Question: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?
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We fall asleep in each other’s arms. We watch a film together and fall asleep in our outdoor clothes, in each other’s arms, her scratchy head beneath my chin. The grief numbs us both. I find myself measuring for the first time how far America is from Cairo, let alone Shobrakheit. How to bridge this ocean? How to explain all I left behind to get even this far?
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English had me captivated from the start: Throwing us into a disorienting, alternating POV — between an Egyptian-American woman who decides to move to Cairo against her immigrant parents’ wishes and a poor cocaine-addicted Egyptian photographer from the countryside who became disillusioned after the fizzling out of the Arab Spring revolution — author Noor Naga creates a freighted love story that explores power imbalances, identity politics, and the absolute inability of anyone to understand life from a different culture’s lived experience. And just when a reader might get too relaxed with the novel’s unusual format (each short section starts with a puzzling “koan” as in the opening quote, followed by quick jumps between the POVs; a format that eventually becomes rote), Naga flips the script in the second section (omitting the introductory questions) and begins to insert frequent footnotes (which even retroactively explain undefined terms from the first section), and I was further intrigued by the change in the format. When the third section changes format yet again, I was gobsmacked by how, in a fairly short work, Naga was able to demonstrate just how hard it is to tell a relatable story: not touch nor words nor photographs can be understood separate from the entire history of the person who offers them. From the sentences to the overall effort, I loved absolutely everything about this novel.
We believed, we really believed that the revolution would succeed on the strength of our brotherhood, and the nobility of our cause. Had we been less occupied with documenting the losses, circulating names and dates, video footage, we might have noticed earlier that everything was not as it seemed. There was money pouring in from overseas, along with vested interests. We thought we were toppling a regime, but the whole world was involved. It seems so obvious now, but if you weren’t there, you can’t possibly judge. I can’t tell you what it was like.
The unnamed “boy from Shobrakheit” happened to arrive in Cairo before the start of 2011’s revolt; and while he was able to sell his photographs to the foreign press for an unimaginable price, he became disillusioned when he learned that in the revolution’s aftermath, his pictures had been used to identify — and penalise — activists, and as the novels opens, he has not taken a picture with the camera he still wears around his neck for eleven years; living in a rat-infested rooftop shack, he has decided to cold turkey his addictions just as he meets a beautiful young foreigner at a friend’s cafe. As the (also unnamed) young woman decides to return to her roots — living in an airy Cairo apartment and working as an English teacher; both of which her mother arranged for her in advance — she meets the photographer, and with her “baby Arabic” that doesn’t quite create understanding between them, she finds herself performing a subservient role for him (cooking and cleaning and washing his shabby clothes after working all day as he — unbeknownst to her — detoxes and watches videos on his phone in her apartment all day), and they spend their time both loving one another and using one another until the disconnect reaches a breaking point. The results are explosive.
William doesn’t even realize what’s at stake when I am asked by shopkeepers and street children and sugar-cane juicers where I’m from. And why should he realize? They ask him too. Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.
I’ve read reviews by readers (presumably authentic Egyptians) who are offended by the female character’s cultural ignorance and poor opinions regarding Cairo’s underclass residents, but to me, this feels like the point: she had ideas about who she was (a lost Egyptian who was actually a privileged American slumming her way to authenticity), and without a true language or lived history in common with those around her, her disdain of her freedoms and advantages were bewildering and off-putting to life-long Egyptian residents (and especially to her outcast lover). The fact that the third section of this novel dissects those ideas felt brilliant and elevating; as much as Naga (who is also an Egyptian-American who has made the move to Cairo) might be accused of not understanding the true Egyptian experience, I believe that this novel is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of anyone achieving precisely that understanding across cultural lines. This is a bold and subversive novel of social and literary commentary and it all worked for me.
Kennedy gave me this book for Christmas, knowing that we were planning a trip to Egypt (and knowing that I have developed a penchant for posing with books in interesting locales). As it turned out, I saved this book for the end of the trip and read it at a resort on the Red Sea:
