If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

If you weren’t there I can’t tell you what it was like. To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in … If there is a Judgment Day, this was it. 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. It doesn’t have to be like this, my neighbor told me, and when I repeated this idea to my other neighbor, It doesn’t have to be like this, I heard him pass it on in a voice that was louder than mine.

money and their drugs with them when they left. Even the Egyptians who flooded back in from abroad in 2011, in hopes of rebuilding the country, have since given up and returned to wherever they came from. 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. He was a thief, but at least the economy was flourishing, they began saying. The wheel of production didn’t stop once in his reign. He didn’t lead us into any wars. He built bridges. It’s been six years since the revolution and the pound is worth a third of what it was worth in 2011, depreciating so fast that none of the shopkeepers put prices on their goods anymore. You have to hold up every can of ful individually, every pack of Cleopatra, and ask, How much is this today?

Old-fashioned and proud and poor. Also, Egyptian. More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life. I’m learning slowly that having money and the option to leave frays any claim I have to this place. It turns out that to be clean in Egypt is just to be free of Egypt, to exercise the choice to stay or go elsewhere, which most of the population cannot do.

Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

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.