Beer In the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghaly

Review by: Helana Reyad

The short
A novel that carries existentialist undertones and explores with wit and wry the crisis for identity and placement that the Egyptian bourgeois class at large – and Coptic minority specifically – undergo post-colonization.

The long
Waguih Ghali writes this semi-autobiographical book about Ram, a member of the bourgeois class, a student of colonial institutions, and a Copt. Ram has lived in relatively good conditions under colonial rule and as the Arab and proletariat identity inform Egypt’s uprising and cast the shadow to inform its future, Ram, a proponent of the revolution, grapples with his positionality in it. A novel that explores imbricating identities, upper crust society in the late 1950s/early-60s, and the psychological implications of both.

To watch or not to watch?
Read read read! It looks past the binary of colonized and decolonized. It works to illustrate the complicated and layered identities of those who lived under colonization and their grappling with new realities post-colonization.