If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

“I am not what you think I am. You are what you think I am.”

QUESTION: If your mother wanted to feed you forever, why would she cut the cord?

the air was very brown, like closet air.

The writing style is interesting

the air was people.

You could turn into an alley and find fifty Sudanese men, bluer than black, with cheeks like shoulder blades and ankles like knives, or else women as tall as I am, women so pale you could see rivered blood at their wrists and neck. I heard twenty Arabics in my first week and wherever

I squirmed at the horror of being served by a Black woman with a kerchief tied around her head.

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

so horrified with joy.

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. We took heart from one another. As with every command from the natural world, the timing was right.

I think this part is very powerful.

Not microaggressions that are tweeted about, not theory; these are adult aggressions, bodily, bloodying.

I borrowed his spoon to eat the coffee grounds at the bottom of my Turkish cup. Isn’t it bitter?

Isnt turkish coffee supposed to be sweet?

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

Who else do you know that eats so someone else can get full?

Why ask a question that has no answer unless you want someone’s tongue in your hand?

she put the head in her mouth.

What head???

Closes his nostrils with one hand and flutters his lips like a horse when he feels a sneeze coming.

I jusy think this sentence wass structured beautifully

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

These older women, who had not learned how to say Thank you or Bless your hands for this meal in Arabic, would beg me in monstrous accents, Neekni, neekni.

The vein knows before the skin is broken what is coming. I swear the vein begins to swell and thump like a cock, the heart already heroic before the tip enters.

This is sad bad its written pretty well

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

My father is a mute. He plays with rubber tires for a living and disappoints everyone around him.

Sometimes i wish i were a mute that dissapointed everyone around me so they wouldnt expect anything from me

It’s exhausting—the levels of dysfunction, the sheer effort it takes to complete even the simplest tasks: crossing the street, buying fruit, changing the gas cylinder in the stove … Everything is more circuitous than it needs to be.

This is what he was like, what I liked about him: a transparency that seemed at times a failure of imagination but at other times a form of respect. He didn’t think too hard about where I had come from or where I was going, how different we were from each other. He just assumed a warmth of feeling. That I had left him on read for weeks was not personal, for example. That he had wanted to see my hair wasn’t a rebuke for its lack. He was just curious, communicating a whim, nothing more. You could see right through to the bottom of him.

We’ve been playing house for the last two weeks. Except that I’m both father and mother, bringing home the meat and also cooking it while he waits for me with his cheek in his hand. Do I mind? It’s nice to crash into his chest when he opens the front door.

You can’t just discard willy-nilly things that once belonged to you, even if you’ve outgrown them. You have to be careful. Some things, I say my grandmother used to say, are holy.

A man wants to know who will close his eyelids when he dies,

If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, have you not thrown it yourself?

When he threw the glass against the wall, I didn’t react. I puttered about making dinner while he watched YouTube videos in the next room and filled the apartment with clouds of smoke. He didn’t offer to help, didn’t even glance up as I trailed back and forth with pots and plates, glasses of orange juice I’d hand-squeezed that morning. I would never tolerate this dynamic in New York, but here, somehow, it is harder to speak to. 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.

Is it arrogant to grieve the loss of what you never had?

I can no longer be like the fountain. The fountain is a structure that spurts water, usually in a roundabout or public plaza. It squirts water from several mouths. I feel that love should flow freely, as water does from fountains. Let me ask you: Is it possible to contemplate a thing—any thing at all—without sadness?

Nice sadness but don’t feed it. Its tummy is holey, so it’s always hungry. If you feed it, it will befriend you and will return every night to beg like a street dog. A dog is a four-legged animal with fur and paws that coughs when it wants to be heard. People put a string around its neck and walk ahead of it on the street. It is considered impure by some religious schools of thought.

Although the english is broken and it sounds elementary, it was more powerful than the flowery fountain reference.

Which is more frightening—to wake up with injuries or a weapon in your hand?

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

This country has milked the tits off me.

Even now, when I begin to think about sharing with them where I have been all these months, I am already tired, too disheartened to try. Where to begin, and will they believe me?

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.

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.

To 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.

whenever I took out my wallet in the street, he would turn his whole body away and light a cigarette, as though I had pulled out a thong instead of the soft, fraying banknotes. As though he were ashamed of my money or performing respect for my privacy. But why do I say performing respect instead of respecting? Does the fact that I noticed his behavior around my wallet and remember it now with cinematic lucidity imply an underlying suspicion? 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, but when someone is being wronged in front of me, I can be violent.

This is the question I get once a week in Cairo, now that it’s clearer to people I’m not ill: Why did you shave your head? 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. I had given up bras and armpit-shaving much earlier—to my mother’s horror—

Identity capitalism- Love this

slacktivism as the new aesthetic,

If he wanted an American girl, he could have found a proper freckled blonde with bouncing ponytail; there are enough of them tramping around downtown with their calves and armpits bare, doing “research,” learning Arabic, romanticizing even the garbage heaps, the fleas on every weasel. And if he wanted an Egyptian, why not a homegrown goose who can hang on to his elbow when they walk the corniche, hide her mouth when she smiles, and practically die of giddiness when he steals an elevator kiss? Was it because I was neither of him nor truly other? Not family and not quite stranger—a thresholded, half-inside, half-outside woman?

And whenever we were intimate, he closed his eyes and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was using my body for the same escapist purpose: ramming in—in hopes of getting out.

He refused to need my mother the way she longed to be needed, would not give the gift of jealousy or even touch her as he retreated into the world of energies and stars.

not because he trusted her but because his greatest weapon was this act of indifference.

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.

There are calculations that precede thought, there are protective measures that one recognizes as protective only retrospectively.

In some of the smaller Egyptian provinces, legend has it that a widow who does not remarry or return to her father’s house grows vaginal teeth as a form of protection against potential sexual violation.

I am bewildereddd

In Shobrakheit, as in all the smaller provinces, it is common to sell vegetables in opaque bags so as not to incur hasad, or the evil eye. In the Islamic tradition, hasad is a curse that Muslims perform on each other by staring at their victim. It is often inspired by envy, hence the practice of hiding purchases from strangers.