Beer in the Snooker Club

WAGUIH GHALI

“History,” Stephen Dedalus says in
Ulysses
, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” By the 1960s, this plangent cry was being echoed by many sensitive men and women in Asian and African countries that had only recently entered modern history as sovereign nation-states. The passionate idealism of anti-imperialist movements and the longing for justice and dignity that went into the making of many new nations had been compromised by the corruption and ineptitude of the first generation of rulers. The futile cycle of coups and countercoups, and the long game of musical chairs between military strongmen and civilian politicians, had already begun. “The politics that came,” writes the disenchanted Caribbean narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s
The Mimic Men
(1967), “made people aware of their pain. Later they came to see their helplessness.”

Few people felt more vulnerable to this postcolonial chaos than members of the property-owning classes. These local elites had prospered during European rule, often as collaborators in a system of exploitation. Educated in Western or Western-style institutions, they had become emotionally and spiritually, as well as materially, dependent on the European metropolis, all the while growing aloof from the rest of their compatriots. After independence, they tended to see their often expensive lifestyles, no less than their power, menaced by newly assertive political movements of peasants, factory workers, and ambitious military officers. And even the most altruistic and perceptive of these native aristocrats found themselves thwarted by their remoteness from ordinary lives.

Alienation was, for them, more than a pose cheaply borrowed, along with black turtlenecks, from French existentialists. It stultified private life—a realm often defined by quietly desperate love affairs with European men and women—as well as political gestures.
The Mimic Men
, detailing a career “sunk in the taint of fantasy,” was among the extraordinary spate of novels and films in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—from Driss Chraïbi’s
Heirs to the Past
and Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North
to the film
Memories of Underdevelopment
by Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea—that diagnosed the failure and premature exhaustion of the most
privileged and talented young men and women before the arduous challenges of revolution, nation building, and self-renewal. But the work of art from this era that has effortlessly assumed the authority of a classic, and has actually felt more prescient and moving since the Arab Spring, is Waguih Ghali’s
Beer in the Snooker Club
.

Little is known about Ghali except that he was born into a well-off family of Coptic Christians and seems to have known intimately the radical postures and precarious bohemianism that his only novel describes with perfectly balanced harshness and solicitude. His true literary predecessor, in many ways, is Albert Cossery, who was from a Greek Orthodox bourgeois family in Cairo and who wrote in French. Cossery denounced the modern world altogether in fictions that upheld a strategic indolence as the correct response to its imperatives to think and work hard. Even the most politicized Egyptian in Cossery’s 1948 novel,
Laziness in the Fertile Valley
, wonders, “Why did [men] have to struggle, always vicious and discontented, when the sole wisdom lay in a careless, passive attitude?” But Ghali belonged, like his first-person narrator, Ram, to a generation of listless youth that had been galvanized by the overthrow of Egypt’s cravenly pro-British monarch Farouk in 1952 and the advent of the pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. “The only important thing,” Ram says, “which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution.” Yet, as his account goes on to show with unsentimental insight and acid humor, this was yet another revolution that—as Milan Kundera wrote in
Life Is Elsewhere
, another 1960s fiction about the fantasies of the romantic intellectual—had “no desire to be examined or analyzed, it only desires that the people merge with it; in this sense it is lyrical and in need of lyricism.”

Revolution may have been the opiate of the brighter demimonde, but Egypt in the 1950s did possess its conditions. Its cities, especially Cairo, were overwhelmed by a massive influx of people who had fled rural subsistence economies only to face unemployment and the degradation of life in slums. The national economy was dominated by a large class of coldhearted landlords, rent seekers, and businessmen who ferreted their profits abroad rather than reinvesting them in the country. One of the wonders of
Beer in the Snooker Club
is the delicacy with which Ghali sketches a background of deprivation and anger into the confusions of a parochial elite. In what is essentially an account of drift and futility,
Ghali—a card-carrying Communist—is always clear about the fate of the insulted and injured people he wanted to care for.

The novel opens with Ram’s aunt, a member of the “cosmopolitan” feudal class, or “parasites,” as Ram’s friend Font calls them, selling surplus land to the fellaheen and “pretending to the government she was giving the land to the poor.” These are the Cairenes who, having migrated spiritually to the European metropolis, won’t bother to learn Arabic and despise the celebrated singer Umm Kulthum. Ram himself is shown to be initially indifferent to the inequities of his society. “I was neither Red, Pink, Blue, nor Black. I had no politics in me then.” His political—and sentimental—education is initiated by Edna, a Jewish member of Cairo’s upper class.

Unlike Ram, Edna has successfully rebelled against her comprador origins. “I hate Egyptians of your class as much as I do my parents,” she tells Ram. “It was Edna who introduced me to Egyptian people,” Ram writes, adding, “it is rare, in the milieu in which I was born, to know Egyptians.” He and his close friend Font hungrily start to read the books she suggests. She initiates them into the cruelties of European imperialism, and the struggles for freedom waged across the postcolonial world. “Gradually, we began to see ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians.” One symptom of political awakening in the postcolonial world during the 1950s was anti-Americanism: Ram and Font share a “vehement phobia towards Egyptians who read the American
Time Magazine
.” When Ram’s America-returned cousin Mounir claims that “American Democracy is
the
thing” and pontificates about the “Red Menace,” he finds himself violently challenged by Edna’s intellectual protégé Ram, who has since picked up a lot of information about the plight of blacks and Native Americans in Freedom’s Land.

Yet Ram can’t help sense some falsity in his new role as a firebrand, and his exposure to the big world outside Egypt also breeds a different kind of appetite for life elsewhere.

Some of these exuberant and contradictory desires are actually fulfilled as Edna helps Ram and his friend Font travel to England—“Jesus, Font; here we are, London and everything”—and Ram turns out to have a better time of it than most other people from the colonies. As an exotic, he finds himself quickly adopted by a left-leaning English family in Hampstead. His superior class and education and fair skin help him transcend the racism that most other colonials are subjected to. So he can pity rather than despise the uneducated former soldier in Kilburn who calls Egyptians “wogs,” and even find it “natural” to sleep with the Englishman’s fiancée. He has the upper hand on the condescending white woman who tries to pigeonhole him as one of the “intelligent Egyptians … at the Gezira Sporting Club.” Worried that he is turning into a “phoney” like his shiftless compatriots, “the Cairo arties, who if not slumming in Europe, are driving their Jaguars in Zamalek,” he imagines being “down-and-out” in the East End before deciding against the idea. He ends up with a compromise in Battersea, living with a working-class man and his Irish stepfather.