Content warning: This post and podcast episode contain discussion of suicide.
Sixty years ago, the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali published Beer in the Snooker Club, a commanding postcolonial novel. The storyline ricochets between Cairo and London, expressing disenchantment with Nasser’s Arab nationalism and with the British Left’s brief forays into anti-imperialism. It’s also an account of a privileged young Egyptian looking for political purpose in his life – and failing to find it.
Waguih Ghali has much in common with Ram, the central character in his only novel. Both are Egyptian Orthodox Christians from wealthy Cairo families; both are instinctively on the left; and both speak English and French but not Arabic. But paradoxically, in many ways we know more about Ram than the writer who created him.
The details of Ghali’s life are so opaque we are not sure, even to a year or two, when he was born or how much of his life he spent in Egypt. His death was much more in the public eye – he took an overdose in the London flat of his friend, Diana Athill, who wrote about their relationship in her 1986 book After a Funeral.
In this podcast, History Workshop’s Andrew Whitehead discusses Waguih Ghali’s life – and the renewed interest in his writings – with the British literary scholar, Susie Thomas, and with Zainab Magdy, who teaches at Cairo University. They are collaborating on a forthcoming book titled Citizen of Nowhere: Waguih Ghali’s Literary Lives.
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