In a crowded market in 1950s Morocco, a storyteller sitting on a mat begins a story that draws people around him (the story is inspired by a real case). In 2005, he received the Ulysse Prize for his entire work, and in 2008 he was elected a member of the Goncourt Academy and was decorated by Nicolas Sarkozy with the Cross of Grand Officer of the Légion d’honneur.

In 1987, he receive the prize Goncourt with “The Sacred Night”, the first of its kind awarded to a Maghreb writer. In 1975 he obtained a doctorate in social psychiatry, and in 1985 he published “The Sand Child”, a novel that will make him known all around the literary world. Following the advocacy against violence committed by the Moroccan Police, he was forced to move to Paris in 1971, where he completed his studies in psychology and began collaborating with Le Monde. He taught philosophy in Morocco, publishing in various literary magazines. He studied philosophy at the University of Rabat, at that time also writing his first verses. Tahar Ben Jelloun is a writer born in Morocco in 1944. Thus, from the first sentence of the final cover of the book, I knew that I would buy this book and that it would be the first on the reading list, without doing any prior research on the author or content. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.I must confess that I have a great passion for literature that addresses the status of women in different cultures and throughout history. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity.ĭrawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun tells a story of power, colonialism, gender, and sexual identity in North Africa.

The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun