THE BEE KINGDOM

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 Praise

What a true, strange, familiar, and fantastical place Joy Amina Garnett’s The Bee Kingdom is! Rarely do you come across this much liveliness, humor, and precise observation in a single package, either. By going after her remarkable grandfather and his remarkable bees, Joy ends up giving us a map to herself: a miraculous hybrid creature unbridled by history, geography, or language even as they determine her course.
—Youssef Rakha, author of The Dissenters

In The Bee Kingdom, Joy Garnett weaves together memoir, history, and artifact to create a vibrant meditation on art and identity and the role they play in the fraught narratives that make up a family’s sense of itself. Fascinating material about her Egyptian polymath grandfather, Ahmed Zaky Abushady, is deftly paired with a coming-of-age narrative in which an artist develops her talent in the context of her family’s relationship to its complex past. An absolutely unique book with much to say about art, literature, science, and colonialism. 
—Dale Peck, author of Night Soil

A true polymath like her legendary grandfather, the artist Joy Amina Garnett turns her painterly gift into near-perfect prose. Her unabashedly cosmopolitan life gives her grandfather’s Egyptian story glimmering new life. And in so doing, she thwarts the myths of family and belonging beloved of jingoistic nationalists in the countries of his birth and hers alike.
—Hussein Omar, author of The City of the Dead

Joy Amina Garnett’s journey in The Bee Kingdom deserves a place beside Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, David Du Bois’s And Bid Him Sing, and Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt. In searching for the truth about her famous Egyptian grandfather who died in relative obscurity in Washington, DC, she weaves diaries, family lore, photographs, and more into a beautifully wrought account of self-discovery.
—Robert Vitalis, author of America’s Kingdom

Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi was a pivotal figure in that vibrant period of the cultural history of modern Egypt between the two World Wars. This beguiling memoir charts his granddaughter’s quest to discover, to understand and to appreciate the life and achievements of the grandfather she had never known. The journey moves back and forth from the USA, Egypt and the UK as she weaves a fascinating tapestry from narratives, memories and the hidden treasures of family records. It is a triumphant reconstruction of a family history which the author now deservedly owns.
—Robin Ostle, Emeritus Fellow in Modern Arabic, St. John’s College, University of Oxford

In narrating her search for details about the life and work of her grandfather, the groundbreaking Egyptian poet Ahmed Zaky Abushady, Joy Garnett crafts a warm, richly textured, and multi-sensory inter-generational family memoir.
—Deborah A. Starr, Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature and Film, Cornell University; author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt

In The Bee Kingdom, Joy Amina Garnett transforms a search for her influential grandfather, the Egyptian poet, scientist, and beekeeper Ahmed Zaky Abushady, into a luminous meditation on memory, inheritance, and belonging. Blending memoir, biography, cultural history, and archival detective work, she reconstructs a remarkable family’s journey across Egypt, Britain, and the United States while probing the silences, myths, and contradictions that shape both personal and collective histories. Elegantly written and rich in unexpected discoveries, The Bee Kingdom offers a fresh perspective on the intertwined histories of the modern Middle East and the West, while restoring a pioneering literary and intellectual figure to a broader public view. At once intimate and expansive, it is an important contribution to contemporary life writing, speaking to anyone who has inherited more than one culture, more than one history, and more than one idea of home.   
—Samia Mehrez, Professor Emerita of Arabic Literature, American University in Cairo, author of The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui 

The Bee Kingdom is a homage to a gifted, exceptional and admirable man, but it is not a simple biography. Instead, Garnett cleverly takes us with her on her long and painstaking search for the details of her grandfather’s life. Books are hard to come by. Databases are recalcitrant. Conversations meander maddeningly from the point. Family friends fail to write back. A goldmine of letters is discovered, the pages secured by now rusted pins. Garnett weaves a kind of magic out of this; in showing us the patriarch she brings in a panoply of aunts, uncles, cousins and great-grandparents. This is the story of an Egyptian-English-American family of the twentieth century, with all the history of dislocation, adaptation, grief and renewals that that entails. And it is, of course, written with love. 
—Frances Liardet, translator of City of Saffron by Edwar al-Kharrat

The ghost of Abushady, eccentric Egyptian doctor, bee-keeper, publisher, poet—and the author’s grandfather—haunts this wonderful book. Garnett brings to life an array of characters in his orbit, including villains, tragic lovers, Saudi film stars, retentive Arabic teachers, and a glut of romantic poets. This wide-ranging story is told in calibrated prose, but beware the subterranean darts of emotion that surface to pierce the heart when one least expects it. 
—Raphael Cormack, author of Midnight in Cairo

The Bee Kingdom is a can’t-put-it-down story of long searching and gratifying finding. It’s a story of identity discovered and identity constructed. Garnett sets out to trace the life of a famous grandfather whom she never knew. Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady, born in Egypt, was a man of diverse talents and accomplishments. A poet, a medical doctor, and a renowned beekeeper, he left his mark on the world. Garnett reconstructs his life in Egypt, in England, and finally in America. Using every scrap of documentation she can lay her hands on—photos and books and magazines, diaries and family anecdotes—she paints a compelling portrait of a complex man in his glories and in his frustrations. Along the way she discovers perhaps more about his family—her family—than she does about the eminent Abushady himself. The book has an appealing immediacy. The reader follows Garnett’s journey eagerly. Reading it, I cared what came next. You will too.
—Mark Jacobs, author of Memory Falls

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