Name: Jasper's review of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
Item: If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
Author: Jasper

Noor Naga

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire-for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other-takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.

A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga's experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?

A Novel

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Alex

Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.

When we are together, some of that favor God intended for her rubs off on me by proximity.

Tabea Lüth

At the age of seven, I came home crying, “Are we black or white?” The kids at school wanted to know. “What an idiotic question. Omar, come listen to your daughter.”

To dress like you have money is not just an exercise in vanity, it’s also a mode of protection. The city punishes the poor every chance it gets. 

“Every girl you meet, you think, Hey are you my wife? If the answer is yes, you throw yourself at her feet. If she tries to leave you chase her back. It’s all life-and-death stuff, very dramatic, but also just a way of passing the time. Egyptian men - we’re fucking loyal, and you should be worried”

Every few weeks she asks me why I don’t do photography anymore, and I have to bite back my temper. If you have documented a revolution, how can you bring yourself to capture anything else on those same streets where your brothers stained the asphalt with their lives? 

After so many lifetimes of peaceful eating, a nation overturns the dinner table; there is the darling outrage, a newfound entitlement, hope, yes, hope--and then betrayal. Disillusionment. That sheepishness, afterward, at hav- ing been caught believing. For every Egyptian of my generation, this will be the greatest political event of their lives, the drama they return to and repeat to their children and to their children's children to explain the world they are born into. 

Where the roads are numbered (rarely), they are not ordered consecutively, and when they are named, no one uses those names. The landmarks are arbitrary-a discontinued post office, a banana-seller. The bridges are referred to by dates. “I’ll take the 26th of July to Zamalek and then you point where you want to get off”, the driver says politely. It's as though the city were deliberately designed to resist comprehension and to discipline those who left for daring to return. You have either lived here and you know, or you never have and never will. 

It was in moments like this that she reminded me of the Germans and Italians I used to sleep with, who were so predictable with their sympathies in the months after the revolution. We'd be approaching a barefoot child doing his homework on the sidewalk and I just knew they would start fumbling with their purses. I just knew they would pull out an egregious sum, squat beside the kid, ask where his shoes were and his mother, take a picture of him without permission. They thought it made them look conscientious instead of guilty and voyeuristic. I always let these women empty their pockets without commenting, since there was something retributive about the exchange, a kind of tourist tax. 

She was alone in this city, which explained some things. She was Egyptian enough to wax her arms but American enough to shave her head. She was Egyptian enough to sit at the ahwa under the bridge but American enough to think a silk nightie was appropriate wear at the ahwa under the bridge. She uncrossed her legs when she heard the athan, but then kept them wide at the knees like a truck driver. 

Arabic: this language that has only ever existed for me in kitchens and bedrooms, baby talk, breakfast chatter, Eid mornings at the mosque (before my father converted to astrology), goodnight kisses after Kalima wa Dimna, or fever talk when I was feverish at age five. 

Later when we were alone in the street, she asked me if Sami didn’t want Muslims in Riche because his family was Coptic. Adorable. “They don’t hate Muslims, they hate the poor”, I laughed. 

At some point after the Rabaa massacre of 2013, after the sugar crisis and the floating of the Egyptian pound last November, after it became clear that all the men who had disappeared from their beds at night for tweeting were not going to be released, the unthinkable happened: people began to long for the days of Hosni Mubarak. 

Cairo is not what I expected, but the shock is one of scale rather than content. I expected traffic and poverty and pollution, but not like this. It’s a city dialed up to its extreme. 

We rose from our graves, patted the dirt off each other, looked each other in the eye. An entire population crawling out of a mass grave to hold those who’d buried us accountable, and in doing so daring to imagine another reality.

“Post-revolution, everyone was coming back all excited. Ask me where they are now.” I looked at her blankly. She made pedaling cycles with her cigarette hand until I recited: Where are they now? Then she continued as though I hadn't. “Twenty pounds to the dollar. This is the exchange rate today. A year ago, it was eight. Tell your mother I miss her.”

When I arrived at Ramses Station in Cairo, the air was people. They clogged every street and then piled on top of each other in buildings twenty stories high. 

Emma

new 2025 goal: stop giving literary genre a chance

also the way the dual pov was written was killing me

Jasper

DNF at 25%

new 2025 goal: stop giving literary genre a chance

also the way the dual pov was written was killing me

Loved. Really powerful exploration on displacement and the dynamics of a dual-identity. Though at times Naga perhaps memorializes her own experiences too strongly, the chapter about being cancelled in NYC because of her box braids was shocking. It began to feel as though it was portraying Cairo as this place in which progressive and experimental thought cannot exist, especially post-9/11. Great job at writing characters who are easy to love but also easier to hate. 

Emelee Marie De Leon

read like a word salad and i didn't like that the 3 parts had different formats.

rain/anagha

The ending for me was mind-twisting and conveyed much of what I wanted to say about this book. Noor Naga writes very sophisticatedly yet I (an Arab, Muslim girl) felt bothered by the way she wrote about Arab culture and Islam, it was not offensive as much as it was Westernized and degrading in a way I think an Arab reader would sense it. It feels as if the character/author was looking down on us. Diaspora authors feel entitled to describe the "Arab Western" experience once they return to their "homeland" and for me, that is probably worse than letting a white man write about us because at least then we'd understand he's writing out of cultural differences or racism and it'll make sense, but to see an "Arab" author writing in a maybe unreasonably belittling way is very disheartening. I am not here to discredit her incredible writing style or her clear knowledge of Egyptian/Arab culture, but to attribute yourself as Arab and then write in a way to show yourself/the main character as more privileged and better than other Arabs is something we do not need.

P.S.: I said "character/author" because I find it unclear whether this is a memoir or a novel.

shaymaa

The ending for me was mind-twisting and conveyed much of what I wanted to say about this book. Noor Naga writes very sophisticatedly yet I (an Arab, Muslim girl) felt bothered by the way she wrote about Arab culture and Islam, it was not offensive as much as it was Westernized and degrading in a way I think an Arab reader would sense it. It feels as if the character/author was looking down on us. Diaspora authors feel entitled to describe the "Arab Western" experience once they return to their "homeland" and for me, that is probably worse than letting a white man write about us because at least then we'd understand he's writing out of cultural differences or racism and it'll make sense, but to see an "Arab" author writing in a maybe unreasonably belittling way is very disheartening. I am not here to discredit her incredible writing style or her clear knowledge of Egyptian/Arab culture, but to attribute yourself as Arab and then write in a way to show yourself/the main character as more privileged and better than other Arabs is something we do not need.

P.S.: I said "character/author" because I find it unclear whether this is a memoir or a novel.

arth

Winona 

I'm starting to think that diaspora authors shouldn't be allowed to write about the motherland and its people. At least not the upper-class American ones, anyway. 

This read like a 19th century exercise in Orientalism. Where the fabric of Egyptian society is woven with threads of mysticism; religious chauvinism; licentiousness; debauchery; erotic familial relations, etcetera, etcetera. Alienating our Egyptian-American lead from a society she thought was hers to belong to. When really she is most comfortable - and safest - in the embrace of post 9/11 NYC. 

 If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English  is a blatant case of beating down the Orient to uplift the Occident. And its done in such a hateful manner that lacks any nuanced understanding of what life as an Egyptian is like since the return of military authoritarianism. Our closest look at Egypt is through the POV of the Boy from Shobrakheit: an amalgamation of Orientalist stereotype that exists about Arab men. He is passionately romantic, but also violently possessive; he is an impoverished revolutionary, but also believes himself too good to work at an ahwa; he hates women, but bears an almost incestual worship of his late grandmother. He is a dirty, homeless, junkie, but a beautiful, imposing presence with a mind spilling forth creativity. He is a caricature. A walking exotic erotic. The symbol for misogyny in Arab society. He is not a person, but he is every Egyptian in this novel. Suffering from poverty, food insecurity, medical negligence, the threat of the military police disappearing them in the night. But none of that matters, because what matters most is how all of these things make the American girl feel. 

She can escape to her fancy apartment with rent that costs more money than most Egyptians will see in their lifetime, whilst pretending to be self-aware about this. Heck, she can even escape the country in ways ordinary Egyptians living under military surveillance cannot. Reading this felt like experiencing someone else's utter resentment towards her own Egyptian identity as well as Egypt's (and its peoples) failure to live up to her expectations. She reduces the entirety of Egypt - from Cairo to the Deltas - to a toxic, failed relationship with one man. Its harmful projection that feels written for the colonial gaze. 

Something even more emphasized during Naga's whole woe-is-me, I escaped NYC for Cairo because I was "cancelled" for wearing box braids because I let my boyfriend call me Black when my parents are racist, chapter. Its not even tongue-in-cheek. Its just corny. lol

What even is this? A novel? A memoir? The publisher classifies it as the former, but the third part would suggest the latter. Which makes the perspective of the male character even more egregious. I can't believe Naga's got me out here defending what is meant to be an abusive man, but if he's meant to be a depiction of her abusive ex, why does the American woman's perception of him expand him in a way that establishes him as a representative symbol of Egyptian revolutionary men? Why does she keep using the revolution and political context of Egypt as a symbol for her own, highly individualized, experiences when the majority of the population continues to suffer and die under the weight of the REALITY. This could have worked if the American woman was the sole POV character. I understand wanting to explore the rationale in one's abuser's mind. It could be both thought provoking and healing. But in this context it just serves to degrade and ridicule those suffering the worst affects of Egyptians sociopolitical and economic climate. 

Its so self-absorbed and infuriating. It hurts even more because my own family were involved in the revolution. There's good, bad, ugly to every society in the world. But the ugly is all we get here. Mean-spirited and cruel depictions of the under-class where criticism is shut down with a masturbatory third part that serves as some sort of meta-commentary whereby Naga's critics are ridiculed and dismissed for their lack of vision or understanding of what it means to be a WOC. Or whatever the fuck it was she was trying to say. 

Thanks, I hate it.

Signed,

An Egyptian Who Cannot Speak Arabic.

a deep dive into american identity politics and how they are reflected across national borders, but also a story that deals with abuse in a relationship between two very different people, who were raised very differently with very different cultural ideals. an exercise in different structures and forms, i deeply enjoyed this novel in its complexities. 

Clara Gauthier

Omnya Ahmed

رواية ممتعة ولكن غريبة، واقعية وحزينة وتجربة مميزة ولكن كنت مستنية منها أكتر من اللي لقيته.
الجزء الأخيرة منها حسيته عبارة عن تبرير لنواقص الكتاب أكتر منه إكمال ليه، كأن الكاتبة لو حطت الجزء ده بتعفي نفسها من النواقص دي بإدراكها ليهم
وده مش حقيقي فهي هتفضل بالنسبالي قصة ناقصة كان ممكن تكون مثالية من غير الجزء الأخير.
رغم كدا النقاش النهائي كان لذيذ برضو وحسيت أني في نادي كتاب بنناقشه، ولكن كان نفسي يكون فيه مناقشة لكتاب كامل بدل قصة بتفاصيل كتير مش موجودة.

Emma &
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga

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