If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
A Novel
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire—for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other—takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Naga (Washes, Prays) delivers a chaotic experimental romance, narrated by a wealthy Egyptian American woman and a bohemian Egyptian man who meet and fall in love at a café in Cairo soon after the Arab Spring. The unnamed man moves into a fancy apartment with the woman, whose name is eventually revealed as Ferial, and their romance quickly sours. Much of the story consists of alternating monologues that address the characters' respective feelings of alienation. Ferial, who keeps her head shaved, feels uncomfortable as an outsider in what is purportedly her homeland, and the man feels insecure because of his humble origins (at one point, he explodes upon discovering a back staircase in their flat that once led to servants' quarters). Naga impresses with her snappy prose ("There is all the evidence of a past tended by a woman's hands—he's at least as spoiled as he is damaged," Ferial observes) and has a gift for exploring varied perspectives. The voice of the male protagonist is spiked with testosterone and self-pity, as when he harangues his lover ("I almost jumped off your beloved balcony yesterday. Don't you know you're the only good thing I have?"), but as the passage shifts to an internal monologue, Naga poignantly reveals his humanity. This smart story is distinguished by its surprising empathy.
