Noor Naga's novel looks at love, class & identity in the wake of the Arab Spring — read an excerpt now
The novel is a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Set shortly after the events of the Arab Spring, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga is a novel that traces the relationship between two people — a wealthy Egyptian American woman and an unemployed man from the village of Shobrakheit — who meet in a cafe in Cairo. The pair fall in love but must contend with issues of identity, class and violence as they try to build a lasting relationship.
"The main unnamed character doesn't have the stereotypical immigrant story of struggling parents. Her parents are working professionals, they have a lot of money, they're very comfortable. And yet, she's constantly trying to find ways to to minimize that power and maximize all the ways in which she might be a subject of racism or Islamophobia," Noor said in an interview on The Next Chapter.
"So coming back to Cairo, all of that crumbles into the ground — very, very quickly — because this is not the reality. What it means to be a minority in Egypt looks very different. Class is really the biggest defining marker.
"If you're somebody who has lived all your life in the U.S., then you are upper class — that's a fact of your life and [Egyptian] people are very good at reading that."
Naga is an Egyptian Canadian writer. She won the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for her poem The Mistress and the Ping. She also won the Disquiet Fiction Prize in 2019. In 2020, Noor was named a writer to watch by CBC Books in 2020. Her first book, the poetry collection Washes, Prays, was published in 2020 and was named among the best poetry of the year by CBC Books. Noor is an instructor at the American University in Cairo.
Read an excerpt from If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English below.
Question: If you are competing to lose, what do you win if you win?
He told me he was from a village, Shobrakheit. He told me a New Yorker and a Cairene have more in common than a Cairene and a man from Shobrakheit, but he would not tell me what the commonalities were. Instead he asked if I had ever ridden a microbus, and I was forced to say no. What about a tuktuk? Another no. And then I remembered that when we'd stopped at the kiosk for cigarettes, he had bought singles. I looked and seemed to see him for the first time: the hems of his pants were frayed, strings dangled from his vest like lines of saliva, yet he wore a perky bow tie. He wore black leather sandals with socks, but one of the soles was loose, flapping like a bottom lip when he walked. I didn't know then: every night before bed he washes his feet and socks in the sink, wrings the blackness out of both. Hangs the socks on the bathroom door handle to dry for the morning. Only pair he has. He washes his socks every night but he has never brushed his teeth with toothpaste or shampooed his hair. Does not own deodorant. If he showed a little more ideology, he could be considered woke — some kind of minimalist, an ecofreak. How to say consumerism in Arabic? How to say toxins, microplastics, mutagenics, fair trade, ethical sourcing? But the boy from Shobrakheit doesn't give a reason for not shampooing his hair — just says he doesn't like to. What's a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor. Also, Egyptian. More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life. 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 else where, which most of the population cannot do. The boy from Shobrakheit will die never having crossed a border. He is so tall that when we walk around downtown at night, his hair catches on the butchers' hooks, which are black-tipped, yanking, the blood beneath them never dry. He took me to get liver sandwiches from a cart on the street, but not the popular cart. The popular cart is a pound more expensive per sandwich, which is robbery, he said. We sat on the sidewalk to eat, and I knew he had chosen the ground because I had chosen the crème slip-dress, which would catch the dust like a wet tongue. But I take the metro all the time, I said, remembering that I had ridden it once when I first arrived and that it had cost as little as a pound, as little as six cents American. We test each other.
LISTEN | Noor Naga talks about how Cairo influences her fiction with Shelagh Rogers:
Excerpted from IF AN EGYPTIAN CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH. Copyright © 2022 by Noor Naga. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
