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Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels pp 3–39Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘Touch Me, Baby’: Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun

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Abstract

There exists a longstanding and widespread belief that touch is anti-intellectual and therefore inferior to sight. Yet the novel examined in this chapter, Egyptian-British writer Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (1992), invests heavily in the notion that tactility is connected to knowledge, and that others’ touch facilitates a better understanding of ontology. Through an extramarital affair in Britain, Soueif’s protagonist Asya gains entry to a new realm of somatic knowledge. The affair has violent repercussions, though, and the novel’s exploration of painful touch is further developed through depictions of torture, agonizing beauty treatments, and the medicalized body. Rather than endorsing a sensory hierarchy, Soueif shows that the senses are interlinked and messily overspill any boundaries that are constructed to separate them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, York, UK

    Claire Chambers

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  1. Claire Chambers
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Chambers, C. (2019). ‘Touch Me, Baby’: Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun. In: Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_1

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