If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English|Noor Naga

It's 2017, six years after the Arab Spring revolt that ended Hosni Mubarak's decades-long dictatorship, and Egypt is suffocating economically under the boots of a new ruler so much so that some yearn for the recent past where "the wheels of production didn't once stop…" What's more, the wave of foreigners and diasporic Egyptians that flooded the country during the revolution, as "the global epicentre tipped in [Egypt's] direction," have since ebbed along with dreams of redemption.

It's in this socio-political quagmire of regret and somnolence that Noor Naga's novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English opens, tracing the observations of an acutely self-aware Egyptian-American woman (also named Noor) whose maiden trip to her parents' homeland coughs up more questions than answers on the subject of identity, authenticity and belonging. 

Noor arrives in Cairo from America to connect with her quote unquote roots— albeit her shaven head, unusual fashion, and poor Arabic betray her as a foreigner and sets an automatic boundary between her and those she regards as her people. However, Noor's job as an English tutor at the British Council leads her to an upscale cafe and a friendship with two middle-class Egyptians versed in local etiquettes and Western culture. They provide cultural insight into her new environment without judging her American identity, and for a while the duo constitute her regular companions until the unnamed boy from the village of Shobrakheit enters the cafe and into her life.

So diametrically different are they from the other that one expects their acquaintance to resist a romance. He is an occasionally homeless drug-addict and unemployed photographer of the revolution, she a Columbia University graduate living in an apartment furnished with a doorman, airy balconies and furniture "living in denial of its geographic circumstance." His English is non-existent and her Arabic is painfully inadequate, and soon enough their worlds clash in wry, revelatory and tragic ways narrated in chapters alternating between their points of view.

In one of his poetic text messages to her in which he uses the word fountain, the boy from Shobrakheit assumes she doesn't know the Arabic word and defines it. However, Noor finds the overwrought explanation condescending and replies in kind, annoying him.

Compounding their misunderstandings is the fact that in the language of her ancestors, Noor feels constrained and estranged from herself, a situation she analyses as thus: "I am stupid in this Arabic, a blubbering toddler in his arms, defenselessly drooling all over his chest. Meanwhile he peers down at me from his height, his muscled tongue clicking, spitting."

This push and pull intensifies as the tyranny of gender and class rears its head in overt and subdued forms. Watching Noor scrub her face with brown sugar, the boy from Shobrakheit remembers his impoverished mother trying to save grains of salt. And socialised to see women as potential damsels in distress, he feeds his male pride by protecting Noor from the city's mean streets, where men rob, sexually harass and ogle women. Later, when Noor begins traversing the city alone, her independence irks him to the point of violence. 

"He senses his usefulness is depleting," she muses after he smashes a glass against a wall in her apartment. "Ever since he showed me how to buy vegetables from Bab-El-Louk, I no longer need him to buy them with me." 

She theorises his rage stems from the unrelenting deprivation that has marked his life but not hers, and goes as far as accepting his outburst without protest if only to assuage the guilt she feels for missing the revolution and growing up privileged even though middle-class privileges are different for Arabs and minority groups in a white-dominated America. But beyond her intimate life, the glaring differences between her life in New York and Cairo force Noor to interrogate certain American indulgences and obsessions. What really are micro-aggressions to limbless beggars and child hawkers, and is drinking alcohol in a country where it's proscribed an act of rebellion or one of pure entitlement if it doesn't garner the hatred meted out to hijabis in New York?

Meanwhile, the boy from Shobrakheit silently passes judgement on her American ways. When she hands cash to children in a poor neighbourhood, he likens her to the German and Italian women who took the photos of similar kids without permission after handing them change.

"I always let these women empty their pockets without commenting, since there's something retributive about the exchange, a kind of tourist tax," he muses. "And now with the American girl I catch myself doing the same thing…"

When their tenuous, undefined romance comes undone, both realise they've been shields for the other in their respective social spaces. He can't access the posh restaurants or cafes that readily admit Noor, while she now has to endure having her identity questioned in the streets. But while the boy from Shobrakheit harbours feelings for her to an excessive degree, she doesn't share his naïveté about sex as an overture to love or marriage. And in that chasm arises the stalk of a deadly deed.

Naga's sublime, experimental novel lends a nuanced and intriguing flair to the narrative, with the first third opening with koan riddles, the second part incorporating footnotes like an academic essay to describe Egyptian culture, and the final third is written as a play that shatters readers’ assumptions about whose perspective animates the story. Shimmering with philosophical depth, her confident and deft prose aptly paints the tensions and contradictions around questions of identity, what constitutes it, how slight differences and large fragmentations arising from class and geography often complicates it, and why some might struggle to fully inhabit it. As Noor eventually realises about her place in Egypt: "I'm learning slowly that having money and the option to leave frays any claim I have to this place." 

This review originally appeared in The Johannesburg Review of Books.

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