Book Review - The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey

Feeling fuzzy on memories, it's time to do a book review. The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey is written by a friend of mine, journalist, writer, and poet John Zada.  We were flat mates in Cairo, Egypt for about one year in the the middle 1990s. One chapter of the book deals with a horrifying episode we passed through together in Cairo. That event is in a book. John's version is not exactly as I remember it. However, it is there, a shared memory. It happened in some form or another. 

John told me about four years ago that he was working on this book, a memoir of his life in the Middle East. At the time I was living in Virginia. Last year he told me he told me he'd done it, finished his labor. I won't call it a labor of love. I think it was a sort of catharsis. It's not that the act of writing itself was laborious or cathartic. John is a writer by profession and has two other books published prior to this one. I believe this book was a challenge for him because it was so personal, was an attempt to unveil who he is, and it was a failed attempt. The book itself is very good. It's his attempt at self discovery that seems to have failed. John is from Toronto, Canada. His parents migrated their from Cairo, Egypt. But they were refugees from southeastern Turkey, part of the Christian communities purged from that country in a genocide at the close of World War One. John felt out of place growing up in an Arab Christian household in largely Jewish suburb of Toronto. He went off to find himself after starting college, thinking that the Middle East held the key to unlocking who he truly is. So, this book is about his travels through the Middle East, from Morocco to Turkey, over several decades. 

This book is not what I expected. I was actually a scared it might be a tell all of John's life in Cairo, of which I was a not insignificant part, and which included the first women with whom I truly fell in love, one of whom was John's deep love interest for a time, regularly spending nights with him in his room, just a wall and a door between us. This was not an amorous love I felt, but Plutonic love, a new respect for the opposite sex who taught me how to be emotionally normal. Still the jealousy was there, especially on those nights and the mornings after. It felt like a Leonard Cohen song. I thought this book would be John's Alexandria Quartet with a Cairo spin. But this book is not that. 

I've read several adventure/cultural collections from journalists recounting their travels and travails in the Middle East. This book is that to some degree, but so much more, woven together as an homage to John's mentor, Kamal Bey.  That was a surprise. I expected Kamal Bey to be a fictional character. John had never mentioned Kamal to me before. Beyond homage and travelogue, the book is that deepening identity crisis, a search for lost roots, a critique on tribalism, and a brief but meaningful history of genocide on the upper Tigris River. The arc of Kamal Bey's journey is very poignant. The arc of John's search is increasingly manic, and in many ways without resolution. 

The language in The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey can be challenging. It is often lyrical and sometimes ornate. Maybe it strays too far from prose in places and tries for poetry where it should not. I love John's poetry. He used to sit up late into the dark of night in Cairo, our flat over the Corniche El Nil, the Nile River just beyond that, only a candle burning reflected off crystal chandeliers, writing hunched over a notebook pouring out poems sometimes until the first calls to prayer broke the stillness. He read them to us later the following day, or saved them until Fridays, when the city's rhythm slowed to a languid crawl. So many memories coming back. 

If I did not know John and had not lived one chapter of this book with him, would I have enjoyed reading it? Would I recommend it? Yes. For those who love travel or for those who are lost, this is a wonderful book. It works on so many higher levels than typical tales of travel to distant places. Take Fred Birchmore's Around the World on a Bicycle, for example, which I wrote about in an a earlier post. John's book is not passing through on an adventure and experiencing the exotic. It's a search for a part of him that was lost. It's a return. It's a rejection. In the end  The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey left me with a haunted feeling, a longing feeling, which I believe most people who read it will identify with in some way.