If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

searching for the Egyptian in me, or possibly the illness. I wanted to say, Same.

wanted to explain that I was one of them, that I had been in line earlier and paid my dues, but my Arabic … The

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.

My first year in Cairo, I still spoke country, referring to myself in the plural. We do,

Post-revolution, everyone was coming back all excited. Ask me where they are now. I

Why are you going there? Now that I have gone there, the question has folded on itself, put a foot in its mouth: Why have you come here?

All her life she told me I would eat from her hands one day, I would eat with this lace. And I did. On

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.

I felt that my entire life had been a preparation for this exact purpose, that I was fulfilling my grandmother’s prophecies, avenging the senselessness of her death and

Six years later, it’s embarrassing to remember just how innocent we were—

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 I start asking questions, they switch immediately to English, as though correcting themselves, putting us both in our places.

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.

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.

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

He asked me what I played, meaning what I did, then

Before I could arrange my body in response to this realization,

like a sniper’s. I

while I sat, poor boy down on the tiles near her ankles, in the shop that was also underground.

Reem is less inhibited and eats with her left hand like an infidel. But you’re left anyway, aren’t you, Reemo? Sami teased; left meaning loose, meaning sexed and liberal. Reem lowered her eyes as if in prayer. I do the Lord’s work. She turned to me and flicked her tongue. Who else do you know that eats so someone else can get full?

That blubber-tub Sami was at it again. Every

More than a pea for intimacy, this, I thought, was a gesture of solidarity.

Adorable. They don’t hate Muslims, they hate the poor, I laughed. She

The drugs were passed out with the sandwiches and water and vinegar and yeast. Boys

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

would step into rooms like a drop of oil in a glass of milk, like an open drain.

an illiterate, straight from the village, with rough hands and hair of black lambswool, sexual hang-ups inherited with bestial customs.

The vein knows before the skin is broken what is coming.

could hear her crawling through the language,

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

IMPORTABT CHAPTER

In New York this would have been my cue to leave. I know the rules. I know what is correct, when to attack and who to defend. Once

In New York, alcohol isn’t radical, does not set you against the grain or expose you to hatred the way wearing a hijab does or praying on the grass in Central Park,

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.

But when I leave the car, having paid less than a dollar for a half-hour ride, I’m

There is something entitled about it. Yes, there is something rich.

breathing things he’ll never say. He

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. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d cobbled together this collection just for me, to prove he could.

The boy from Shobrakheit hot-wires an intimacy just by sounding like him.

His texts also consist of theoretical food offerings, and in them I hear how the women in his family have loved him.

The children of the bridge began to call one another until a small group of them had gathered, talking loudly about the man who was a princess and wasn’t his a pretty dress and whether he would give them a pound.

I always let these women empty their pockets without commenting, since there was something retributive about the exchange, a kind of tourist tax.

If he showed a little more ideology, he could be considered woke—some kind of minimalist, an ecofreak. How to say consumerism in Arabic? How to say toxins, microplastics,

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.

We sat on the sidewalk to eat, and I knew he had chosen the ground because I had chosen the crème slip-dress, which would catch the dust like a wet tongue. But I take the metro all the time, I said, remembering that I had ridden it once when I first arrived and that it had cost as little as a pound, as little as six cents American. We test each other.

My own cousin had a work on her from age six to age eight. When it was removed, she vomited a mango she had eaten two years earlier. The

We tied them together with rope—also stolen—and floated the whole pathetic contraption in the Nile.

I stayed for one week and, that whole week, dizzied around the house that had never homed me, like a trapped moth. People from all over the village came to us for news of Cairo, and my father did not leave my side, so proud was his breathing.

after realizing the marketability of the Orient in the Manhattan alternative health industry. In 2004 he suddenly became a fad.