If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

Now that the fun is done, though, the presence of a male in my space is nauseating. I look for reasons to resent William’s body.

if it was him and me versus William, or him alone versus William and me.

William imagines at every turn that the locals are cheating him—which they very often are, and which he deserves (locals, he calls them). He doesn’t hear himself, slurring entitlement paranoia:

thinking that if the line is busy, it will mean it really was her I had seen on the balcony, and if not, then not.

this time the line is flushed, warm-blooded.

The down is hard, harder than I remember, quicker at me, as though this Palestinian budra were not cut with flour after all, but pure.

entrepre-neurially aware, putting on street corner skits of self-flagellation and getting tipped in kisses.

He spent the night in my apartment again but only because he ran a knuckle up my back as we stood waiting for the fourth cab to turn us down.

This never once happened

Finding hersrlf yhrough lovers made of caricature

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.

I HAVE A ROUTINE NOW, MIRRORING HERS.

She comes out wearing headphones and turns into the street without looking.

She never sees me, walks around with that tourist-oblivion, cocksure, trusting the world around her

fiddle with it, nervous, clearly, no one on the street but her (and me).

I’ve been sleeping in the mosque and spending my days sitting in various places:

dress like you have money is not just an exercise in vanity, it’s also a mode of protection. This city punishes the poor every chance it gets.

clearly ashamed to be out-gentlemanned by a tramp like me. This was all back when I took regular showers, and the American girl would wash my clothes with her own things in a machine in the bathroom and hang them out to dry on one of the balconies.

café or restaurant?

he snapped, and for the first time since I’d met Sami, he seemed annoyed rather than charmed by my naïveté.

There was a long-haired man I always saw around Hoda Shaarawy in loud parrot-colored makeup, which I’d always assumed was drag (and how heartening to see drag in Cairo!), who now suddenly looked like a woman and a prostitute.

What did the boy from Shobrakheit notice when he walked down Mahmoud Bassiouny? What did he see when he looked at me? In the apartment, I discovered the laptop I had thought was gone,

As though he were ashamed of my money or performing respect for my privacy. But why do I say performing respect instead of respecting?

Was I watching him from the corner of my eye for signs of theft or envy? Did he notice and is that why the money was always pointedly—aggressively, even sarcastically—where I had left it?

I’m not a violent person,

I remember this as I tail the American girl from a distance.

All her body parts look like other body parts

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

I eventually shaved so as to pass at the gay bars I had begun to frequent as something of a Twitter celebrity.

The answer as Manhattan as I am: identity capitalism. Because I wanted to win by appearing to have lost, because queerness is a spectrum, and no one can say I’m not. I wanted in.

let him do the man-thing. Sometimes I pretend to be nervous going home at night, so he will walk me to my door. He likes it and I like him liking it. She was always smarter and kinder than me,

Did I emasculate the boy from Shobrakheit with my independence? The irony is that I do need him.

Was it always this bad? I can’t remember. This is how I ended up with William on my couch the first time. I asked

him to walk me home and he wanted, instead, to ride.

The same instinct that had pushed me out into the light hauled me back by the scruff of the neck, and with the same exigent wisdom.

This is how my fantasies of real injury began. Some kind of street assault, obviously, because the setting would need to be accessible to me, and what other injury requires a savior? An assault, then. Petty or sexual? Definitely sexual.

and the funniest part is that the fool will probably take the wallet and trash the bag, not knowing the bag is worth a hundred times as much—

How do you explain desirability politics to your whitewashed immigrant mother

It’s a fashion accessory, Mama. Oppression as handbag. What is more accurate: Oppression as shield and battering ram,

neither the ISAC nor the BSA nor even SJP will collaborate with the MSA to this day.

Remembering that day now from across a great body of water, it seems as silly from here as it was truly frightening and legitimate over there.

wondering if I have been robbed because I look like a foreigner, or robbed because I don’t look enough like one.

The one who gets her will be a balding mechanic from Champollion, a tire-runner, chloroform-sniffer, who couldn’t light a cigarette in the wind if he tried.

I’ll kill him. Beat him unconscious, head against the steel edge of an electrical box, then I’ll help her put her clothes back on and carry her crying the whole way home.

became Latina and floated on the periphery of the Puerto Rican girl clique

My best friend Elijah, former boyfriend Elijah,

He came from a family of academics and activists who made sure he was radicalized before his milk teeth had fallen out. He’d watched every season of Roots by the time he was five.

Commodification but also religiositt of woke

When I said Egypt, he called me a Black queen,

actually, I was Arab.

He liked girls that looked like me: Desis, Arabs, Blasians, and other mixed chicks who were pigmented enough to be lassoed into a broad category of Blackness, if he chose to, if he named them queens before they could name themselves,