Ghorfa 304 ("Room 304: How I Hid From My Dear Father for 35 Years"), Amr Ezzat, Cairo: Dar El-Shorouk, 2018.
“Room 304: How I Hid From my Dear Father for 35 Years” is Amr Ezzat's first published work. The title brings to mind the legendary poet Amal Donkol's famous poetry collection “Room 8 Papers”, published in 1983. Donkol’s work was about his death-bed experience in a hospital in room 8, while Ezzat’s book is about his own room at home after his father tells him to leave the house, takes him back, and gives the room a number, 304, humorously like a hotel. Ezzat was simply there to enjoy room service and that was understood in the last chapter of the book, which brings to the fore the question of the relevance of the title to the content.
We cannot classify Ezzat's book as a novel, a philosophical work, or memoires. Room 304 is an amalgamation of all that -- he painted a self-portrait. In the first part, the book is an unfocused and erratic attempt at communicating ideas, documenting events, explaining the thoughts of a young man who took part in the pre-25 January 2011 Revolution. Without getting too much involved in the details, the writer highlighted his intellectual contribution and efforts in the blogs that contributed in providing ammunition to Mubarak’s regime dissidents.
The main character (the writer himself) is a young engineer who decided to study philosophy, then took on writing by pursuing a career in journalism; all that while going through three short-lived marriages.
The writer decided to use a style of unshuffled timeline to write his “novel”. The chapters are titled according to years marking certain events in his life. They are not arranged in a chronological order, however, which makes reading a bit confusing and difficult in spite of the fact that the book is short.
The novel is like a puzzle where all the pieces eventually fall into place. No clear justification of the writing style was given or deduced throughout the novel: the purpose remained ambiguous. In other words, if the author wrote the book in a chronological order, the ideas and the narration would have been more effective and clear.
Writing a book about your life is quite a self-obsessed ambitious project, to say the least, especially if it is your the first attempt; yet the writer decided to take that step and centred his work on his relationship with his father and framed the novel within the eternal conflict between a generation and its offspring.
The book can be seen as a guideline on how young people can rebel against parental authority. The parallel is clear, the defendants of Mubarak's regime look at the January 2011 Revolution as a rebellion against the father figure that Mubarak represented. Ezzat explained his attempts to hide his activities, ambitions and philosophy from his father. Sometimes he got away with it.
Growing up, discovering his body, then the opposite sex’s body, through innocent relations with a couple of girls in the neighbourhood were the writer's early experience in understanding that hiding his actions from his father was key in their relationships. He kissed one girl in the balcony and they were seen by the neighbours; the other kissed him on the roof of the building, in a more secluded place, and no one knew about it: the point being is to hide when you want to do anything that your father wouldn’t approve of. He mastered his technique when he got involved with the Muslim Brotherhood. Until the end of the book, his father wasn’t really sure that his son was a group member or sympathiser.
In the book, the father is represented as a dictator who tries to impose his will on his son.
In one of the chapters, the author decided to use his study of philosophy by explaining Emmanuel Kant’s philosophy about lying. Kant objected to the idea that some lies can be ethical if no harm is done. Kant stated that lying is immoral, period.
Ezzat tried to work around Kant’s strict ethical rules since he was lying to his father to do what he wanted and gave an example of a relationship he had with a girl who was a compulsive liar and who lied even when there was no benefit from it. This double standard of believing in Kant's idea while doing the opposite in his relation with his father is the hypocrisy that the author seems to be ok with. At the same time, he refuses to have a relationship with someone who lies due to the unnecessary effort he spends trying to understand the girl he was involved with.
That chapter is just an addition to the novel’s mix-up and maybe a show off by the writer that his intelligence is higher than the average reader, or someone who did not read Kant.
Ezzat jumps back and forth in time to tell the reader his story, from the red birthmark on his face, to explaining briefly the geography of Imbaba and its modern history, the conservative cultural structure of that area where the parents in general refuse that their kids leave the family house when they get married, and instead build another apartment for the newly wed. The problems in the area are solved through informal talks and negotiations between the different parties. Area leaders normally handle these matters away from the authorities. The area leader in the story is also Ezzat’s father.
Room 304 represents the confusion of a generation moving from religious groups, to joining socialist movements, to ultimately developing their own manner of thinking and ending up going back home and accepting room service if it is offered by the parents -- a suggestion of the state, perhaps?
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