Reproducing, mothering and caretaking: Forms of resistance in Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun

ABSTRACT

Spanning the years 1967 to 1980, Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun narrates the period in Egyptian history when family planning had shifted from being almost exclusively the domain of domestic agencies to a programme that received much of its funding from western donors. Analysing Soueif’s representation of the protagonist Asya al-Ulama as well as village women’s family planning and reproductive decisions, this article argues that these decisions put into crisis the demands of the Egyptian state. That is, in both cases, women dis-identify child reproduction from the regulatory demands of the institution of marriage and its reproductive expectations, on the one hand, and the state economic development agenda, on the other. Furthermore, the article proposes that these failed attempts at regulating women’s bodies uncover alternative, non-biological forms of kinship structures informed by their Muslim faith.

KEYWORDS:

• Ahdaf Soueif
• feminist methodologies
• Egyptian women’s literature
• reproduction
• family planning
• state resistance

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my thanks to the anonymous readers for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing whose insight and suggestions deepened my analysis of the novel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the history of family planning in Egypt, see Baron (2008) – specifically on the details of the private family planning programme spearheaded by birth control advocate and chair of the Joint Committee for Family Planning in the 1960s, Aziza Hussein; El Shakry (2005); Bier (2010); and Ali (2002) who combines history, medical training and anthropology to provide a historical perspective.

2. Borrowing from Chakrabarty’s (1995) studies of British colonial rule in India, which the British tried to emulate in Egypt, Ali (2002) writes that “the modern Egyptian state, in alliance with international capital, seeks to admit others into the realm of citizenship through the process of public health campaigns and rural uplift programs or through the rhetoric of equality and justice” (12–13). See Ali (2002) for a thorough analysis of the operations of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) programme, which commenced in 1977 and far exceeded any other source of international funding (32).

3. For more on Egyptian state policies of reproduction, see Bier (2010). In 1977, World Bank official Richard Rosenthal suggested that three-quarters of the women in developing nations should be sterilized to prevent economically disruptive revolutions (Gumbs 2016, 20). In 1979, Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain, spearheaded a project of disinvestment in social services and the loosening of regulations on multinational corporations (Gumbs 2016, 26).

4. For other scholarship on Soueif’s oeuvre, see, for example, Albakry and Hancock (2008), Ayad (2016), Chakravorty (2007), Hassan (2006) and Valassopoulos (2004).

5. Asya’s pleasure system, unconstrained by procreative imperatives, does not pose a problem for her family or friends. Her mother helps her deal with her adulterous relationships and supports her when her marriage fails. She is unquestionably accepted back into the family when she returns to Egypt (Soueif 1992, 568).

6. At the end of the novel, Asya does consider adopting a little girl she sees in the graveyard with her family. However, her perspective remains problematically classed and biologist. She wants to clean her and “spray her hair with insecticide and then put her into a warm bath with bubbles and scrub and shampoo her clean”. Asya abandons her thought, however, because she wouldn’t be able to “trace [her] features back to herself or to other, loved people” (Soueif 1992, 746).

7. Marx and Engels link the historical stages of development with the economic structure of society. This has formed the basis for the critique of women’s reproductive and domestic labour in the west.

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Nada Ayad

Nada Ayad is assistant professor of World Literature at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her research interests lie in modern and contemporary Arabic literature, women of colour feminisms, theories and literatures of decolonization, and translation studies. Her publications have appeared in Translation Review, and in the edited volume Text, Context & Politics Intersections in Translation. Her translations have appeared in the edited volume Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions. Currently she is working on her book project, tentatively titled Domesticating the Revolution in Egyptian Women’s Political Texts.