Saloua Ben Zahra
FATIMA VS. "CURE OR KILL"
A DISABILITY STUDY OF TAHAR BEN JELLOUN'S L'ENFANT DE SABLE
In Arab and Muslim societies, the predicament of the disabled is particularly critical. That is the case mainly
because traditional Arab societies are customarily misogynous and tend to equate femaleness with disability and the
death of patriarchal lines and names. To have a physical impairment in addition to being a woman in such a society,
signifies a state of culturally gendered and accrued handicaps.
A woman with a minor disability would be deemed unfit for sight and society, and unmarriageable. Women with
disabilities living in Arab and Muslim societies have traditionally been isolated, silenced and buried alive
in the house institution. They are seldom represented in their national media. They tend to be absent–present
in Arab and Muslim classical and contemporary societies and texts. They continue to be underdeveloped in their
Post–Colonial literary milieu, where writers tend to include them only as minor and easy to abuse and forget
,1 fix or kill characters.2 Such is the predicament of the Moroccan disabled female character
Fatima in the
Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable (The Sand Child in English translation). Her Morocco
represents a moderate modernizing Arab and Muslim country in the Post–Colonial era that other societies in the
Arab and Muslim world and African continent, particularly its Northern part, entered during the same period, in the
1960s.Yet Fatima's predicament, which could serve as a sample of the conditions of disabled women in her time and part
of the world, is anything but progressive or humane.That predicament begs us to imagine the plight of a woman with a
disability in an Islamist state, for instance, the more radically Muslim Iran (compared to North African societies)
in the Middle East. We can see a picture of what it means to be a blind Iranian woman living behind the veil under
Islamist rule in the film The Apple, which was directed by Samira Makhmalbaf and based on a
true story.
The relatively different Post–Colonial context in which Fatima lives complicates her experiences further
and produces a modernizing native son/sister who will occupy her in a liminal space between Islamism and modernity.
As a consequence, Fatima finds herself at an intersection of two competing and conflicting cultures, Arabian and
Pre-Islamic customs, and Post–Colonial Westernizing cultural "imports."
North African Arab and Muslim disabled women can find themselves only in restricted fictional spaces where they
tend to be managed in a fashion similar to their mistreatment in reality. Fatima accumulates all the harm that results
from the mixed recitations of her contemporary fellow citizens, as they recite religious and commercial imports. Yet,
helpless as she is, she creates a space from which she forges intertextual relationships with sisters in the same
predicament and manages to utter a call for their recognition as a textual entity worthy of inclusion and development.
She embarks on a mission of metaphoric rescue in favor of female characters with disabilities like her. She initiates
that by contesting her narrative treatment and protesting against the "cure or kill" technique that writers
creatively administer to them. She talks back to her writer and chastises her storyteller. In order to hear her voice
and version of her story, we need to begin with the end of the narrative.
Near the end of his journey, the storyteller in Ben Jelloun's novel reveals encountering his characters:
I walked for a long time, then found myself back at my starting point. The characters I thought
I had invented appeared on my way, called to me, and demanded an explanation. Condemning fingers pointed at me,
accusing me of betrayal…I met Fatima too. She was no longer sick. It was on a Friday. She stopped me and said,
"I am Fatima; I am cured." She appeared to me laden with flowers, happy, like someone who had just taken her
revenge on destiny. A slight smile played around her lips. Her white dress –something between a shroud and a
wedding dress –was almost intact; just a little soil was caught in the folds. " Do you recognize me
now?"She asked calmly…I am the woman you chose to be your hero's victim. You soon got rid of me.
I have now come back to visit the places and observe the things that I wanted to be eternal. I see that the
country hasn't changed."
The storyteller's statement "the characters I thought I had invented " is thought-provoking.
It testifies that such characters as Fatima exist and are real, and that her narrative is possibly based on true
stories of other disabled women living or rather dying in her larger country. Their death in life is intimately
connected to their exclusion from public social space, their unmarriageable status and sterile living conditions.
Fatima rebels against her hasty banishment from the narrative and comes back with a graceful vengeance to haunt
her narrator and to urge him to voice her concerns and allow her to interact with him in rewriting the story of
her fellow citizens in her country. She has
statements to make on the state of their shared culture and its impact on disabled women like her. She wants
certain parts of it to be eternal and others to change. We shall see in the position of the disabled Fatima
the present face of Post–Colonial Morocco that must make the changes necessary to improve the living
situations of its disabled and the rest of their society. Such cultural work entails that Arab and Muslim
societies return to their common Islamic source for directives and simultaneously move forward on a path of
genuinely modern and moral progress where all community members, especially men and women with disabilities, have
adequate access to all the social, educational and professional venues that they wish to pursue.
The Friday meeting of Fatima and the narrator is laden with Islamic cultural and spiritual meaning, given that
it is Muslim's holy day. It foreshadows a common allegiance that connects Fatima and the narrator. They both explain
the degradation of their present to a certain extent in relation to religion. More precisely, they attribute such a
degradation to the forgetfulness by their fellow citizens of fundamental Islamic principles and values under the
influence of unwelcome negative Islamist and Westernizing changes that are sweeping their country. Such values are
the respectful,
compassionate and inclusive treatment of all community members, especially women and disabled individuals.
The misogynous social text of Fatima's society that is written by a male dominant state most tragically over
the bodies of disabled women violates every Islamic principle and distorts the spirit of Allah's words. In
The Quran, God has never intended women to be read as ''bad news.'' Yet, that is how female infants
were perceived and received in Fatima's context.
In the background narrative of The Sand Child, the protagonist's father, Hajji Ahmed
(called Hajji because he had managed to fulfill the pilgrimage to Mecca, Haj), is beset with a large
number of daughters, an undesirable occurrence in Arab and Islamic
societies.3 The daughters were precisely seven, a number which otherwise, is considered
blessed and lucky by Arabs. Hajji Ahmed blames on the wife what we might call her
"male–sterility," and punishes her and their daughters for it as he forgets "her"
daughters into non–existence (9). He thinks that she carries an infirmity within her that makes her
unable to produce males (13). His brother spitefully rejoices in this situation and waits to inherit from him.
In the absence of a male heir, Islamic inheritance laws prescribe that the brother of the deceased inherit the
largest share, even when female progeny exists. The narrator documents this legal fact of the times in his
following address to the listeners and readers of his storytelling: "you are not unaware, my friends and
accomplices, that our religion is pitiless for a man who has no heirs. It dispossesses him in favor of his
brothers, while the daughters receive only one–third of the inheritance"(10). In order to counter
the oppressive legal clause, the protagonist's father decides that the next child to come will be a son even
if it were a female. Accordingly, the last girl born, the protagonist, is given a male name, dressed and raised
as a man to be.4 Shortly after the childbirth of the eighth girl, he even brainwashes the mother
into believing that the female she is looking at is actually a male. She will treat the girl accordingly and
repress every sign of femininity in her. The deafened /deafening silence of the mother– literally speaking,
for once unable to tolerate her husband's voice anymore, she will disable her hearing by pouring hot wax in her
ears (100) – enables the father to carry out the transgendering stratagem. Hajji Ahmed did everything else
he could do besides silencing and brainwashing the mother, to mislead his society into believing the travesty
and accepting the living portrait he was drawing of Ahmed as a real man. He even sacrificed his finger simulating
Ahmed's circumcision
(21). He worked on securing the success of his scheme through giving Ahmed a boys' education, separating her/him
from the sisters and sowing a dangerous division among the women of the family:
Ahmed never left his father. He was educated outside the house, well away from the women.
At school he learned to fight and fought often. His father encouraged him…Ahmed mistreated his sisters, who
feared him. It was all quite normal! He was being prepared for the succession. ln due course, he became a man (28).
Although the main focus in this work is on physical disability, gender itself may be deemed a disability, as in the
previously cited instances of gender reception and legal discrimination. Furthermore, in a society where females
tend to be disliked, gender aggravates the predicament of a woman with a disability. In such a context, a disabled
female would be much less liked than a male or a normally healthy woman. The gender question as to whether the
oppression of the disabled woman within Moroccan Muslim
society as portrayed by Ben Jelloun is complicated by the fact of her being female, also is relevant to this study
because the narrator and protagonist's attempts to get rid of her are initially dictated by the prevalent misogyny
in their shared context.
The context in which the protagonists are situated was also marked by colonialism. Therefore, the mistreatment
of Fatima was over–determined by intricate cultural mixtures of pre–colonial and post–colonial
elements. In The Sand Child, Hajji Ahmed wanted a male child not only because of the Arab Muslim
family dynamics and male sibling rivalry that he was experiencing but also to celebrate for political reasons
as well:
He bought a half–page in the great national newspaper and had his
photograph printed in it, followed by the following text:
… A boy … We have called him Mohammed Ahmed. This birth will bring fertility to the land, peace and
prosperity to the country. Long live Ahmed! Long live Morocco!
…The nationalist militants did not know that this rich craftsman was also a good patriot (20).
The quoted passage is highly suggestive. Colonial presence aggravated the bias in favor of male offspring. French
presence was perceived by indigenous men as a threat to the
power and life of the native male population. They felt that they needed valid manpower more than ever, in order
to counter the humiliation and oppression of colonial occupation. The challenges and insecurities they were faced
with made them less tolerant of female and unhealthy progeny, and more desperate to produce males. The passage makes
the reader think about the possible marks that French presence would leave on Ahmed, as is generally the case with
colonialism, the colonial encounter often producing native generations of colonizing tastes, in this instance
French–oriented European tastes.
The aggravation by colonialism of pre–existing male dominance and misogyny will shape the protagonist's
relationship with Fatima.
Ahmed, the daughter who Hajji Ahmed willed to transform into a son, grows to like the privileges that come with
being a male in her/his society. As he reaches early manhood, he begins to further develop his adoption of a man's
dress and conduct. He decides to seek power and starts to dress up in suit and tie, that is European fashion, and
grow a mustache (34). In this combination of foreign and local ways, the mustache stands for the local masculine
look. He admits to his father:
I don't just accept my condition and endure it, I actually like it. It is interesting.
lt gives me privileges that I would never have known. lt opens doors for me, and I like that, even if it locks me
in a glass cage…
I would like to pursue this story to the end. I'm a man. My name is Ahmed
according to the tradition of our Prophet. And I want a wife…Father, you've
made me a man. I must remain one. And, as our beloved Prophet says, 'A
complete Muslim is a married man"(34–5).
His mother asks him whom he wants to marry and the following exchange takes place:
"Fatima…my cousin, the daughter of my uncle, my father's younger brother,
he who rejoiced at the birth of each of your daughters."
'"But you can't. Fatima is ill –she's an epileptic and has a limp…"
"Precisely!"
"You're a monster."
"I'm your son, no more, no less."
"You'll bring unhappiness on us all!"
…Certain verses of the Koran that I had to learn by heart have come back into my mind recently, just like
that, for no apparent reason. They go through my head, stop for a second, then vanish: 'God charges you,
concerning your children: to the male the like of the portion of two females….'" (37)
Ahmed has a precise plan for the employment of Fatima's disabilities. The following passage testifies to his
intentions:
Today I am pleased to think of the woman who will become my wife. I don't speak of desire
yet; I speak of
servitude. She will come, dragging one leg…I shall kiss her hand, say that she is beautiful; I shall make
her cry and let her indulge her feelings. I shall observe her, struggling against death, slobbering, imploring (40).
Unworthy of kin, such a plan evokes certain negative treatments that Western colonizers and their
"semblables" and/or allies engaged in vis–a–vis colonized native
women with disabilities. Salient examples can be found throughout J.M. Coetze's Waiting for the
Barbarians and in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky (138–40). In the latter novel, the American
protagonist, Port, expresses intentions similar to Ahmed's toward a blind Arab prostitute. To his eyes, her disability
makes her a highly desirable object of curiosity and experimentation. While it is beyond the scope of this present
work to analyze the scene in Bowles' novel, it is worth remarking that Port's statements could be imaginatively read
as an extension of the way the colonizers and their "Frenchified" allied treat native women with disabilities.
Colonialism produces generations of colonizing tastes in that co-nationals learn to shape and locate easy prey among
themselves to occupy and abuse. The relations between able–bodied and disabled natives become allegories of
colonial occupation. The pre–colonial and present native cultures surely contribute to this divided consciousness.
Ahmed reveals a connection between his intention toward his disabled female cousin and The Quranic verse
that he cites, (37) which is widely memorized in Islamic societies and founds Muslim family inheritance laws. Particularly
telling is his expression
"verses of the Koran that I had to learn by heart." It is a fact that traditional Islamic education
was based on the forced rote memorization of The Qur'an. As we have seen, this practice produced Muslims,
exemplified by Ben Jelloun through Ahmed, who knew Quranic verses by heart, quoted them without consideration for the
change in context and difference between the times of their revelation and those in which they were citing them. Such
Muslims tend to take Quranic verses literally in different situations, consequently misinterpreting and misapplying
the scriptures. In post–Islamic times, oppressive family members often act on their dislike of women in the name
of Islam. In order to justify their actions, they pretend to read from The Qur'an, select certain verses, and
cite them by rote and out of context. They use Quranic verses as a pretext to sanction their misdeeds, as we shall see
in our reading of Fatima's ordeal at the hands of her cousin Ahmed.
Ahmed cited the verse in his conversation with his mother not only to point out to her where their background story,
the master family story of uncle, daughters, and
coveted son, comes from but also to foreshadow and justify his reenactment with his chosen Fatima of what he thinks the
verse to mean. He plans to enact over her body his
inherited belief in the inferiority of women. A motive of his selection of Fatima is the hope that she will prove to be
an easy and unsuspecting house–mate, qualities which have been essentialized in disabled women and that could
serve the success of his subterfuge. He thought that because Fatima was a woman and disabled, she would be lacking in
intelligence and attention, thus unable to find out his gender game. He anticipated that
she would be easier to manage than a normally healthy woman and expected life with her to be easier to control, for he
knew the way she was living in her father's house. To his eyes, her infirmities make her an easy target and disposable
experimental object.
Ahmed's quotation of the verse seems to betray a narrow comprehension of its implications. All he seems to see in it is
a divine statement on the inferiority of women to men, for he will treat Fatima, according to the limited interpretation
that was dominant in his society, as an unworthy female whose disabilities reduce her value even further.
The Quranic verse regulating inheritance along gender lines should be read and interpreted in light of its
original context, because it derives its humane meaning from the times of pre–Islam and early Islam. In that
period women had virtually no rights and
family relationships were marred by strife, abuse of power and oppression. The Qur'an
came and gave women rights where they had none. It entrusted men with the women in their care and urged on them to
give females a share of the family properties, including disabled females. (38) Men, at that time, were the ones who were
versed in financial affairs,
whereas women lacked access to and practice in the matters and may have mismanaged a larger inheritance than The
Qur'an had entitled them to. Allah granted males double the portion of females for pragmatic reasons as well.
Demanding an equal distribution of
property between men and women would at that time, have outraged the males, who were used to their privileges, with
the possible result of denying women any share in property altogether and the perpetuation of the status quo. The
Qur'an was trying to institute change in a gradual manner, for society could not be expected to transform itself
overnight.39 While Allah refrained from any direct suggestion of women's entitlement to an equal share in the
inheritance of property, he explicitly singled out disabled individuals throughout The Qur'an as deserving
of special care and protection. Precisely because of their infirmities, He sees such individuals to be worthy of
assistance and trust. He looks on their hearts and minds and sees their humanity and ability to understand. Ahmed's
citation of that particular verse rather than any Quranic verse urging the humane treatment of the disabled which
would have been more relevant to the context at hand, is symptomatic of the selective memory of many Muslims
vis–a–vis The Qur'an. They all remember that particular part of the inheritance verses, but
neither Ahmed nor any of the other Muslims in his society within the narrative seem to remember one verse from The
Qur'an among the many that honor the disabled. Muslim populations tend to remember best the verses that they hear
the most frequently in public, through the schools, the available media, and in the streets. Ahmed's forgetfulness of
The Quranic verses that concern the disabled reflects the fact that those verses were not taught with any
special emphasis by religious teachers, nor quoted or recited in newspapers and radio
channels. Arab populations, particularly in economies of scarcity, tend not to read. Although they may recite
learned texts, they tend to rely on authorities such as leaders, media and teachers to remind them of sacred verses
and inform them. The inheritance verses that Ahmed refers to seem to be the most circulating ones in his society. Of
the whole Quranic chapter, they are the ones that stand out and endure in men's memory. In the spirit of Islam,
Quranic verses are meant to be read in context with "ljtihad,7 that is with the mental and
intellectual exercise
and effort needed to reach imaginative interpretation applicable to different situations as they arise. They are not
to be used as a pretext to oppress women or the rest of society.
Ahmed chooses Fatima for suspect reasons. As he said to his mother, he chose her precisely because of
her
epilepsy and limp. Ahmed could have thought of many other women or female cousins to marry. Because of the common
practice of inter–marriage between paternal cousins in Arab Islamic society, Fatima's sisters would have
been highly eligible wives for him. Moreover, like her, they were also the daughters of the uncle who spitefully
rejoiced in the fact that his father did not have a male heir. Having internalized his father's feelings of
humiliation at the wife's failure to produce a son and his uncles mockery, Ahmed could have used one of Fatima's
sisters in his revenge plan. Yet, he purposefully chose Fatima. It seems that he found her to be the fittest for
his intended social game. Later in the narrative he admits that "I had intended to use her to perfect my social
appearance" (57). Ahmed's plan was to delude his society, including his uncle, into thinking that he was a
man. He wanted to experiment with the codes of a society that was oppressive in its rigid distribution of life
activities along gender lines yet easily deceived by a perfected cross dressing game. He wanted to prove that,
fooled by his male dress into believing him a man, and more of a powerful man, even, being so
"presentable" (41) in his European modem suit and tie; society would allow him to do everything
that a man could do, including marrying a woman. To achieve that purpose in safety, he chose the disabled female
cousin whom he knew to live in her father's house.
The uncle's dislike for the disabled daughter may not be obvious and she may
even appear to benefit from special protection, kept sheltered as she was. This
"protection" however, is merely a form of house imprisonment. It equals a death sentence. As we
shall see in Ben Jelloun's representation of the situation of Fatima, the disabled woman's able–bodied
caretakers reduce her, for suspect self–serving motives, to a lonely and loveless house–bound existence.
They consider her a nuisance and attempt to get rid of her by removing her to hidden quarters within the house.
It is arguable that a worse fate may be awaiting the disabled woman if she were to be completely abandoned by
her family and thrown out in the outside world of her society, in the streets or the brothel even. Yet, the
protection in question remains troubling because the house imprisonment causes the disabled woman emotional
and mental isolation, and social deprivation.
It may seem that Ahmed's marriage to Fatima was a rescue mission meant to save her from her restricted life,
but in truth, he had at best mixed feelings toward her. The dominant elements in his design were his desire
for revenge and his intention to use and dispose of his cousin. He admits to his revengeful motives later
on in the narrative as he confronts himself:" you wanted that union not out of pity, but out of
revenge"(63). It could be argued that a normally healthy person also could be the object of mixed feelings
and vengeful schemes, so that it is not necessarily Fatima's epilepsy and limp that qualified her for this
kind of treatment at the hands of her cousin. One manifestation of Ahmed's choice of Fatima precisely on
account of her epilepsy and limp, however, is the fact that his thoughts and acts concerning her revolve around
her disabilities. When he tries to analyze her, he dwells on her physical differences and shortcomings.
Occasionally, he seems sympathetic in his descriptions of her restricted life, yet be ends up reducing her to
the living conditions that he knew her to suffer in her father's house. In his own house, she is confined to
the life of an undesired and disposable object of curiosity.
On the whole, Ahmed had harmful plans for Fatima, which the following excerpts will sum up. His cruel
intentions betray mixed feelings towards her. Ahmed's ambivalent reactions to Fatima and his double treatment
of her are more evident in the following passage:
I gave her a bed next to mine and busied myself with her as much as I could…One
day, as she lay asleep, I tried to see if she had been circumcised…I gently lifted the sheet and found
that she was wearing a strong girdle around her pelvis, like a steel chastity belt, to discourage desire –or
to provoke it, and destroy it, all the more (S5)
Ahmed treats his disabled cousin as an object of curiosity and makes a private spectacle
out of her for self–serving motives. He rejoices in observing the scars that the dehumanizing misogyny of
their society has left on her body. By the same token, he congratulates himself on having escaped such a fate
through cunning. The reference to female circumcision functions as a metaphor for the dehumanizing effects of
Fatima's society on women like her. Fatima is repressed, regarded as asexual yet hyper–sexualized at the
same time. She is denied womanhood, sexual life, life in short. Ahmed sees her at the same time as discouraging
and provoking desire, but she is doomed from beginning to end as her reproductive potential is destroyed through
seclusion and rejection.
Ahmed's attitude towards Fatima changes quickly from false attraction and tolerance to annoyance and rejection,
as the next excerpt demonstrates:
Fatima's presence disturbed me greatly. At first I liked the difficulty and complexity
of the situation. Then l began to lose patience. I was no longer master of my world and my solitude. That
wounded creature at my side, that intrusion that I had myself installed inside my secret, private life, that grave,
desperate woman who was no longer a woman, who had traveled a painful path, that woman who didn't even aspire to
be a man, but to be nothing at all, that woman who almost never spoke, murmuring a sentence or two from time to
time, but enclosing herself in a long silence, reading books of mysticism, and sleeping without making the
slightest sound that woman prevented me from sleeping.
Ahmed has learned from society how to ill–treat his disabled female cousin. He is encouraged in his
choice and treatment of Fatima by his observation of society and family's irritation with and contempt for her,
as we can see from this description of her living conditions:
Everybody in the family had got used to seeing her knock her head against invisible
walls…She was left alone to have her fit, so she didn't disturb anything: her brothers and sisters were
left undisturbed, full of the future, happy to be able to make plans,…put out at having a sister who
introduced a false note into so harmonious a landscape.
In the end, Fatima had her own space– an uncomfortable room, near the terrace. They often forgot about
her. Two or three times, I [Ahmed] found her crying for no apparent reason… She was very bored and since
nobody in her family showed her the slightest kindness, she sank into a shroud of pitiful melancholy (53).
Worth remarking is a note on Arab Islamic local family housing styles in North Africa during the early
decades of the twentieth century. Extended families used to live together
in large houses. This way of life was based on sharing space, activities and meals. Siblings of the same
gender would also sleep in shared rooms. Fatima, however, had a room of her own! The deviation of Fatima's
family from a local way of living that might have been beneficial to her exacerbates her alienation and
loneliness within her family home. The separate rooms arrangement was meant to shun Fatima, remove her from
the family space and make her existence as invisible and inoffensive as possible to her normal and healthy
family members. This strategy in the treatment of her disabilities foreshadows a relatively similar move to
come from her cousin Ahmed after he chooses her for a wife.
In order to assess the uses to which Fatima was put to by her family and Ahmed, it would be useful to
read the narrator's account of how she was given away and
re–examine Ahmed's motives for this union:
To ask for the hand in marriage of the wretched Fatima, with her limp and her epileptic fits, was either too
good a stroke of fortune or an insult.
As soon as her name was spoken, she was taken away and shut up in the upper room, and no one said anything–
either yes or no. They were waiting to consult the father…
All his life he had been counting on that inheritance. With the arrival of Ahmed, he was forced to bury those
hopes…Then he came around to the idea of talking about it with Fatima. She wanted to marry.
Ahmed laid down his conditions: the two families would remain apart; he would live alone with his wife. She would
leave the house only to go to the baths
or to the hospital. He was thinking of taking her to consult certain great doctors, of getting her cured, giving
her a chance (48–9).
ln Ahmed's house, Fatima is as silent as she bas always been in the family home, initially at least. As the
following passage will tell, at this stage in their co–habitation, Ahmed is intent on breaking her silence,
but not for her sake. Once again, he is attempting to serve himself, this time to confirm, to the detriment of
his mate, his image of himself as the educated young man who is learned in the history of the world and who can
understand everything. He seeks to penetrate her mind:
Sometimes I observed her for a long time in her sleep…and I penetrated that dark, shadowy pit in which
her deepest thoughts were kept. Silently I pursued my delusion, successfully reaching her thoughts as if I
myself had expressed them. That was my mirror, my weakness; that is what haunted me. I heard her steps in the
middle of the night…I could see the traces of footprints in the dust. These led me to a cave where rats
and other beasts, whose names I do not know, live happily. In that cave, a veritable prehistoric grotto, lay
the thoughts of the woman who was asleep in the same room as I, and whom I regarded with mixed feelings of pity,
tenderness, and anger (56)
Ahmed feels modem and superior in comparison to Fatima. In the eyes of the young man, she is ancient. To
his mind, she belongs to pre–historical times. He thinks the disabled woman retarded because he does not
know what she is able to understand. Of all people, she turns out to be the person who finds him/her out from
the start:
I wanted to get rid of Fatima in some way that would not harm her. I put her in a room
well removed from mine…
She had already given up living and was moving slowly and surely toward disappearance, toward extinction…She no
longer took her medicines, ate little, spoke hardly at all (57).
She reveals to Ahmed:"I have always known who you are, and that is why, my sister, my cousin, I have come
to die here, near you" (58). Fatima's words demonstrate her intelligence and agency. She is far from being
retarded. She has known Ahmed's secret identity all along in part out of a sense of identification with a
kinswoman who embodied the common predicament that hung over their lives like a sword: "be a man or be
nothing."
Fatima's calculating intellect unfolds through the few statements that she manages to make in the narrative.
She had said that she wanted to marry most likely because she wanted to get out of her father's house. She found
Ahmed's marriage proposal to be a golden opportunity for her to escape from the family's prison house. She kept
Ahmed's secret to a certain extent for similar reasons, in order not to have to go back to her
father's house and to stay away from it till her death. She did not want to embrace her imminent death without expression.
Another reason why she chose to play Ahmed's game was because she wanted the narrator to tell her story as a disabled
woman in their society. She was aware that she had no place in her times and knew that she would die in a house, hence
her assertion to her kinswoman "I have come to die here, near you." In
their context, the house is women's grave of life." She chose, not without regret, to be
an accomplice in her death rather than to continue leading a marginal existence. The regret comes from the fact that she
wanted to live a human and happy life.
Fatima helps the narrator get rid of her in the narrative by stopping to take her medications and withdrawing further,
but not without reproach. Having become tuned to Fatima's inner sounds and feelings, Ahmed senses that her exit was more
involuntary than willing. The narrator writes her back in the fiction and gives her a voice to criticize her narrative
and social treatment. His critique involves tracing where the mistreatment of the disabled comes from. The narrator
explains the social ills that affect everyone in his community and most of all disabled women, considerably in relation
to religion, that is in terms of what happened to The Quran and to the Islamic character of his society in
our modem times, the Holy Book being a pre–text in this cultural work. It is a formative text, alive in almost
everything Muslims do whether that is well informed by its principles or deforms its words. It is also a pretext that
is recurrently invoked to justify choices and actions.
Ben Jelloun renders the Arab Islamic character of his fictional world in a dramatic fashion. Inspired by Arabic
oral tradition, he stages his fiction in the form of a
storytelling gathering in a Marrakesh market square of the 1950s, during which a professional
storyteller, the characters and the listeners take part in telling stories within stories. One particularly imaginative
description by Ben Jelloun of the source of the stories goes as follows:
Our storyteller is pretending to read from a book that Ahmed is supposed to have left behind.
That is untrue! Of course the book exists, but it is not that old notebook, yellowed by the sun, which our storyteller
has covered with that dirty scarf. Anyway, it isn't a notebook but a cheap edition of the koran.
…Companions! Don't go away, listen to me…Be patient! Wait until I
have reached the top of the terrace. I am scaling the walls of the house. I am going to sit on a mat on the white
terrace, and open the book to tell you the strange and beautiful story of Fatima, who was touched by grace, and of
Ahmed, cloistered in the vapors of evil (49 – 50).
In a sense, the book from which the multiple storytellers are reading and recounting is their social text, a
cheapened version of The Quran, in which community relations are marred by deviations from Islamic principle
and misogyny. It is a context where society leaves the sacred word behind and regresses to beliefs and practices of
the pre–Islamic times, called in Arabic, a/ Jahiliya, the (era of) Ignorantism.
To contextualize the preference of male over female offspring in Arab and Islamic societies, we need to ask where
it
comes from and place it within a larger and older setting, first at the local Islamic level and subsequently in the
context of colonial European influence. The belief in the superior worth of male progeny and the different ways of
burying females alive go back to Arabian pre–Islamic times.43 As Ahmed Zahra's father, Hajji Ahmed, tells his
daughter/son during a nightmare of hers: "before Islam, Arab fathers threw an unwanted female infant into a hole
[in the desert sand] and covered her until she died" (Sand Child,99). That was before Islam. Ben Jelloun's
female characters live in Islamic times and yet, they continue to feel disliked and fear being buried alive. Zahra
reveals her living nightmare:
I sense them there behind me, pursuing me with their mocking laughter, throwing stones at me. I see first my father,
young and strong, advancing toward me, dagger in hand, determined to cut my throat or to tie me up and bury me
alive(99).
What the society of Fatima does to women, burying them in houses for life, may be less, in degree, than the
pre–Islamic practice. In nature, however, it is a similar kind of "killing." Vulnerable disabled
women suffer the most from such a misogyny. In post–Islamic times, burying women alive takes different forms
besides house arrest. Hajji Ahmed combined various ways of negating his daughters' lives:
The father thought that one daughter would have been enough. Seven was too many; tragic, even. How often he remembered
the story of the Arabs before the advent of Islam who buried their daughters alive! Since he could not get rid of them,
he treated them not with hate but with indifference. He lived in the house as if he had no progeny. He did everything
he could to forget them, to keep them out of sight. For example, he never called them by name (9).
It is worth observing that such underestimation and mistreatment of females – whether it is slitting their
throats, burying them alive in one form or another, abusing them psychologically, stoning them or excluding them from
society – do not come from Islam. Such misdeeds are often perpetrated in the name of Islam and Islamic values
such as honor. In truth, numerous Quran verses give the lie to such claims.
The Quran includes several verses that document and condemn the common practice of burying female infants
alive in pre–Islamic times. It is worth noting that, as we learn from the verse to be cited, the practice had
a name that is almost untranslatable in English. It is not quite "burial." In Quranic Arabic, the noun is
wa'd and, to the mind of the learned Arabic speaker, it signifies the burial of female infants alive in the
desert sand, all in one short noun. The Quranic chapter, numerically 81, in which the verse occurs is about
the end of the world and Judgment Day. Its title refers to the sun and describes what happens to it during apocalypse.
It is titled in Arabic At–Talcwir, and translated by Dawood as ''the Cessation"(that is the
cessation of the sun from shining) and as "the Covering Up" or ''the Folding Up" (of the sun) in other
translations. The chapter reads as follows:
When the sun ceases to shine; when the stars fall and the mountains are blown away; when camels
big with young are left untended, and the wild beasts are brought together; when the seas are set alight and men's souls
are reunited;
when the infant girl I buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain; when
the records of men's deeds are laid open, and heaven is stripped bare; when Hell bums fiercely and Paradise is brought
near: then each soul shall learn what it has done (Dawood's translation of The Quran, p. 419– Italics mine).
Allah clearly condemns the pre–Islamic custom of burying unwanted females alive.
Moreover, He promises to punish those who committed the misdeed and to vindicate the innocent newborn girls. He will
restore to the victim not only her life but also the voice that she was denied by her family and culture.
Allah did not mean or want females to be received as "bad news" nor did He see them as such. Possible
linguistic evidence for this is to be found in the Arabic text of verse 17 in chapter 43. Its first part is often
translated as '"when the birth of a girl is
announced to any of them"5 and less frequently as "when one of them is given news."36
It reads in transliterated Arabic as follows: wa itha bushira ahaduhum bil ountha. The second translation is
more faithful to the spirit of The Quranic verse, for the verb bushira,
the passive form of the infinitive bashara, means more than ''to announce." The Arabic language has equivalents
to the verb "announce." If that is what He meant, Allah would have chosen one of them. What the verb
bashara means in Arabic is ''to bring good news." Hence, the verse should read in faithful
translation:"when good news is brought to one of them…" The qualifier good is
inseparable from news in the Arabic verb. It comes from the noun bushra, which means "(a piece of)
good news!" It occurs in this sense in The Quranic story of Joseph {12: 19) "Good news! A boy!"
said the passing caravan water–carrier who found Joseph in the well where his brothers had thrown him.
Bushra is also given as a female name in the Arab world by parents who are enlightened enough to choose
it for a daughter and call her Good News, ideally out of positive motives.47 Arabic male names that derive
from the noun bushra are: Bashir and Bashar,
which mean "the messenger or bearer of good news." Based on this linguistic reading, it is clear that Allah
could not be associated with the dislike for females that marks numerous Arab and Muslim societies.
Ahmed inherited his contempt for women not only from the Arab and Islamic side of his context, but also from the
colonial one, though indirectly. It is worth connecting the body of conditions that Ahmed sets upon, undeterred by
any of Fatima's supposed protectors, to his European oriented tastes, manifest, for instance, in his dress (suit and
tie). By his modernizing and Europeanizing Moroccan young man like attire and behavior, the character of Ahmed seems
to represent one way of treating the "Fatimas" that is adopted by younger generation males in North African
society. With respect to the
fathers in the fiction, Ahmed represents the educated younger generation Moroccan men of mixed allegiances, torn
between loyalty to internalized local patterns of behavior and Europeanizing trends. While taking into account the
complex pre–existing enmity between the families, we can associate the condition to live alone as a couple
with the changes introduced in North Africa by French presence. Another decision with mixed causes and effects is
Ahmed's condition that Fatima "would leave the house only to go to the baths or to the hospital;" with
which the father does not seem to have an issue either. Our main concern in this part is to assess the impact such
decisions would have on Fatima.
In the form of a condition, Ahmed promises to allow the exception and make good on it. That could be read also
as a critique of the family's lack of consideration for medical care on Fatima's behalf, probably out of
neglect, ignorance and fatalistic despair of seeing her amount to anything of worth. It is curious that no one in
the family even suggested presenting Fatima to/with an exorcist, misguided as that would have been. In that context,
women with epilepsy were thought to be possessed by jinnis, the well–known Arabian expression for devilish
spirits, and were taken to religious figures, traditional healers and exorcists to cure and/or kill them. Occasionally,
accidents took place when the concoctions and ceremonies administered proved too strong for the patients. It is worth
pointing out that Hajji Ahmed obliged his wife to visit shrines and swallow potions (10) in a desperate attempt to
see her bear a male child. What the patriarchal society that he represents values the most in a woman is her ability
to reproduce sons. Fatima's disability rendered her unimportant and less of a woman / human being in the eyes of
the family. Taking her out to see a healer or bringing a charlatan to treat her, misguided and even hannfu1 as that
may have been, would have indicated a minimal degree of care about her on the family's part. Shame could be
another explanation for such a neglect Letting it be known at large in society that Hajji
Ahmed had a daughter with disabilities would have brought additional ill feelings upon him, particularly from his
brothers. As a consequence, Fatima was left alone and isolated. The hospital is mentioned only by Ahmed. The
community does not seem to be in the
habit of going to the hospital for treatment in case of illness. That is an ironic backward movement from a golden
Arab age during which the first hospitals to come into being were established in the Arab and Muslim world
around 800 A.D., beginning in Baghdad.48 Following the degradation of Arab societies, hospitals are
reintroduced by the colonizers. This can be read in the names of long standing hospitals in Arab countries (Hopital
Charles Nicole and Institut Pasteur are examples from Tunisia). The mixed legacy of colonialism certainly includes
positive elements. In the narrative, Ahmed takes Fatima to the hospital and buys her medication in order to cure her.
The main point of this literary reading, however, is that what Ahmed combines from local and foreign cultures is
largely harmful to Fatima. The idea of taking her out to the hospital informs us not of any genuine care for her,
but rather of how unaccepted and unpresentable she was considered to be in her actual health condition, even in the
eyes of Ahmed himself. In her state and unless cured she had no chance to lead a fulfilled life.
Ahmed's conditions have a mixed impact on Fatima. Nonetheless, a certain positive effect has to be noted,
the main beneficial change that Fatima gained came from Ahmed's foreign idea of living away from the family. As
Ahmed recalls, ''on the day of her [Fatima's] arrival in my house, she whispered in my ear as if confiding a secret:
'Thank you for getting me out of the other house'" (54). It is worth reiterating that Fatima's subtle
cunning and agency enabled her own move out of the patriarch's house. She escaped through expressing her wish to
marry and keeping Ahmed Zahra's secret.
Overall, the process of Ahmed's interaction with his cousin reads as a reproachful and critical statement on his society's neglect of a woman with disabilities. Ahmed undergoes a change from feeling false, or at best mixed sympathy toward Fatima, to sympathizing more positively with her predicament and giving her a powerful voice and presence in the narrative. This change is accomplished through understanding that a large part of Fatima's oppression was determined by the undesirability of her gender in her context. She shared the same nature of oppression that women generally experienced in her culture, mainly the house confinement, lack of free expression and invisibility, but to a higher degree because of her disability.
While Fatima's resurrection by the end of the narrative still betrays a "cure or
kill" approach to female disabled characters, it gives her voice and articulates her observations. The societies of the Fatimas need to change. The disabled women are far from being retarded. Their times need to upgrade to suit and serve them using the most humane of family oriented disability services and the best of modem assistive technology. Their societies need to work on granting them independence without depriving them of human contact. They need independent and decent housing along with freedom and opportunities to develop friendships.
End Notes
1 An example of such unpunished abuses committed by able-bodied male characters over the bodies of
forgotten women with disabilities can be found in Rachid Mimouni's Malediction, (which could be
translated as The Curse),on page 75.
2 Another Post-Colonial novel in which the narrator and his characters administer such a "cure or kill"
treatment to a disabled woman is the Indian Rusbdie's Shame. We had a relatively similar case in the
Tunsian al Metwi's novel Attout al Morr, which could be translated as The Btter Berry.
3 The preference for male progeny over females exists in other societies, such as China and India, which are
not predominantly Islamic. Our attempt to link the misogyny of Arab Islamic culture to pre-Islamic practices that
are documented in the Quran may serve to point out a difference between apparently otherwise similar cross-cultural
examples of female infanticide and related practices.
4 It is worth noting that tales of transgendering are frequent in Magbrebian and Oriental folklore, including
The Arabian Nights. Such gender shifts are tolerated to a certain extent, especially when they are an
instrument used more or less on the female figure's initiative to demonstrate a woman's abilities. The father's
forced transgendering of his daughter in Ben Jelloun's work, however, is felt by the narrator and various characters
to be an aberration. That is most evident in Ben Jelloun's next novel, The Sacred Night.
5 This is the 11th verse of "the Women" chapter in The Qur'an. This chapter establishes the rights of women, orphans
and the rest of family members to inherit after the death of a relative. It urges upon Muslims the values of social
obligation, mercy and justice.
6 Surprising and true enough. The Qur'an does not explicidy mention disabled women, versus men,
such as in chapter 80 which is dedicated to a blind man, and other references throughout the Book to the disabled
in the masculine form. Verse 4:126, however, is explicated in canonical Quranic exegesis, such as the Islamic scholar
Tahari's work, to be revealed in reference to the case of a blind girl who lived in the days of early Islam and a
question put to the prophet by her uncle on whether being blind, the new
inheritance laws applied to her as well as any other woman. The Qur'an's word on the manner is positive.
Fatima Memissi comments on the blind girl's story at some length in her work Le Harem Politique,
translated into The Veil and Tile Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam.
God's omission can be interpreted sympathetically by reading it as a statement on His part to lhe effect that He
sees a blind girl as equal to a seeing woman and deserving of a fair share in social goods, hence He did not need or want
to call her ''blind."
7 The concept of .Ijtihad in Islam means the process of interpreting Quranic statements and rules in bringing
gradual change as application to new situations that occur in different later contexts. It is the effort to read
God's intent in the long term. Regarding the inheritance question that we have at band, God's plan would be to move
forward from giving women rights where they had none, to extending their shares in proportion to their roles and
accomplishments next to men when times genuinely changed and improved.
Saloua Ali Ben Zahra is currently based in North Carolina where she is Director
of the Arabic program and Assistant Professor of Arabic culture, language and
literature in translation. She obtained her Masters' and Doctorate degrees from
the University of Minnesota where she was a recipient of Fulbright scholarships
twice. For her doctoral project she worked on representations of disabilities in
Arab / Islamic post-colonial literatures, cultures and societies. She taught
diverse courses in Minnesota, Arabic language and culture most recently, but
before that French and Italian. She is originally from Tunisia where she was
educated at the university of Tunis-Carthage and specialized in English and
Italian for her undergraduate degree. She taught at various universities in
Tunisia mainly courses about English language and fiction in addition to
American literature. Her areas of interest include in addition to Arabic Middle
Eastern fiction and film Francophone literature and cinema.
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