Reclaiming the Body: Ahdaf Soueif’s In The Eye of The Sun

Abstract

My Freedom I shall carve the words in the earth, Chisel their sounds Over every door in the Levant, Below the slope at every street-corner, Inside the prison, Within the torture chamber... - Fadwa Touqan, Arab poetess When Ahdaf Soueif, the Egypt-born British novelist, published her novel In The Eye of The Sun in 1992, it was banned in the arab world ostensibly due to its explicit content. As it always happens in such cases, this brought the book greater publicity, and, more importantly, the banning of the novel was seen by many as an act of suppressing the voice of women’s self-expression. The novel was read in the original English and came to be known widely. Soueif’s explicitness was viewed not as obscene, but as a gesture of self-assertion and rebellion.