In retrospect of some forty-three years since its publication in 1964, we can see that Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club anticipates the terms of engagement of postcolonial studies in the present. In After Theory (2004) Terry Eagleton observes that it is postcolonial studies that deals with the         wretched of the earth. The personal cost of activism is an important theme of Ghali’s novel. The protagonist Ram speaks of “This terrible knowledge I possess . . . I see myself not only through Egyptian eyes, but through eyes which embrace the whole world in their gaze.” The tragic end of Ghali’s life is sketched out in Diana Athill’s After A Funeral (1986), in which she comments on Didi’s need for a witness to his suicide: “He himself would feel, I believe that in writing his book and in choosing his death he did the only two things in his life which belonged to the man he could appear to be, and whom he might, in different circumstances, really have been.”

This paper will examine the plight of Ram as an activist in Nasser’s Egypt, a type of the isolation of the committed individual in the postcolonial world—living in exile, unable to speak with complete sincerity to anyone, wearing a mask, and carrying alone the burden of his “terrible knowledge.”