If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

No place is better than any other, we only think it is.

We thought we were toppling a regime, but the whole world was involved. It seems so obvious now, but if you weren’t there, you can’t possibly judge. I can’t tell you what it was like.

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

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. They took their work and their money and their drugs with them when they left.

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?

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.

How to say consumerism in Arabic? How to say toxins, microplastics, mutagenics, fair trade, ethical sourcing? But the boy from Shobrakheit doesn’t give a reason for not shampooing his hair—just says he doesn’t like to. What’s a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor.

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.

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

What if female arousal is just the belief that you will not die at this man’s hands?

How convenient, then, when all is said and done, to arrive in the riskless aftermath, claiming, Me too, I’m one of you. I’m too late returning and he knows it.

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. After years of claiming Arabness as an excuse for what I am

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

What is unforgivable in English, in Arabic has no name I know.

we watch a young Mahmoud Yassin stalk Faten Hamama until he possesses her in the 1971 classic The Thin Thread. When he calls the film a romance, I realize very clearly what he wants from me,

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.

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.

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

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

It is in Arabic that lovers murder each other with side tables, and it is in English that they theorize about what it means to be murdered by side table. It is in English that they write about it, grieve and forgive, fuck their equals.

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.

I realized something else as well: in the story where the American girl is saved from an assault, she is saved from someone who looks like me.

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.

They think dating is about love, when any New Yorker will tell you that dating is a martial art. It’s basic offense and defense.

As soon as you begin rejecting a man, you have to be twice as polite.