The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 25 November 2015
by Tahar ben Jelloun
The question of personal identity and gender have become hot topics in the 21st century. We've come to accept a broader range of identities than we have in times past. That's progress. We still have quite a way to go. At least in many Western societies. Such acceptance is still far off for people struggling with gender and sexual identities in more religiously repressive or retrograde societies. That's the way it is, and we can hope that will change.
This small impressionistic novel is set in Muslim Morocco, probably sometime in the middle of the 20th century. A man feels cursed when his wife gives birth to girl after girl. His inheritance and legacy are threatened. So, when the eighth girl is born, he decides the girl is a boy, names her Ahmed and raises the girl as a boy and a young man. She or he inherits the majority of the family fortune, protecting it from avaricious uncles. All of this as long as the scandalous secret is kept. Ahmed struggles with her own identity, and lives a life of strict self-imposed solitude. The society is too restrictive to let on, even a little bit, what his/her life is like. Her sexual identity is vague; his gender goes back and forth.
Ben Jelloun's writing is highly poetical and impressionistic. As we learn about Ahmed, the story bends and twists, until it becomes about the nature of story-telling itself. History is subjective, though we like to think there is One Truth sitting out there somewhere. We get a different perspective on Ahmed from at least four different story-tellers and one more or less objective narrator. The book is small but complex and dense. Questions of identity are raised but unanswered. The overall impression is that everything from history to individual personality is as soft and elusive as the sand running through an hourglass. But Time, itself, is the grand enemy here. Years of solitude, the certainty of death. These are the reliable truths. What it all comes down to in the end depends on who you are as you read this book.