If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

The whole village knew she was wondering how best to divide a peach into thirds.

It couldn’t have been easier, but it has not been easy.

I thought I had cried until I fogged up all the roads going anywhere,

My mother was every hefty tante in tassel-fringe capris, pointed-toe mules, and my father was the same cricket-legged bald man serving me coffee, driving me home.

We took heart from one another.

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

they talk to me in Arabic and I feel I’ve won something.

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

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

I am outside of my context, confused about where the margins and the pressure points are. Who has the power? Where is the center?

Photography is not about victory; victory is viler, baser than the loll of a child’s head on that child’s own chest.

Reem tried to ask what I meant, looking hurt and longing in that way she did when we were alone. She was in love with me.

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

His texts also consist of theoretical food offerings, and in them I hear how the women in his family have loved him. Here, have peanuts and buffalo milk, he texts me. Have gateaux, black tea with fresh mint. Come, eat pickled lemons from my hand. Have tomatoes with cumin. Are you happy? I am trying to please you with the little I have. Here, have grapes. Have a chocolate croissant.

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

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.

dizzied around the house that had never homed me, like a trapped moth.

I resent him because I recognize him. This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing form makes fools of us both. We’re pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat, and ultimately stick out everywhere we go. We were both more convincing Egyptians in New York than we’d ever be on this side of the Atlantic.

I could say, Back home, we do it like this, pat our bread flat and round, never having patted bread flat or otherwise. But here I keep saying I’m Egyptian and no one believes me.

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.

When I come home at the end of the day, I am filthy and exhausted—but amazingly filthy. Filthy in ways that seem magical, given the route I have taken since leaving the shower that same morning.

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

You’d walk in and be confronted immediately with the feeling that all the furniture was living in denial of its geographic circumstance, that the human who had done the arrangements was afraid of the city outside her windows.

I stay in this apartment that could be anywhere in the world—if it weren’t for the balconies and me in it.

How convenient, then, when all is said and done, to arrive in the riskless aftermath, claiming, Me too, I’m one of you

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

Our relationship is fragile, sustained by habits we intuited from the beginning and now adhere to.

He senses that his usefulness is depleting

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. After years of claiming Arabness as an excuse for what I am—hairy, hard-boned and dirt-skinned, sensual, impulsive, superstitious, nostalgic, full of body-shame and estrangement—I feel I’m earning it at last. The hazing is belated but confusingly sweet. I have a guilt, and the boy from Shobrakheit has an anger.

Let me ask you: Is it possible to contemplate a thing—any thing at all—without sadness?

How long does a newborn listen before it utters its first word?

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

You are condescending toward the street dog.

If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?

How to say passive-aggressive in Arabic? Guilt trip? Victim complex? How to say emotional blackmail? What is unforgivable in English, in Arabic has no name I know. You are trying to make me feel bad, I say like a small hiccuping girl with sand in her eyes. You are no longer safeness, I tell him. I miss my

Addicts, like grandchildren, do not fill their hours. They pull the hours apart, entertain themselves by melting the hours into new shapes: a ring, a gray braid down a bare back. Occasionally the hours fight back with passion so the addicts and grandchildren are transformed into the bleeding of a nostril or ear. Bleeding means the wasting of time, but it can also mean the loss of blood, as in: I bled from the nostrils. The nostrils are the two openings of the nose.

The nostrils are the two holes of the nose, and the word nose suggests both curiosity and snobbiness, and what is meant by snobby is the rice remaining on a plate at the end of a meal, and what is meant by plate is one of a pair of kidneys (usually the right) in the body of a woman

Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.

It’s a losing game, this waiting on the smallest life sign from her.

You’re lucky if your beloved is also your destiny

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE between being poor and being cheap,

Only a foreigner in Cairo is made to repeat ten times a day: I’m Egyptian, I’m Egyptian

When we were together in public, no one would have dared ask me where I was from, and if they had dared, he would have defended me with one of his characteristic rages. He would have cursed them up and down, calling them dogs and shoes and threatening to raise their mothers’ ancestors from the ground.

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.

To dress like you have money is not just an exercise in vanity, it’s also a mode of protection.