If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

The resemblance between them was uncanny, actually: the same vanity, the femme fatalism, the overpowering smell of creams and powders. You just knew she spent too much time alone in front of mirrors, crying.

Why are you going there? Now that I have gone there, the question has folded on itself, put a foot in its mouth: Why have you come here? This is the first thing people ask when they meet me, and their tone is more indignant than inquisitive. The more they discover, the more offended they are. You live in America? Have American passport? Do you know what people here would give for an American passport? We are all trying to leave and you have the option to be there but instead—why are you here? I try to explain that America is not heaven, that there are problems everywhere. Trump, I say, but it is the wrong thing to say, to the driver, to the doorman.

The people are warmer here, kinder, more humane, I continued, as though I had been in Cairo for longer than four hours when I met her and could possibly have an opinion.

I’ve never been interested in traveling outside, myself. Some of my brothers work in Saudi, they always say it is cleaner outside and the money’s good, but I’ve never wanted to leave. No place is better than any other, we only think it is.

I started to think she was gullible and dim-witted for treating my account without skepticism.

In 2011, we really believed we were birthing a new order, that everything would change and the corruption that had seeped through the veins of the nation, poisoning every organ, would be flushed out at last … Six years later, it’s embarrassing to remember just how innocent we were—not naive so much as innocent. Those who were gunned down without even a crowbar in their hands to defend themselves we called martyrs and repeated their names and hung posters of their faces everywhere we could, determined that their bloodshed would not be in vain. We believed, we really believed that the revolution would succeed on the strength of our brotherhood, and the nobility of our cause.

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.

In fact, they didn’t just understand me, they competed for my attention like spaniels, always yapping appreciatively about how clean I was. Clean being code for more than just money; a coveted un-Egyptianness, a combination of first world contact and old-world etiquette.

In the months I knew him, I never saw evidence of his photography and believed him solely because he didn’t try to shoot me, as they all do, didn’t say the line they all say, preying on the conceit of women:

QUESTION: If a girl misremembers the first time she saw you, can you ever truly fill her eyes?

QUESTION: If a man’s anger is lovelier than his loveliness, what kind of ending do you expect?

As soon as I sat down, she lifted my spoon off my saucer and began to diddle with the coffee grounds at the base of her cup. Then, without ado, she put the head in her mouth. More than a pea for intimacy, this, I thought, was a gesture of solidarity. Later, when we were alone on 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. She was shocked and I was very pleased. Perhaps, had it not been for this moment, we would never have come to love each other. But it was the look on her face in the grim street light. I could see her multiplying that small injustice a hundred times over, calculating its true scale across a life span. She was from America, rich, obviously, but it seemed she could still be horrified by the wanton exercise of power, and this singled her out from the others. I felt somehow that she was on my side.

QUESTION: Can a man and a woman fetishize each other in equal measure, or must one always be outdone by the other?

It is sentimental for most of us. Reminiscent of innocent, thrilled beginnings: protest, conspiracy, army tank graffiti, tear gas and tent sex, downtown house parties full of sweating journalists and mahraganat, the Italian orgies in Agouza. All the foreigners were here to fuck. I would step into rooms like a drop of oil in a glass of milk, like an open drain.

They wanted someone unpolluted by modernity—an illiterate, straight from the village, with rough hands and hair of black lambswool, sexual hang-ups inherited with bestial customs.

Her Arabic was cute, barely there. I could hear her crawling through the language, using expressions I hadn’t heard since my own childhood. She handed me back the spoon and the metal head was sucked as clean as the tail. She was hairless, I believed, all over.

It was a joke they were passing back and forth; they were laughing. I wanted to vomit. What about them? said Reem when she and Sami were done, but I felt sick. In New York this would have been my cue to leave. I know the rules. I know what is correct, when to attack and who to defend.

In New York, alcohol isn’t radical, does not set you against the grain or expose you to hatred the way wearing a hijab does or praying on the grass in Central Park, so it’s disorienting now to be in a city where every Friday, mats are rolled out onto the street and businesses close up so the men can pray under the sun.

I am outside of my context, confused about where the margins and the pressure points are. Who has the power? Where is the center?

Every time I get into a cab, I am given a sermon by the driver about the wrongness of women looking like men, and why don’t I cover up my head, seeing as I don’t have hair anyway? But when I leave the car, having paid less than a dollar for a half-hour ride, I’m confused about my right to offense, just as I’m confused about drinking as an act of resistance. There is something entitled about it. Yes, there is something rich.

I wasn’t encouraging, but leaving him on read—which would be so communicative to any New Yorker—he didn’t register as rejection. Or, possibly, he understood but did not consider rejection an obstacle.

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

Now, twenty years later, I realize I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me.

His texts also consist of theoretical food offerings, and in them I hear how the women in his family have loved him.

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. And now with the American girl I catch myself doing the same thing: just leaning back, watching the scene play out, not tempted to intervene at all …

But the boy from Shobrakheit doesn’t give a reason for not shampooing his hair—just says he doesn’t like to. What’s a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor.

But I take the metro all the time, I said, remembering that I had ridden it once when I first arrived and that it had cost as little as a pound, as little as six cents American. We test each other.

I resent him because I recognize him. This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing form makes fools of us both. We’re pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat, and ultimately stick out everywhere we go.

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.

They flirt with me and horse around with each other, competing for my benefit. I let them because it helps; language acquisition is such humbling work.

I spend twice as much time bathing to feel clean for half as long.

After all these years, it’s this thought keeping me up at night, keeping me as far as possible from home: that her molars could be shining still behind the lips of someone living. Her molars. Her thin incisors, like grains of basmati.

QUESTION: If the men make animal sounds in your direction, which of you should get the bone?

There is the harassment on the street, which excited me when I first arrived, my mind delighting in theorizing ahead of my body: The Egyptian catcall is a form of social engagement, an interpellation of womanhood, increasing the potentiality of every public space, so refreshing after Manhattan, where no one looked you in the eye! But now I’m completely worn-out.

Only the boy from Shobrakheit didn’t notice the subtle changes in my appearance. We had been talking for two months and he seemed to only just realize, when he saw the schoolgirl, that I, too, must once have had hair long enough to braid. This is what he was like, what I liked about him: a transparency that seemed at times a failure of imagination but at other times a form of respect. He didn’t think too hard about where I had come from or where I was going, how different we were from each other. He just assumed a warmth of feeling.

That sheepishness, afterward, at having 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. I missed it entirely. Watched the revolution on television from the comfort of my home on the Upper West Side, a French bulldog on my lap. How convenient, then, when all is said and done, to arrive in the riskless aftermath, claiming, Me too, I’m one of you. I’m too late returning and he knows it.

Other times she looks at me with an appetite that is romantic but wrong: Curious, consumptive … anthropological? As though she were peering at a moth pinned to a cork-board, shivering, still very much alive. As though she were laying it on her warm tongue, letting it dissolve there. It’s her American showing: rolling into my village in a military tank, tossing at my mother’s feet three-quarters of an apple she has only peeled with her teeth.

Yes, he could be misogynist, but he was also valiant and sentimental, poetic, young-hearted, a weirdo in his way.

But even so. The boy can’t boil water or heat bread on the eye of the stove. Leaves the milk out of the fridge. Tries to cut an apple in the night and I wake up to blood spattered on the kitchen floor, seeds everywhere. There is all the evidence of a past tended by a woman’s hands—he’s at least as spoiled as he is damaged, I mean.

He senses that his usefulness is depleting.

After years of claiming Arabness as an excuse for what I am—hairy, hard-boned and dirt-skinned, sensual, impulsive, superstitious, nostalgic, full of body-shame and estrangement—I feel I’m earning it at last. The hazing is belated but confusingly sweet.

It’s become clear to me that Egyptians are meddlesome, full of Good Samaritans who love to hear a woman scream so they can swoop to her rescue.

What could he do with everyone watching? Am I safer with him on the street than in my own home? Am I safer on the balcony than in the windowless kitchen? Would he have thrown a glass at me in any other room?

Let me ask you: Is it possible to contemplate a thing—any thing at all—without sadness?

I can see it happening almost before it happens—all the ways I will be misunderstood.

I have nothing to offer you. What can I offer you? I bring you bundles of mint leaves because I can’t afford the sugar apples you eat with both hands and drip all over your chin. Do you know how it feels, knowing I can’t even buy sugar apples for a woman I love?

Don’t you know you’re the only good thing I have? That you hold spoons by the middle the way my grandmother used to?

Why is this pity I feel so frightening?

When we were still two, my grandmother and I, living in the house on the river, she’d come out of the bathroom after bathing, thighs blubbering against each other and her smell preceding her down the hall. I’d pinch her where the meat of her belly folded over the meat of her thighs and she’d scream giggles. How to explain the devotion between us?

You are trying to make me feel bad, I say like a small hiccuping girl with sand in her eyes. You are no longer safeness, I tell him. I miss myself.