Summary
Egyptian novelist whose In the Eye of the Sun is the subject of essay 35 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: Said reads it as an Arabic novel in English that writes both England and Egypt from within, through its heroine Asya Ulama, without falling for East versus West formulas (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.383-386).
Details
- Soueif’s earlier collection Aisha (1983) focused exclusively on Egyptian life, set in a sort of apolitical, almost folkloric limbo; In the Eye of the Sun (fiction) places Asya against turbulent political history — 1967, the War of Attrition, Arab socialism, Nasser’s death, Sadat’s Jerusalem trip and Camp David, the bombing of South Lebanon, the Palestinian movement and the occupation (PDF p.383-384).
- Asya, whose parents are academics and whose upbringing is also traditionally Muslim, is beset by her husband Saif Madi, her English paramour Gerald Stone and her Ph.D. dissertation on metaphor; Said calls Soueif “one of the most extraordinary chroniclers of sexual politics now writing”, her pages about two Arabs doubly unusual (PDF p.385).
- Her style is “totally amphibious” — not a dutiful translation of an Arabic original but authentic, idiomatic and Arab English reducible only to Asya; in the epilogue Asya, having rejected both Saif and Gerald, returns to an almost ritualized Egypt and sees herself “in the sunlight” (PDF p.385-386).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Um Kalthoum