Beit Al-Masakeen (House of the Poor), Mina Adel Gayed, Al-Karma Publishers, Cairo, 2021, pp. 155

As a starting point, Samuel, the protagonist, is on a plane feeling enthusiastic about returning to his homeland Cairo after UNESCO assigned him to trace the path of the Holy Family’s journey as it became a non-material world heritage.

Using the flashback technique, Gayed returns to Samuel’s childhood and how his grandmother and mother used to link everything to Christian religious beliefs, such as the Moon being inhabited by Mar Jirjis, the dragon slayer, and falafel balls in its roundedness resembling the stones laid on Christ’s grave.

Samuel focuses on his brilliant and arrogant elder brother Butrus, the philosophy student, who studied languages at the hands of a foreign priest. He has always used his knowledge to satirize religious tenets and the prophets’ stories.

He recounts his family’s annual trip to attend the Virgin Mary’s birthday, similar to a feast that continues for seven days. However, this family trip's specific aim was to implore the Virgin Mary to cure Samuel’s mother from cancer after slaughtering a lamb as a vow.

Many a time, Samuel pleaded to his father not to slaughter the lamb, which he deemed his most intimate friend, and his father refused unreservedly. His father made a miraculous feat by saving his wife when she fell from the ferryboat into the Nile River.

The family arrives at the house of the poor, an ancient house where the great ancestor of this family welcomed the Holy Family upon their arrival, served them for nothing in return, and provided them with food and shelter until their departure. His offspring continued to rent the house rooms to those attending Virgin Mary’s birthday.

Samuel renewed his friendship with Jiwarjius, one of the poor’s sons, who is more like an ascetic or a hermit with a dusty face, shabby clothes, and puzzlingly wise phrases. Often, Samuel wanders and feels lost only to find that Jiwarjius appears out of nowhere, thus saving him physically by his presence and spiritually by his mystical phrases. After accomplishing his mission, he vanishes into thin air.

Samuel’s father grabbed the opportunity and took his son to draw the cross tattoo on his right arm. Butrus told him if he came back in time, he would have refused to be tattooed to avoid discrimination. When Samuel retorted that his name was enough to determine his identity, he did not expect such an answer but replied that he would not have accepted such a name too!

Butrus tried to stop drawing the tattoo on his brother’s arm and engaged in a hot discussion with Jiwarjius, who defended drawing the tattoo vehemently. Eventually, it was drawn. Samuel, carrying his lamb on his shoulders, goes to the cave in which the Virgin Mary hid and implores her to intervene so that God cures his mother immediately, in which case his lamb will not be slaughtered.

Samuel had a meaningful dream, entering a cave with Jiwarjius and finding effaced traces of Qur’anic verses save a clear verse as high as someone's height then raising his head he saw several Christian icons. That is why he asked his companion; he told him that Muslims prayed in this cave and Christians prayed in it before them. When he raised his head very high, he viewed Pharaonic drawings. A sound began to recite verses from the famous Book of the Dead. It alluded to Egypt’s three historical periods while the cave represented Egypt itself! He tried to find an answer from Jiwarjius, who told him not to divulge this dream and try to reach the truth himself.

As a counterpoint to this dream, Butrus took Samuel on a visit to Abdel Al-Fattah Al-Tohami, an Egyptian Muslim painter in his villa built close to the Church of the Holy Virgin at Gabal Al-Teir (Birds Mountain). This ponytailed painter was very clever in his work such that he was embraced by some archaeological Italian group, after his father’s permission, when he was just fourteen years old. After decades of living abroad, he returned to Egypt to spend the rest of his life with his Italian female partner. He told Samuel that during the period in which he lived in Egypt, there were no psychological boundaries between Christians and Muslims, but both sides constructed them later.

On the seventh and final day of the feast, Samuel carries his lamb while hearing assonant phrases that resemble colloquial poetry chanted by all attendees, especially women, even a belly dancer, desiring to receive blessings or be cured of a terminal illness. The attendees were expecting the Virgin Mary’s appearance. Suddenly, the lamb disappears totally! The novelist ends the novella with the internal broadcast of the plane announcing a soft landing at Cairo’s Airport.    

This novella raises many questions, the most prominent of which is, can what happened between the prologue and the epilogue be considered a dream? The novella was built on the eternal conflict between the intellect and the soul represented by Butrus and Jiwarjius. Samuel wondered why his brother was acquainted with important personalities while Jiwarjius was attached to ordinary people. This leads to another question: is it necessary for one to be Westernized to reach good positions and be wealthy in Egypt?

House of the Poor can be classified as a novel of ideas resting upon rationalism and spiritualism in which all the elements of the work, such as plot, characters, dialogue, and setting, serve this main purpose.

This novella comprises sixteen chapters where the first-person method of narration is employed and is full of hymns asserting and praising the Virgin Mary's virtue. Gayed titled each chapter starting with a Coptic word “Oshiyya,” meaning supplication and is followed with another word or words. In some chapters, the word coming after “Oshiyya” is not consistent with it, such as Oshiyya the sound or the talent!

One of the few drawbacks of this novella is its slow pace with very few events taking place. Moreover, it is almost exclusively closed to Copts save the Muslim carter, who gave a free lift to Samuel and the Westernized icon painter. Gayed has a phenomenal Arabic style, being an exception among his coevals.

Gayed excelled in presenting a detailed portrait of food and scents related to Upper Egyptian Copts. One significant observation is that poverty and misery are not limited to adherents of a certain religion. Another one is that myths and superstitions are similar and prevalent among Christians and Muslims alike.

This is Gayed’s third book. He has been awarded for his non-fiction book I Was a Coptic Child in Minya.