If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

QUESTION: If the beast is already in your house, does that make the wilderness safer?

He cried. After he swung the table at my head, he crumpled to the floor in what my mother has been calling child’s pose ever since she took up yoga.

And now he is crying on my living room floor in what my mother calls child’s pose. I look again: Boy defeated.

QUESTION: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?

How to say passive-aggressive in Arabic? Guilt trip? Victim complex? How to say emotional blackmail? What is unforgivable in English, in Arabic has no name I know. 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. He hugs me and I let him.

My mother made a call and arranged it before I even arrived in Cairo. She was even embarrassed to make the call, to tell her former classmate Sherry that her own daughter, a Columbia University graduate, wanted to teach English for less money than she pays the maid in New York. 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?

QUESTION: How long can you hate yourself before everyone else hates you too?

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.

QUESTION: If an ending is as wrong as you expected, were you wrong or were you … ?

The nostrils are the two holes of the nose, and the word nose suggests both curiosity and snobbiness, and what is meant by snobby is the rice remaining on a plate at the end of a meal, and what is meant by plate is one of a pair of kidneys (usually the right) in the body of a woman.

My shoulders heaved. Mother nodded. 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.

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

because it was easier to drop my new friends than to fight for them in my own home. My punishment for this cowardice is that when he swung the table, when he left, I was alone with my relief and its complications.

It’s not over, is what I’m saying. Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.

here. It twists my brain to know she is somewhere in the world, breathing, making those little sighing sounds she makes when lost in thought, and I cannot know who, if anyone, is around to hear them.

I RETURN TO ENGLISH as if to the arms of a lover and feel instantly safe and indigenous there. What are borders, anyway? Just lines in the sand. What are citizens? Just people fucking within the same lines in the sand—and their children and then their children,

THE END IS ALSO A BEGINNING, of rummaging through memories.

leave him there drooling: British, with British teeth, all of them fighting for front row.

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

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.

THAT WE NEED TO BE NEEDED by the one we love is something I should have learned years ago from watching my parents.

She was always smarter and kinder than me, in a way that the age difference did not account for.

Question: How much vanity does it take to be a healer? Answer: an astrological amount.

My grandmother spoiled me by giving me a pride beyond my means. She raised me to believe that wherever I went I would be recognized, I would be rewarded, celebrated, and only now do I see. It was an accident, but she handicapped me to a lifetime of scoffing at the very things I need. There is such a thing as princely poverty.

TRULY THE MOST DEPRESSING KIND OF RELATIONSHIP is one where the blood runs in both directions and it’s unclear who is to blame.

IT WAS CLEAR TO ANYONE WATCHING that the barking man was unwell. When the boy from Shobrakheit first tackled him, he didn’t seem to notice, and then on the ground his responses were delayed and inappropriate.

I SPENT THE NIGHT not because I saved her, but because she saved me. She fed me, she clothed me in her too-short pants and made me a blanket-nest on the couch that now faced a coffee table instead of armchairs.