An Insider and Outsider View of Modern Egypt By Waguih Ghali And Amitav Ghosh

• Main Author: Neslihan ALBAY
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Celal Öney 2020-06-01
• Series: Journal of History and Future
• Subjects: modern egypt; waguih ghali; amitav ghosh; coptic; the british; insider view; outsider view; genizah
• Online Access: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/1160649

The purpose of this paper is to expose an insider view of Modern Egypt in the fifties and sixties by the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) which is a semi-autobiographical novel written in English and an outsider view of Egypt written three decades after Ghali in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992). Shedding a light to the struggles of the Francophone, British educated Egyptian Coptic figures with their conflicting allegiances to the Egyptian revolution that both opposed colonialism and practiced repressive domestic policies and their allegiances to the British culture that imposed colonialism, Beer in the Snooker Club seeks a cosmopolitan identity by rejecting the binaries of post-coloniality. On the other side, in In An Antique Land the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh presents two different narratives one of which is an anthropological one based on his visits made to two villages in the Nile Delta, while the other narrative is based on the process of writing his doctoral dissertation (in the years 1980-81 and 1988) with the aim to reconstruct the history of a 12-century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju and his slaves by using some documents from the Cairo Genizah.