If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

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.

Venus is in retrograde, he said. We feel a strong impulse to break out of cycles we’ve been trapped in for years.

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.

QUESTION: If a man’s anger is lovelier than his loveliness, what kind of ending do you expect?

Now, twenty years later, I realize I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me.

She looked like she had walked right out of the museum and I told her so. You are pharaonic.

What’s a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor.

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.

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

If a fly rubs its hands delightedly all over your excrement, is it a compliment or an offense?

It was the first time I saw him get nasty and I recognized immediately that it was not about me, not about the classist architecture of my building. Rather, it had all become too much somehow. I held his gaze and said nothing until he left the kitchen, then I picked up the glass shards and swept carefully, thinking, He senses that his usefulness is depleting.

If you have documented a revolution, how can you bring yourself to capture anything else on those same streets where your brothers stained the asphalt with their lives?

What once was peculiar in him, charming, even, is now terrorizing beyond words.

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

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.

When I offered to pay for our meal, William suggested we split the bill, what the Egyptians call going American, though Americans call it going Dutch.

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.

This city punishes the poor every chance it gets. There is hardly a public bench left that doesn’t require payment, but I once saw the American girl sit in Cilantro for two hours and leave without ordering a thing.

remember vividly her magnanimity with men, how she protected their balloon-pride from puncture, and I can’t help but wonder: Did I emasculate the boy from Shobrakheit with my independence?

I have the kind of skin lazy white writers refer to with food items: honey, latte, almond, cinnamon, caramel, et cetera.

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.