Shelf | الرف

End of an Era

But in reality, of course, even in Soliman’s time a bango gathering was regarded as an inadequate alternative to the older practices of Egyptian hashish culture. In contrast to the widely felt nostalgia for the goza, the Egyptian waterpipe in which hashish burns atop a screen of me’assel tobacco, and for the ghorza, the now nearly extinct clandestine cafe-type establishment in which people smoked, the Western-style joint smoked in a private apartment was looked down upon as the makeshift of a culture in exile. Yet it is to this culture that the veteran Egyptian novelist Khairi Shalabi has often turned, and in his new novel Saleh Heisa he has endeavoured to give literary shape to it. In so doing, he has taken on board the task of documenting one of the most stimulating periods of Egyptian cultural, social and even of political history, that which extends from the 1950s through to the 1970s, choosing, however, to approach events from below and to focus not on the official history but rather on the events of individual lives.

Part of a review in english of Khairy Shalabi’s book Salah Heisa, written by Youssef Rakha and published some 11 years ago in al-Ahram Weekly (saving up for a subscription).

The reason I bring this up today is twofold, firstly this was the only thing I could remember ever having read in english that referenced the goza in its distinction rather than a subset of “waterpipe” and secondly because I found out that a translation of the book has been released by the AUC press this past spring (still not available on Amazon Canada though).

It saddens me that the character of Saleh Heisa has been given the rather tame name Saleh Bedlam, just doesn’t feel right.