Deconstructing Ghali
A talk and discussion: Deconstructing Ghali; Reclaiming Waguih Ghali.
About the Event
A revised Arabic translation of Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club, by Iman Mersal and Reem El-Reyes, appeared after 2011, followed by a wave of writing about him in English and Arabic. His admirers, across both languages, have come to resemble a religious sect — with its own rituals and little patience for critics, turning Ghali, within a few years, from a singular rebel into a cultural commodity. In this talk, with our guests, we try to unpack this through a close reading of his writing and its translations.
Waguih Ghali
He was a writer of a singular biography and trajectory. Raised within Egypt's bourgeois circles, in a Coptic family belonging to the upper-middle class, he quickly became opposed to the bourgeoisie and to colonialism in his thinking, his values, and his way of life. He emigrated to Europe in a self-chosen exile after 1952 and lived an unsettled life across different cities.
His choices were full of contradiction: he took on multiple jobs as an "intellectual" who could neither forget his bourgeois origins nor feel a sense of belonging to the working class — often crushed before the colonial West, exploited by some of the figures who passed through his life, and at other times exploiting others himself. He was suspicious of those who loved him, and his relationships with women were always tense. He carried a deep longing for Egypt, one that surfaces in his famous novel, as well as in stories, letters, and diaries he wrote in English, before taking his own life in 1969.
