Noor Naga - If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English: A Novel

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English seethes with metaphoric passion and emotional intelligence beneath its piecrust of metafictional playfulness, and will reward every rereading with new doses of pleasure. Noor Nagas writing is fearless, virtuosic, and pithy with aphorism, her sentences honed to dagger point, thrumming with swag. This is a writer who looks and listens with an assiduous,sensual attention, and whose voice, in this engrossing debut novel, has found a subject to make it sing.

In If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Noor Naga finds a form for diasporic consciousness: capacious enough to hold conflicting voices, inventive enough to capture the dream state of life in translation, supple enough to express varieties of heartbreak at the margins of culture. Through a love story told at a breathless pace, Naga evokes breath: the presence of living bodies, whose silence surrounds all novels, never quite caught on the page. This is a book for anyone whos ever been mesmerized by language, amazed and stricken by what it can and cannot do.Sofia SamatarThrough exquisite invention and a tightly woven form, Noor Naga brings us into the colliding spaces of cultural duality met by the perennial struggles of people attempting to reconcile with one another and themselves. With the backdrop of a Cairo in perpetual chaos and the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution, here are two young Egyptians, each from one side of the Atlantic, trying to find meaning amidst a conception of nation and belonging that seems to have all but dissipated. Beyond attempting to come to terms with ones identity, these nameless characters are in search of revelation. If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is fixated on complexities that define how we come to understand ourselves, and our striving to grapple with desire and yearning while also being beholden to one another. Enthralling and nuanced, this is a novel by a writer whose powers are just becoming known.Matthew Shenoda

Noor Nagas language combines precision with extraordinary suggestiveness. Reading this book is like stepping through an open doorway and realizing that a sparkling zodiac of colorful expressions lies another small step away. One has the impulse to keep going and to stop only to wave someone else to hurry along.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

And then Mother placed a single peach on a saucer at the centerof the table. With a carving knife, divided it in four. Dinner, shesaid. My grandmother, whose perfect teeth were singly stolen by a dentist working from his one-room across the river and seating patients on the bed he sleeps in, took all the peach quarters and squished them into her ears. Such greed, said Mother, sucking the hollow seed. Father breathed. Swinging her elbows like a racewalker, Grandmother busied into the kitchen and climbed inside the stove. The next day they placed her collection of paper cranes into the ground with her, so I left. This was ten years ago. The distance from Shobrakheit to Cairo is 140 kilometers. I took a microbus, then the train.
Q uestion : Is it arrogant to return to a place youve never been?

If I was a white girl with a shaved head, they probably wouldnthave cared. But because I was an Egyptian girl with a shaved head, they wouldnt let me forget it. Everything was fine at JFK. Even when four hundred Egyptians funneled into a Boeing 777 destined for Cairo, no one noticed me. For twelve hours our heads nodded, lolled against one another as we dozed and dreamed, and there was no telling in the canned gloom who was who. Thenthe lights came on and we landed. These same four hundred passengers disembarking on the other side seemed to have forgotten where wed come from. They glared openly at me and muscled past in the aisle, suspicious all of a sudden. No one helped me get my backpack from the overhead bin. At passport control, the officer looked like a younger version of my father. Slender, brown, and long-faced, with silver glasses that gave him a pained, glittering look of sensitivity. Behind me the line was long and vocal, but he held my American passport leisurely in his hands, as if it were a book he had read before. He said my name, searched my face the way strangers study the daughters of a niqab-wearing woman, noting the texture of their hair, the pucker of their mouths, aging the childrens faces in their minds, searching for the mothers beauty. It was clear that the officer was picturing me with hair. He was searching for the Egyptian in me, or possibly the illness. I wanted to say, Same. I had filled out the boxes on the declaration form in a childs handwriting, articulating the tooth of every letter sin anddotting my diacritics individually. The effect was neat but painstaking. What brings you here? he asked in Arabic. Do you have anEgyptian passport? I shook my head. National ID card? I said, Pardon?He sent me out of the line and around the corner to another man, who was very large, with purple eye rings, smoking cigarettes in a glass cubicle. He looked trapped in it, as if on display in a museum. This man finished his cigarette, brushing through my passportwith his thumb before asking in English, How long you stay? I tried to tell him I was staying for good. Six months, okay? he asked and I nodded because his English was poor but my Arabic was poorer. He made a loop and a dash on a pink slip. Take this, go that office upthe stair, you pay, you come again here. I went up the stairs to thesecond office and there was no one there. When I returned to the man in the glass case, he shouted over his shoulder in Arabic, Dina!Go tell that son of a shoe to sit at the cashier! and shooed me with the back of his hand before I could explain. The son of a shoe looked about fourteen, with matching purple eye rings, smiling. I paidhim and returned to the smoking man, who sent me back to thepassport control line with a paper visa in my hand.