Review: If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga

Girl meets boy in Cairo in this bruising novel. Although at first, if you come into cold as I did, it might not be so apparent that the two voices are different people and different genders. The woman is from New York, a recent graduate, and is visiting Egypt for the first time. The man is an Egyptian photographer, from a rural village north of Cairo. She has a shaved head, and is often confused for a man on the streets of Cairo; he’s got long, distinctive hair. She’s in Cairo to discover the nation of her ancestors. He’s down and out, addicted to painkillers, washed up (or, rather, abandoned by Western media) after success as a photojournalist during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

The first part unfolds as a series of questions and answers, perhaps those asked between new lovers. The questions are lyrical and the answers illuminate the lovers’ meeting and attempts at romance. In the second part, the questions disappear, to be replaced with footnotes that explain aspects of Egyptian culture for a Western audience, a switch that starts to feel increasingly awkward. It is the third part that pulls the rug out, reframing what has come before in the most brutal way. It’s a self-reflexive twist that addresses any criticism that might be raised of the earlier sections, but does so in a way that heightens the themes and raises the stakes rather than diminishing them, as is often the case when a text answers its own critique. It’s a fearsomely lucid depiction of the politics of stories, who gets to tell them, who for, and who profits from them.

Like Yumna Kassab’s recent novel, The Lovers, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English considers how love and desire function under the systems of power that structure society — patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, globalisation. But whereas Kassab resists detail, Naga’s novel is almost all particulars, with a vivisector’s sense of character, place and time. “If he showed a little more ideology,” the woman thinks, “He could be considered woke … what’s a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor”. “She looks at me with an appetite that is romantic but wrong,” he returns, “Curious, consumptive … anthropological?” Her American woman, simultaneously cynical and wide-eyed, hyperaware of privilege and complicity but also blind to it, is absolutely convincing (“the worst kind of SJW,” she flagellates herself at one point), but it is Naga’s Egyptian man who is really remarkable — all twitchy, reflexive masculinity; all wounded, vulnerable heart. Rarely have I been so scared for and of a character.

If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English poses whether desire can create a space outside the inherent exploitation of such systems, and answers with severe ambivalence. The woman is driven by the urge to understand the culture she feels entitled to, but, like the asymptote on a graph, she can perhaps never reach it. I’m reminded of Getanjali Shree’s novel, Tomb Of Sand:

Understanding has become a much eroded, much abused word, to the point that its sense has come to mean to establish meaning, when its real sense is to displace meaning. To give you such a shock that you see lightning.

If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English provides that shock. It’s a powerful destabilising of things we might hold to be true about power and systems that distribute it.

Gay rating: 2/5 for queer characters and themes.