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The sand child / Tahar Ben Jelloun ; translated by Alan Sheridan.
LIBRA - Special PQ3989.2.J4 E613 2000
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- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 1947-
- Standardized Title:
- Enfant de sable. English
- Language:
- English
- French
- Subjects (All):
- Islam--Social aspects--Fiction.
- Islam.
- Gender identity--Fiction.
- Gender identity.
- Islam--Social aspects.
- Inheritance and succession--Fiction.
- Inheritance and succession.
- Morocco--Fiction.
- Morocco.
- Genre:
- Fiction.
- Islamic stories.
- Penn Provenance:
- Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)
- Physical Description:
- vi, 165 pages ; 21 cm
- Edition:
- Johns Hopkins paperback edition.
- Place of Publication:
- Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
- Summary:
- 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. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. 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. 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. Drawing 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.
- Contents:
- The man
- The Thursday gate
- The Friday gate
- The Saturday gate
- Bab El had
- The forgotten gate
- The walled-up gate
- The houseless woman
- "Construct a face as one construct a house"
- The storyteller devoured by his words
- The man with a woman's breast
- The wman with the badly shaven beared
- A night without escape
- Salem
- Amar
- Fatuma
- The blind troubadour
- The andalusian night
- The gate of the sands.
- ISBN:
- 0801864402
- 9780801864407
- OCLC:
- 43287602
- Online:
- Contributor biographical information
- Publisher description
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