The two female characters in Hoda Barakat’s 1998 novel Harith al-Miyah (Tiller of Waters) share an unusual passion; separated by age, homeland, ethnicity, and religious background, they nevertheless both become obsessed by silk. In the family fabric shop, Niqula’s mother Athena and his lover Shamsa after her wrap themselves in the luxurious cloth, eventually detaching from family, relationships, and the world. While other characters quickly attribute their actions to some form of treatable hysteria or “women’s illness,” Niqula’s father sees the “curse” of silk as related to its long history and non-synthetic nature. Silk is not made; it is “born complete,” it travels, it has sound and life and history (162). The history of silk also describes the rise and fall of world empires from Rome to Byzantium to Persia. In situating this novel at the height of the Lebanese Civil War, Barakat also connects silk to the devastation of Beirut and subsequent rebuilding efforts. Silk implicitly critiques the synthetic, the reconstructed, the erasure of history, in favor of narrating a more comprehensive, ambiguous past. In 2002’s Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that “Texture seems like a promising level of attention for shifting the emphasis of some interdisciplinary conversations away from the recent fixation on epistemology . . . by asking new questions about phenomenology and affect” (17). This paper embraces Sedgwick’s methodological proposal by reading Barakat’s use of fabric and silk in particular as innovative historical narration. “Women of the Cloth” traces the way the novel narrates silk and characters’ engagement with the material in order to identify the practices of memory Barakat asserts in her depiction of the Civil War. I argue that rather than pathologizing or psychoanalyzing characters’ fixation with silk, readers should understand the detailed engagement with touch and material as a method for making the past tactile. As a material with a past, Barakat’s silk draws attention to the affective experience of history, loss, and transformation.