If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

QUESTION: If you don’t have anything nice to say, should your mother be punished?

QUESTION: Is it arrogant to return to a place you’ve never been?

QUESTION: If your mother wanted to feed you forever, why would she cut the cord?

When I arrived at Ramses Station in Cairo, the air was people. Nowhere you looked wasn’t people. They clogged every street and then piled on top of each other in buildings twenty stories high. Many were not even Egyptian.

QUESTION: If the stampede is heading toward you, should you turn around and run?

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. Madame Fadya, the cleaning lady, was the only one who believed me, and seemed pleased to hear it.

The people are warmer here, kinder,...

A few days later I called him at the office in Midtown because he so rarely came home anymore. He cleared his throat as though fatherhood had just been declared carcinogenic and he wanted nothing to do with it: he was doing a cleanse, he was detoxing, he had given up gluten and dairy and daughters. Venus is in retrograde, he said. We feel a strong impulse to break out of cycles we’ve been trapped in for years. Moving across the Atlantic may not be the answer, though.

QUESTION: How far can you run from home before you run out of water? ________________________________

QUESTION: Is science enough to explain why you see a mirage when you’re dying of thirst?

I arrived in June. My first month in Cairo, I kept mistaking strangers for family. Everywhere I looked I saw my parents and my sister, Lulu. In the bars of downtown Cairo, especially Zigzag, any of the curly-haired girls with enormous, glassy doll-eyes could be Lulu. My mother was every hefty tante in tassel-fringe capris, pointed-toe mules, and my father was the same cricket-legged bald man serving me coffee, driving me home. In my first week of teaching English at the British Council, I even called one of my students baba by accident, to the class’s uproarious delight.

QUESTION: If everyone you knew jumped off a bridge, wouldn’t you believe you could fly?

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.

QUESTION: How many questions can you ask before you expose who you are?

I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.

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.

QUESTION: If this one cigarette was two cigarettes a year ago, where did the second cigarette go?

When the foreigners left, it all went to shit. When it all went to shit, the foreigners left. The sequence hardly matters, the result was the same.

was. Clean being code for more than just money; a coveted un-Egyptianness, a combination of first world contact and old-world etiquette.

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?

QUESTION: Why ask a question that has no answer unless you want someone’s tongue in your hand? ________________________________

QUESTION: When is a confession of addiction not a foreshadowing?

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

QUESTION: If the shoe doesn’t fit, should you change the foot?

I am outside of my context, confused about where the margins and the pressure points are. Who has the power? Where is the center? I haven’t seen a woman’s knees since I got here, and no one has seen my knees either.

QUESTION: Have I gone blind because of the dark, or is it dark because I’ve gone blind? ________________________________

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

I was surprised that someone like him could have such eclectic tastes, that he could be historically inclined and access a larger world through the cracked screen of his outdated phone.

QUESTION: What if male arousal is only a gasp misplaced in the body?

QUESTION: If you are competing to lose, what do you win if you win? ________________________________

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.

QUESTION: Is a country boy trading country stories for city stories from a city girl getting ripped off?

QUESTION: How far can you run from home before you have to face what your father has done?

Why do I keep seeing him everywhere? My slim-faced, long-boned father, with an accent in both his languages, with the papyrus framed on the wall of his waiting room and the oud charming his patients over the speaker system.

There I had enough Arabic to flirt with the Halal Guys and the Yemenis at my deli.

I keep nodding, pretending I understand and then frantically googling phrases late at night, but not everything is googleable.

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.

QUESTION: Is a father who won’t speak up for you the same as a father who can’t speak at all? ________________________________

I had a backbreaking childhood, that I grew up drinking a glass of steaming ghee every morning, swallowing garlic cloves whole, and heading out to plow the fields. The truth is, people everywhere need to do more than just eat. In Shobrakheit, there are lawyers and electricians, musicians, tailors, knife-sharpeners, teachers, drivers, plumbers, doctors, carpenters, blacksmiths, architects, painters …

QUESTION: If a city is actively trying to kill you, should you take it personally?

QUESTION: If your first love does not live forever, how do you forgive yourself?

She lived with my grandfather’s memory alone, and it was enough.

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

In fact, many of the photographs we prided ourselves on taking for posterity’s sake, as archival testaments to the martyrs and believers, the heroes of our time, ended up being used against them. Since al-Sisi came into power, thousands of those who accidentally put him there disappeared overnight, many of them identified through our footage. There are more political prisoners in Tora Prison today than passed through it in the last four decades;

QUESTION: Is it arrogant to grieve the loss of what you never had?

QUESTION: If your lover lives in a building grand enough to have a servants’ staircase, how long before she sends you down it? ________________________________ You are condescending toward the street dog.

If I had been able to speak to you in English, you would not have thought I was condescending toward the street dog. I can see it happening almost before it happens—all the ways I will be misunderstood. I am trying to express myself with the vocabulary I have in Arabic.

My world is getting smaller. He doesn’t say, Stay with me, or Hurry back, but there is always a fight when I come home.