Operating Narrative: Words on Gender and Disability in Two Novels by Tahar Ben Jelloun

This article discusses the operation of narratives, in particular the narratives of gender and (dis)ability – how they are operated, and how they operate – and their relationship to identity, in two novels by Tahar Ben Jelloun. The scenes of Ahmed/Zahra's mother's operation and Ahmed/Zahra's own genital mutilation demonstrate how discursive and surgical operations produce, and are the product of, operating narratives. While the operated and thus disabled body is invariably yet automatically read in pejorative terms, according to the norm of able gendered bodies found in the master narratives of “Homme” and “Femme” in Moroccan tradition, Ben Jelloun may also be inviting us to see disability as a bodily state with which any human being can successfully live. Through these readings of mutilated bodies and altered narratives, Fatima's call (at the end of L'enfant de sable) that opens this study – the call to notice how bodies are selected and discarded – has found a first response.