The Sand Child

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-16

Chapters 17-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 8 Summary: “The Houseless Woman”

When the storyteller mentions the inscrutability of Ahmed’s new status as a widower, a member of the audience chimes in his dissent, deeming the protagonist’s situation logical given that Ahmed used Fatima to fortify his personality and reputation. The listener then recounts a related tale of Antar, a brutal, intolerant warrior from the previous century. A ruthlessly strict leader feared by his men, Antar was revealed to be a woman at his death, after which he acceded to sainthood. The storyteller jumps in to add details to the story, noting that Antar fascinated his troops by wearing a veil and had a passionate sexual relationship with a cave-dwelling bandit who was unaware of Antar’s “official” position—and gender—in society.

The storyteller circles back to Ahmed, who after Fatima’s death takes to his room in dejection, writing incomprehensible, mangled texts, and resumes exchanging letters with his anonymous correspondent. As the missives grow increasingly intimate, Ahmed experiences a sense of silent joy at being able to remove his mask and “exist in his truth” (63). In the dated letter he receives after Fatima’s death, his correspondent qualifies Ahmed’s contrived marriage as a perilous game through which he lost one of his masks. Identifying with Ahmed’s wound, his melancholy, and his suffering, the correspondent beckons Ahmed to abandon his masks and re-enter society. The correspondent also criticizes Ahmed’s cruel treatment of his mother and sisters, deeming his silent dismissal of them a result of his taste for the privilege that manhood brings.

Annoyed by these comments—which he finds moralizing—Ahmed considers ending the correspondence but instead responds by claiming solitude as his domain of choice. Likening his retreat to an unending journey across the desert to cleanse himself of unnamable desire, Ahmed asserts his outright rejection of the dominant family structure in their society.

The storyteller, having finished reading the letter, tells his audience that during this long period of isolation, Ahmed saw nobody except Malika, the kind servant, who muttered prayers to Allah with every visit to his room. Ahmed continues his reign of terror, communicating only by bizarre notes that his illiterate mother, growing increasingly ill and demented, is unable to read. Alone, Ahmed spends time shaving and removing hair from his legs, awaiting his body’s return to its original state.

Chapter 9 Summary: “’Construct a Face as One Constructs a House’”

The storyteller begins this chapter by evoking the poor state of Ahmed and his family as the days following Fatima’s death elapsed. With the protagonist henceforth in seclusion and some of his sisters married off, the others squander what little inheritance they receive—since under Islamic law of the time, women inherited paltry amounts—and their mother’s mental health declines. Their family manor falls into ruin. Ahmed begins to hang slates inscribed with Koranic verses—to which he added his own flourishes—on his door.

Ahmed’s journal entries demonstrate his mounting exhaustion and depression, with his written queries rendered even more offbeat by his seclusion and the effects of kief—a mixture of marijuana and tobacco. One of his writings details a bath during which he fell asleep and dreamt of a man performing oral sex on him. In the following entry, he wonders if the experience occurred in dream or reality. He then proceeds to name his anonymous correspondent—employing a masculine pronoun, identifying him as a man for the first time—as his bathtub visitor who delivered sexual pleasure to him. The remainder of Ahmed’s April 17 journal entry grows increasingly fragmented as the protagonist details overtly autoerotic acts.

In the following entry, Ahmed describes gazing at his own naked body in the mirror as an act of liberation. The next day, he writes to his correspondent, openly expressing his desire: “when I read your letters I see my garments fall one after another to the ground” (74).

Ahmed fills his next missive with frank discussions of sex. Not having seen a naked body—besides his own—since his visits to the hammam, he speaks of non-gender-specific bodies that visit him in his dreams as well as society’s general hunger for sex. He also details observed sex acts between his parents and farm animals—which he found “grotesque”—describing the semen he’s seen as “the white seed” (76).

A few days later, Ahmed mentions traveling far away to forget. He confesses to having lost all sense of time, to the point where his life and his calendar—the official record of time—have few points of intersection as night and day become indistinct. He also notes that with his sisters having all left the family home and their mother having gone mad in her confinement, the household has fallen into shambles.

Chapter 10 Summary: “The Storyteller Devoured by His Words”

Noting fewer listeners in his entourage, the storyteller chalks this up to the heresy of the protagonist’s having distorted Koranic verses. He attributes this act to Ahmed’s having undergone a crisis, noting that only God can judge him.

Extolling the exhilarating morning wind that turns the book’s pages, awakening its syllables and sentences, the storyteller evokes images of moths, swallows, and other flying creatures emerging from the book, freeing themselves from jumbled words and carrying away unnecessary images. Obsessed by the fragmentary text, he likens it to a house on a theatrical set.

Chapters 8-10 Analysis

Narrative instability emerges thematically and operationally once again as a member of the audience cuts off the storyteller in Chapter 8, contradicting the latter’s claim that Ahmed’s new role as widower was painful and incomprehensible. This speaker, deeming Ahmed’s situation logical, supports this point of view by relating the tale of Antar as a parallelism to Ahmed’s. Given the work’s recurrent discussions of language in general and the materiality of words in particular, it cannot be overlooked that both stories feature a tyrannical woman whose name begins with the letter A—alif in Arabic—passing as a man. Here the speaker mentions that, upon Antar’s death, a shrine was built to honor him and that he became a saint—once again foreshadowing one version of Ahmed’s ironic fate.

Contrary to Ahmed, Antar clandestinely lived his female sexuality with his rogue cave-dwelling lover, the tawdry details of their affair revealed through the original storyteller. As a plot device, introducing Antar’s tale at this juncture of the narrative serves to frame Ahmed’s gradual embracing and exploration of his female desire during his dark period of depression and seclusion. For the protagonist, sexual self-acceptance occurs both by inscribing his longings in increasingly eroticized missives to his correspondent and by exploring his own physical body, with which he develops an intimate and overtly sexual relationship. This confluence of language and desire recalls Ahmed’s childhood visits to the hammam, where he first saw naked bodies while internalizing the sheer power of individual words. During this confusing yet ultimately liberating life chapter of shedding masks and sexual awakening, Ahmed describes a scene in a similarly aqueous setting: his bathtub. Having fallen asleep there, the protagonist specifies sensations of experiencing oral sex performed by his correspondent—whom he designates as a male for the first time—only later to question whether the event occurred, given his general state of confusion exacerbated by drug-induced highs.

That Ahmed takes the liberty to add his own flourishes to Koranic verses further dethrones the Islamic sacred text from its elevated position in society, simultaneously highlighting all texts’ inherently non-static nature. The storyteller underscores this point in his poeticized musings on literary production. Citing morning’s sunrise—in the East, where The Sand Child’ takes place—as the magical time when textual creation occurs, the storyteller again mentions the fragmentary status of Ahmed’s manuscript, likening it to his family’s dilapidated old abode, itself a “sham house, a theatrical set in which the moon and sky are represented by a lightbulb and a blue sheet held between two windows” (81). He increasingly emphasizes the theatricality and non-fixedness of all texts, even those purporting to tell the truth, be they holy books, works of fiction, or non-fictional writings.