In Hiding in a Hamster Wheel, Essam Al-Zayyat presents a stark vision of trauma and its lasting consequences, showing how unspoken and unacknowledged psychological wounds can shape a person’s life in devastating ways.
The narrative opens with the protagonist, Aajaybi, standing at the scene of his wife’s death, reenacting the crime he is accused of committing. From this shocking prologue, uncertainty governs the story, as gaps, silences, and unexplained details raise questions about guilt, truth and what remains concealed. The novel then moves backwards through a series of flashbacks that trace Aajaybi’s life, beginning with his early years at university, where a promising academic path is derailed after a conflict with a professor leads to his suspension. This moment becomes the first in a chain of unaddressed psychological traumas, followed by familial pressure, social expectations, forced marriage and emotional isolation. As Aajaybi learns to rely on deception for survival, his life is increasingly shaped by silence and denial, drawing him into a destructive cycle that ultimately ends in tragedy.
For some authors, a single dramatic event can be enough to spark a novel. However, for Al-Zayyat, Hiding in a Hamster Wheel emerged from a cumulative awareness of modern life’s repetitive rhythms. “On a personal level, there wasn’t a single dramatic incident, but there was a long-standing engagement with the rhythm of the modern city: career competition, social pressure, and pre-packaged narratives about the right path,” Al-Zayyat says. “I noticed that many don’t fall victim to overt external oppression, but rather willingly participate in a system that drains them, and then justify it. This observation was the real spark.”
Taking a closer look at the title, Hiding in a Hamster Wheel, some readers wondered why Hiding but not Escaping? The novel actually carries this event at one point in the plot with another main character, Imran, who plays the role of Aajaybi’s psychiatrist. Al‑Zayyat confirms that he was torn between those two words, but eventually he chose Hiding, since escape presupposes an open door. “In Imran’s case, the problem is deeper. He doesn’t escape the system, but rather repositions himself within it. He moves around, changes his decisions, shifts his circles… but all of this happens within the same framework,” Al-Zayyat clarifies. The title embodies a deliberate paradox, where the wheel represents continuous movement even though hiding implies stillness. This tension captures the novel’s core idea that a person may appear active and engaged while, in reality, avoiding true confrontation. “Sometimes we run not to arrive, but so we don’t stop and see where we really are,” Al-Zayyat says. Hiding, then, is not a moral weakness but a survival strategy, a reflection of a generation caught in relentless systems of pressure.
Choosing Luxor as a setting for the novel is not to create a picturesque backdrop but what the author describes as “a psychological testing ground.” Rather than treating the city as a touristic setting, he approaches it as a living environment with its own rhythm, shaped by layered histories and a stark tension between monumental grandeur and everyday fragility. Having lived and worked in Luxor for years, Al-Zayyat draws on first-hand experience to capture a reality that “cannot be inferred from books alone.” At the same time, this intimate familiarity is reinforced by historical and social research, allowing the city to emerge as a dual space, one marketed globally as an icon, and another quietly inhabited by its residents under economic and social pressure. Treated like a character, Luxor functions as an active force in the narrative, shaping the characters’ choices rather than merely framing them, affirming the author’s aim to make place an integral part of the novel’s psychological and social texture.
Building the human characters, on the other hand, the author made sure he gave an honest picture of how a traumatised person feels and acts, especially when the trauma is never recognised as such. “Every unresolved trauma becomes a lens through which Aajaybi later views the world,” Al‑Zayyat explains. “Traumas are embedded in his behavior yet often absent from his conscious awareness; he justifies, rationalises, and reframes his past to survive.”
As for Imran, the novel initially presents him as a morally sound and professionally committed psychiatrist. Though he feels constrained by routine, personal dissatisfaction, and his own desires, these tensions do not immediately disrupt his ethical conduct. However, a sudden shift in his behavior highlights the irony and danger of unchecked authority. This transformation is arguably abrupt, and some readers may find it insufficiently justified within the narrative. Yet Imran remains a morally grey character in the eyes of Al-Zayyat, as he clarifies: “I did not intend to condemn him so much as to complicate his image. The debate around him is useful, because it places the reader in a grey area… Is the problem with the individual himself, or with the system that grants trust and authority to a specific person without sufficient accountability and ongoing oversight?”
While the novel offers a genuine image of trauma and wrong decisions made out of fear, it also underscores how social and cultural responses to suffering often compound rather than heal trauma. Instead of therapy or emotional support, Aajaybi’s family imposes marriage as a corrective measure, presenting it as a remedy for depression and personal instability. The bride, herself underage by legal standards, represents the dangers of societal assumptions that maturity or readiness for marriage can be measured by biological markers rather than emotional readiness. Aajaybi’s experiences abroad magnify this cycle. Facing exploitative labour conditions, isolation and constant emotional strain, he constructs an elaborate illusion of well-being, sending staged photographs and misleading accounts to his family. This performance, as explained by the author, is not vanity but a survival mechanism, illustrating how trauma can teach deception as a means of adaptation to a world that fails to recognise suffering. His lies extend to his romantic relationship, creating a marriage built on misrepresentation and further demonstrating the psychological toll of long-term unacknowledged trauma.
The author also critiques societal attitudes towards trauma, mental health and superstition. Hospitals are depicted as bureaucratic and impersonal, prioritising routine over true care and undervaluing competent doctors. Similarly, cultural beliefs, such as rituals purported to resolve infertility, are portrayed as hallucinatory constructs rather than valid remedies, emphasising the gap between perception and reality. For Al-Zayyat, social and psychological issues form the novel’s deep structure, while dramatic suspense drives the narrative forward. “Each scene was filtered through three layers: event, motive, and context, so that what happens, why it happens, and what it reflects socially all align,” he says, emphasising that many psychological underpinnings are understood through behavior, not theorising, ensuring that the characters remain vibrant individuals rather than mere conduits for ideas. This careful layering allows the novel’s rhythm to flow naturally, with the drama revealing the idea even as the idea supports the drama, maintaining cohesion without sacrificing narrative tension or thematic depth.
In Hiding in a Hamster Wheel, Al-Zayyat identifies one scene as particularly difficult to write – not because of its technical complexity, but because of its emotional contradiction. This is the moment Enjy, Aajaybi’s wife, enters the hospital with her son after the child is stung by a scorpion, and Imran ends up flirting with her. “All the narrative signals were pushing me towards a clear dramatic climax, where there’s a child in danger, a panicked mother, and an emotionally charged interaction that could easily tip into tragedy,” he explains. “The simplest solution would have been to surrender to heightened emotion like screams, tears, moral clarity, but that would have falsified the moment.” Instead, he chose restraint, deliberately crafting what he calls “a grey emotional zone, where fear and attraction exist in the same breath.” He elaborates: “I didn’t want the reader to feel instructed. I wanted them to hesitate, to feel uncomfortable with their own reaction, because life rarely offers us emotions that arrive neatly labelled.” This choice, he acknowledges, carried risk. “I knew some readers might reject the scene for refusing to give them a ready-made response, but ambiguity was the point. As I was writing it, even I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel, and that uncertainty was honest.”
Reflecting on the novel’s nomination for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Al-Zayyat describes his response as “a mixture of surprise and tranquility.” The surprise came from the scale of the recognition and the wider readership it offers, while the calm stemmed from the fact that the novel was never written with awards in mind. “I approached it as a long-term project concerned with the idea itself, not its competitive fate.” He did not expect the nomination, given the work’s psychological and social density, but saw it as a sign that such questions can still resonate. Rather than changing his relationship with the novel, the recognition expanded his sense of responsibility. For him, it is not a destination, but “a point on a longer journey that demands greater discipline, not celebration.”
Overall, Hiding in a Hamster Wheel is a compelling study of human vulnerability, the insidious nature of trauma, and the moral ambiguity of those entrusted to heal it. While some narrative shifts may be uneven, the novel succeeds in provoking reflection on how trauma, societal expectations and human deception intertwine to shape lives in ways both tragic and inescapable. Al-Zayyat reveals that a new project is already underway, one he hopes will mark a clear departure from his previous work. A novel where a certain event becomes the starting point for a psychologically driven narrative that examines how early trauma reshapes identity from within. At the same time, the story expands outward to capture a fading social world, focusing on the disappearance of traditional crafts under economic and technological pressures.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 February, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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