If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

What once was peculiar in him, charming, even, is now terrorizing beyond words. It’s not his fault. He doesn’t speak English.

My monthly salary is roughly what a dog-walker in Manhattan makes in a week, but here it is enough for several months’ rent. More money than he’ll ever have in one go, but what can I do? Who is to blame?

I swear this isn’t who I am. I’m not a violent person, but there is a violence that moves through you like a live current when you hate what someone has made you become. I feel estranged from myself the longer I am with her, made criminal solely because she is afraid, made pathetic because she pities me—a poor boy though I never was.

Living with a woman whose Arabic is stunted, I never noticed how much I was mirroring her: walking on my knees so as to seem shorter. Now it is so good to be back to my full height.

It was one of those ugly cries you don’t want to see in the small, square representation of yourself at the bottom of the screen, the one you will allow only in front of pets and mothers, never males of any relation.

And the doves that the doorman was breeding on the roof oohed back at her from their wooden cages, out of sight, and our legs were tangled like weeds, her heart whimpering in my ears, What is there to hide?

How is it that the rich are surrounded by so much beauty?

She actually lives like this; everything from the shoes she wears to the soap in her bathroom is thoughtfully considered, has a touch of grandeur I can’t explain. When we are together, some of that favor God intended for her rubs off on me by proximity.

Arranges it on a flat clay plate, alongside apricots that she has halved, topped with ricotta, drizzled with honey, dusted in pistachios, damn-near deified before devouring. The indulgence …

No one ever talks about the punishing aesthetics of being poor.

spent forever blowing them off when the boy from Shobrakheit was around, because it was easier to drop my new friends than to fight for them in my own home.

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

I could have made her life unbearable and she’d have no one to blame but herself … As usual, however, nothing bad has happened to her.

I return to English and find my quick wit there, right where I left it. I feel sharp again. Like a toddler in its mirror stage, aroused by recognition. That thrill of being who I am swirls around my belly. William takes the juice off my skin where it shines like spittle, laughs at my jokes because he gets them, they are for him.

It is in English that they write about it, grieve and forgive, fuck their equals.

Why had it taken her so long to appear? I have always been deserving of a first-class love, A-grade, elegant, not these sloppy streetwalkers with dirt under their nails and no evidence of skeletons, just lumps and folds all over. She is almost another species, so lithe in the lines, lovely.

She could be weeping at this very moment, out of view; my heart hurts to imagine. I was the one who left, after all, abandoned her in her dreaming, without explanation or goodbye.

He should not have known to do this, because he wasn’t from Michigan himself, but he knew, both the where and the how. I was so grateful to be seen that my eyes watered. When we talked, I didn’t have to explain basic concepts like yoga or sushi. When I asked him, casually, as a joke, where he was when Michael Jackson died, he could answer. We were both in kitchens an ocean apart and heard it from our older siblings. What are the chances of that?

Now that the fun is done, though, the presence of a male in my space is nauseating. I look for reasons to resent William’s body. He wears white-girl-in-India pants with elephants on them. He haggles with taxi drivers over the price of the trip before getting in the car.

He doesn’t hear himself, slurring entitlement paranoia: a guest in this country, come temporarily, voluntarily, to shit in the coat closet, spit in every vase, accuse the furniture of imposture

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE between being poor and being cheap, and William is cheap, with delusions of sophistication.

It’s not that I’ve never dated a white man before—I have—but never one so oblivious to his privilege.

When I offered to pay for our meal, William suggested we split the bill, what the Egyptians call going American, though Americans call it going Dutch.

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.

When I dream, I dream uneasily of tangerines, peeled and sectioned by my mother somewhere far, far away.

As though he were ashamed of my money or performing respect for my privacy. But why do I say performing respect instead of respecting? Does the fact that I noticed his behavior around my wallet and remember it now with cinematic lucidity imply an underlying suspicion?

… Did he feel mistrusted and did I mistrust him?

Was I as classist as he wanted me to believe?

Why did you shave your head? The answer as Manhattan as I am: identity capitalism.

I remember vividly her magnanimity with men, how she protected their balloon-pride from puncture, and I can’t help but wonder: Did I emasculate the boy from Shobrakheit with my independence?

At the time I don’t think I could have explained it either, the clash of cancel culture with a sudden diversity fetish, slacktivism as the new aesthetic, the student drama at Columbia … How do you explain desirability politics to your whitewashed immigrant mother as she suffers through a mid-life divorce?

I spend all night dreaming that Kendrick Lamar has stolen my hair and run away rapping over his shoulder, Bitch, be humble, lil’ bitch, sit down.

Was it because I was neither of him nor truly other? Not family and not quite stranger—a thresholded, half-inside, half-outside woman?

dated enough to understand how I am used by men who reject themselves:

I am Egyptian—recognizable but also improved by Western inflection, carrying in my fashion sense and orthodontically straight teeth the whiff of opportunity, opulence, and pride.

From kissing-distance, his reflection in my eyes is one of triumph, a boy worthy of first world love.

And whenever we were intimate, he closed his eyes and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was using my body for the same escapist purpose: ramming in—in hopes of getting out.

There are calculations that precede thought, there are protective measures that one recognizes as protective only retrospectively. I defended myself with an instinct that was not there before.

remembered how he knew all the street kids on Champollion by name and how they came to him for candy and sometimes gave him things: stickers, broken toys, a miniature bottle of glitter nail polish, which he happily painted on his thumbnail.

What have I done? What have I turned him into and what else have I forgotten?

She feeds me but won’t hold my body close to hers. She won’t hold my body close to hers because she feeds me.

It is a feint at the patron’s pocket to see if her hand will flinch: a test not of her generosity but of her guilt before my boundless love. Can she trust me to toe the line, to respect what we are and what we are not, or will I ask for too much? Will my greed or, worse, my need—face-slapping, hair-tearing desperation—bubble to the surface and expose the charade we have been acting out since that night I failed to rescue her and was rescued myself instead?

There is something I owe him, though I don’t understand what, and this debt is a gentleman’s tie around my neck, requiring ballroom manners, that level of care. As soon as you begin rejecting a man, you have to be twice as polite.

Why are we even getting his voice in your memoir? [to NOOR] How does that even make sense? You in the boy’s head like that when the whole point is that you don’t fully get each other, you’re from different worlds, et

mean, it’s a bigger problem, obviously. But we demand all this emotional labor from them. We reward loyalty and punish women for choosing independence—for choosing survival, actually.

Part of what keeps us in these patterns is the feeling that our abuser is unique?