If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

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

He sent me origami tutorials, clips from experimental German films of the sixties and seventies, bhangra playlists, Palestinian newspaper coverage of World War I from a digital archive I’d never heard of, and then, from the same year, scanned diary pages of an Armenian in Alexandria—a schoolgirl describing the boys she admired from church … 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eclectic tastes, that he could be historically inclined and access a larger world through the cracked screen of his outdated phone.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.

He wishes me not a good morning, but a childlike morning or a morning of flowers. He texts, I hope your day will be like the birds. I hope your night will be like the childhood of trees. Don’t be sad, my moon. I have a remembering of the lives I didn’t live.

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.