If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

Compared to New York, this is a real place where real things happen. Not microaggressions that are tweeted about, not theory; these are adult aggressions, bodily, bloodying. The beggars are missing arms or legs and come up to tap on the glass, show you their stumps, open their mouths to show you no tongue. They wipe the windshields with rags. Children, eight or nine years old, pull carts over potholes, look for plastic in the garbage piles or sell socks and balloons on the corniche. You buy a balloon and that child eats, or you don’t buy a balloon. It’s sensory overload with nowhere to hide. It’s consequence.

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.

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

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

When is a confession of addiction not a foreshadowing?

Is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?

Although he was mute, not deaf, my mother had long adopted gesture as her primary language. When upset with him, she might remove all the buttons from his good shirt or offer only radishes for dinner.

We’ve been playing house for the last two weeks. Except that I’m both father and mother, bringing home the meat and also cooking it while he waits for me with his cheek in his hand.

He is punishing me for something, and I am letting him. He is weaponizing all his losses against me, and I am wanting the abuse, or, at the very least, accepting it as mine.

How many fingers and toes will you sever before you’re small enough for a man to possess?

Which is more frightening—to wake up with injuries or a weapon in your hand?

When I said I had been born and raised in Michigan before moving to New York City, he raised his right palm and pointed below the thumb, saying Detroit? the way my father taught me to do in case I was kidnapped as a child. 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.

Why did you shave your head? The answer as Manhattan as I am: identity capitalism. Because I wanted to win by appearing to have lost, because queerness is a spectrum, and no one can say I’m not.

Did I emasculate the boy from Shobrakheit with my independence? The irony is that I do need him. Only in his absence do I realize how much his arm pretzeled through mine protected me on the streets of downtown Cairo, his looming, shaggy-headed shadow signaling to other men in the vicinity that I was spoken for, that I had a people at my back, as he used to say, and could not be harassed without serious consequence.

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.

Last year when Mac Miller overdosed, everyone blamed Ariana Grande for breaking up with him, saying she pushed him over the edge. Everyone knew he suffered from addiction but still held her responsible for allowing him to die. And that reaction didn’t just come from nowhere, there’s a whole precedent in the literature, in the media. Like the way tabloids talk about women—and it’s not just tabloids, I 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.