If an Egyptian cannot speak English :

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Title :

If an Egyptian cannot speak English : a novel / Noor Naga.

Title:

If an Egyptian cannot speak English :

Author:

Naga, Noor

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

186 pages ; 21 cm

ISBN:

9781644450819

Production / Publication Information:

Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2022]

Summary:

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.

Language:

English

Genre:

Romance fiction.

Geographic Term:

Cairo (Egypt) -- Fiction.

Subject Term:

Egyptian American women -- Fiction.

Man-woman relationships -- Fiction.

Egyptians -- Fiction.

Language teachers -- Fiction.

Photographers -- Fiction.

Addicts -- Fiction.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	FICTION NAGA	31330009175161	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Chelmsford Public Library	FIC/NAGA	31480011561922	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library	FIC/NAGA	31482003047852	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library	FIC NAGA (PB)	32120001373263	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library	FIC NAGA	30470001989010	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	FIC/NAGA N	31479007111122	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Ipswich Public Library	FIC NAGA, NOOR	32122002940801	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library	FIC NAG	32124002074946	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	FIC NAGA N	32128004059219	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	F NAGA	31478010208255	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Rockport Public Library	FIC NAGA	32129002480761	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Topsfield Town Library	FIC NAGA	32133002624345	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library	F NAGA	31990005104307	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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?

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Apr.)

Kirkus Review

A fascinating novel about class and abuse. When the Egyptian American protagonist of Naga's second book moves from the U.S. to Cairo, she finds herself unable to fit in. She gets stares because of her haircut ("What they really want to know is whether my head is shaved because I have cancer or because I'm a pervert") and questions because of her heritage: "Here I keep saying I'm Egyptian and no one believes me. I'm the other kind of other, someone come from abroad who could just as easily return there." The protagonist, unnamed until the last part of the novel, finds work teaching English for the British Council and befriends two fellow patrons at a downtown cafe. Her life changes when she meets a young man who years ago moved to Cairo from a small Egyptian town; he made a living selling photographs during the 2011 Egyptian revolution but fell into cocaine addiction after the Arab Spring ended. ("When the foreigners left, it all went to shit," he reflects. "When it all went to shit, the foreigners left. The sequence hardly matters.") "The boy from Shobrakheit" (his name is never revealed) and the American woman embark on a sexual relationship that's not quite a romance, but it doesn't take long for her to realize that he's violent--at one point, he swings a table at her head, telling her, "Look what you made me do." After he disappears, the woman is torn, fighting the urge to make excuses for him. The man, for his part, alternates between regret and making excuses. Naga's writing in the book's first two parts is gripping, but the final section, metafictional and darkly funny, is an absolute master class. She deals with important issues with a gimlet eye and a rare sensitivity--it would be a massive understatement to call this novel a must-read. In a word: brilliant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

In Cairo, a few years after the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution, an Egyptian man meets an Egyptian American woman. He is drawn to her curiosity and androgynous grace; she is intrigued by his photographer's eye. She strikes him as coolly, almost colonially ignorant; while to her he is scruffy, artistic, and judgemental. Haunted and embittered by his experiences photographing the revolution, he resents her naive pressure on him to once again take up his camera: "If you have documented a revolution, how can you bring yourself to capture anything else on those same streets where your brothers stained the asphalt with their lives?" As they become lovers, their world shrinks to the confines of her luxurious, balconied, and cocooning apartment. Is she a cultural tourist, arrogantly unaware of her privilege? Is he an emotionally abusive manipulator, mocking her wealth while taking advantage of it? Perhaps both are true. Award-winning Naga has her protagonists narrate in alternating chapters, leading to a shockingly meta final coda in a tale that mirrors latter-day Egypt by being at once romantic, complex, and ultimately tragic.

Library Journal Review

The two protagonists in Noor's (Washes, Prays) unusually structured novel, winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, are referred to only as "the boy from Shobrakheit" and "the American girl." In short, alternating-perspective chapters (most only one or two pages long), readers learn that the boy left his home village for Cairo just before the 2011 revolution and made money selling photographs of the events to the Western press. He's now suffering from depression and drug addiction by the time he meets the girl, an American of Egyptian heritage. Their relationship is complicated by severe cultural and class differences, and misunderstandings lead to eventual tragedy. The novel's third section takes the form of a transcript of a memoir-writing workshop, in which a manuscript (presumably written by the girl but not seen by readers) is dissected by the class. VERDICT The short chapters keep the pages turning during the first two sections as the narrative heads toward the inevitable catastrophe, and the meta-fictional third section helps readers process what may have disturbed or offended in the story itself and its depiction of the characters, addressing current conversations about authorial voice, consent, and cultural appropriation. Extraordinary.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman