taharbenjelloun.org. He are interesting snippets:

July 1966: my philosophy studies are interrupted; I am sent to a disciplinary camp run by the army.

In June 1971, a statement of the Interior Ministry announced that philosophy teaching is to be arabized as of the new school year. Not being trained for it, I requested an exemption from the Ministry and decided to leave for Paris and prepare a PhD in psychology.

June 1975: I defended my doctoral thesis in social psychiatry on “affective and sexual problems of northern-African workers in France”.

1984 : “Hospitalité française”, essay on racism in France

1985: “L’enfant de sable”, novel, Le Seuil.

Most of my work is translated into Arabic. Unfortunately, the Moroccan edition of which I revise the translation is systematically pirated by pseudo-editors in Syria and Egypt. To make matters worse, they redo the translation and take out fragments susceptible of annoying the local censorship. I have so often protested against these practices that I have come to believe this to be a lost cause. The piracy that afflicts the Arab world is symptomatic of the condition of its culture.

I chose these tidbits because I think they shed light on the book and my understanding. As I understand more, perhaps I will come to understand whether they inform my thinking. Here are some more factoids from less authorized Web sites.

Quoting Ben Jelloun and from a critic "Arabic is my wife and French is my mistress; and I have been unfaithful to both," it is obvious though that bilingualism is an integral part of his life as well as a theme in his works.

And also from that source, “Ben Jelloun draws upon his experience as a psychotherapist for his creative writing.”

And here: The novel is written in highly poetic language and does not have a linear narrative. The prose seems to recreate the dissociation experienced by the child.

Well, all that is interesting. And, I like cryptograms.

Betsy