SOURCE: Cazenave, Odile. “Gender, Age, and Narrative Transformations in L'Enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun.” French Review 64, no. 3 (February 1991): 437-50.

In the following essay, Cazenave traces the central themes of age and gender in L'Enfant de sable and explores how the novel acts as a metaphor for the problems faced by Maghrebin authors writing in French.

Traditionally, in African literature, and even more so in North-African Literature, factors of age and gender appear to be key elements in determining the role and status in society for a given character. Geographically and socially, such factors establish a distribution of space (the outside and the inside) and of fixed functions. In L'Enfant de sable (1985) the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, who was awarded the Prix Goncourt for La Nuit sacrée in 1987, uses the two parameters of age and gender as the very focus of the novel. The plot...