Respond paper to The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun

The assigned pages of The Sand Child depicts a scene where a professional storyteller took his audience in a Marrakech market square in 1950s, on a literary journey through seven gates to observe the life of a character of opposing biological and ideological genders, and his family in the domestic and social settings. In this essay, I would like to respond to these chapters on Ben Jelloun's use of human and architectural bodies in the construction of a narrative where self-control and purification take centre stage. 

Over the course of the story, bodies had been born, controlled and transformed, putting to the fore male favouritism and the fear of liminality in the Islamic context. To Ahmed’s father, it was him who created his son, the child of a fabricated gender identity that he conceived in a dream. It is evident when he told his wife that ‘The child you shall bring into the world will be a male, it will be a man, it will be named Ahmed—even if it is a girl! I have arranged everything.’ As a result, no mention of blood or washing was found in the text during or after the biological birth. By forgoing the uncontrollable shed of bodily fluids associated with the delivery of a child, it demonstrated the determination of Ahmed’s father to reject the misfortune of the belly of his wife, and welcome the blessing of a chosen body through an ideological birth. With the arrival of Ahmed, his brothers were no longer entitled to the inheritance according to the Islamic law. The presence of a male heir, therefore, signified his indisputable authority as the eldest son.

From that moment on, Ahmed was no longer the body of his individual being, but the body of the family. And that body lied in the performative staging of his male appearance. When he was young, he was on one hand publicly presented in his father’s workshop and mosque as the line of succession, and on the other got bandaged tightly on the chest to keep his female physique hidden. When he reached twenty, he took a step forward from his father’s will by dressing in a suit and tie and getting married in order to keep up the Qur’anic image of a complete Muslim, all the while dealing with menstrual blood in private. The idea that repetition and manipulation constitute a semblance that can be confided in underpins Michael Taussig’s theory of mimesis, which ‘grants the copy the character and power of the original, the representations the power of the represented.’ Indeed, upon the passing of his father, ‘Ahmed took things in hand, with authority.’ Finally, his authority transcended the worldly boundary into the form of a book after his death, which then reinhabited the storyteller’s body to continue the act. Only this time it provides a cautionary spin in understanding sexuality and its social construction along more nuanced terms than the reductive “male and female”, “mind and body”, “public and private” binaries that have culturally skewed the ways of thinking about human materiality in the Arab-Muslim environment. 

By no means did the authority and privilege take place without consequences. Of particular relevance to S.R. Burge’s discussion on Islamic purity law and the angelic behaviour with the impure is the quasi-polluting substances and objects, which results from the unlawful transgendered actions. These pollutants, while not making an individual ritually unclean, do place them at an eschatological disadvantage. Attested to this is the decay of Ahmed’s health after he retreated to the upper room of the house, subsequent to the death of his father. His senses are heightened but his mobility is hindered by the various conditions of his body for no obvious reasons.

On the other hand, ‘the ‘angels do not enter’ ahadith clearly imply that individuals are affected by the impurity of other people, but the extent to which it disadvantages others is not clear.’ Before leaving the Thursday Gate, the storyteller warned the audience that ‘My friends, if you do not see me tomorrow, know that the angel has swung to the side of the precipice and death.’ In a way, to tell the story is to remove the quasi-polluting substance that is Ahmed’s memory for a purified soul. Hence, ‘I need to get them out of my body in order to make room for new stories. I need you. I make you part of my undertaking.’ That gives the narrative a moral resonance that goes beyond the fictional particularities it depicts, fittingly connecting to the concept of ritual purity and cleanliness.

Equally as substantial with regard to the discourse of this module is the symmetrical relationship between body and building. As the toll exacted by Ahmed’s liminal life loomed large, at first behind the “outer skin in this forest thick with lies”, then eventually “behind a wall of glass”, the gender orientation of these spatial dividers was brought to our attention. Historically, there exists ‘an ideological alignment between all believing women and domestic space in the Hadith…where the house has become the women’s realm; the realm outside the house, perforce that of the men.’ Based on this social configuration, corporeal points of contact such as walls and skins embody a transitory dimension, neither feminine nor masculine, reminiscent to al-Ghuzuli’s placement of the eunuchs.

These castrated guardians stood in the dihliz, in another word, the corridor between public and private, serving as the intermediary between the women of the harim and others. In the same vein, Ahmed was always the witness of both sides of the boundary, ‘the architect and the house, the tree and the sap, a man and a woman’. The fact that he gave orders to his house of women inside the room upstairs overlooking the terrace, another architectural device that dissolved the border between inside and outside for the inhabitants, especially women, to be protected from the gaze of other people, is a testament to the ambiguous category of gender and space in relation to social strata.

All in all, Ben Jelloun’s story opens up spaces between mutually exclusive theoretical pairs to scrutinise the various themes considered in the study of architecture and bodies in class, from the performative male appearance and its manipulative influence on the female dependents, to the transcendence of ritual purity on bodies, souls and buildings, and the state of the “in-between” that begs alternative philosophical models to make sense of the shifting social and moral development. 

Bibliography 

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. The Sand Child. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab. Sexuality in Islam. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Saki Books, 1998.

Marmon, Shaun Elizabeth. Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

O’Meara, Simon. Space and Muslim Urban Life: At the Limits of the Labyrinth of Fez. London: Routledge, 2007.

Burge, S.R. Impurity / Danger! Islamic Law and Society Vol. 17, No. 3-4 (2010), pp. 320-349 

Combs-Schilling, Elaine. “Performing Monarchy, Staging Nation,” in In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power and Politics in Morocco, ed. eadem and Rahma Bourqia (1999), pp. 176-206