Material Agency and Environmental Memory in Amal Al-Faran’s The Sand Divers: A Material Ecocritical Reading

: Literary stories as ‘storied matter’ reflect the culture of a society by revealing the dynamic interactions between humans and nonhumans and the association of agency with matter. This article examines Amal Al-Faran’s The Sand Divers (Ghwāṣū l'aḥqāf) as a localized Saudi contribution to material ecocritical scholarship, focusing on how nonhuman agency is articulated within a desert environment shaped by historical memory and culturally grounded ecological practices. Drawing on Iovino and Oppermann’s material ecocriticism, Barad’s agential realism and Bennett’s vital materialism, the study explores how landscape, natural forces and memory function as vital, agentic forces that shape narrative trajectories, resist human control and sustain the heritage and culture of its people. By foregrounding the material agency of the landscape and natural forces and their role in preserving environmental memory, the article demonstrates how Al-Faran’s novel extends material ecocriticism through a regionally situated, non-anthropocentric literary vision.