Who does power truly belong to? This book digs into the layers of an abusive relationship to find out
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English asks the reader to confront their ideas of morality and control
Shelfies is a column by writer Alicia Elliott that looks at arts and culture through the prism of the books on her shelf.
The story of Alexandrian writer Noor Naga's structurally inventive, morally complex novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English may seem clear enough to start. A woman referred to in the first two parts of the book as "the American girl" is an Egyptian-American student and minor Twitter celebrity who, after suffering a social media callout that's left her disgraced, has deactivated everything and moved to her parents' home country of Egypt. She's hoping to find something. She just isn't quite sure what.
Meanwhile, the second protagonist is a man referred to as "the boy from Shobrakheit." He came to Cairo from his small village just in time for the Arab Spring. He made a living documenting the revolution, but now that it's over, he is left wandering — poor, jobless and addicted to drugs. The two meet in a café, as might happen in any romantic comedy, and start a relationship.
But as it continues, and as they project certain expectations onto one another based on their gender, culture, country of origin and class, they begin to chafe under those expectations. It is a discomfort that quickly spreads to the reader, as we come to understand their dynamic — and this novel — is far more complex than we initially assumed.
As Naga writes, "It is in Arabic that lovers murder each other with side tables, and it is in English that they theorize about what it means to be murdered by a side table." We get to see both the violence and the theorizing unfold — then clash.
There is no way for the American girl to translate Western theories of identity or abuse into Arabic for her Egyptian boyfriend to understand, just as there's no way she can translate the realities of living in Egypt into perfect, unproblematic theory for her North American friends and colleagues. After all, she is used to understanding and defining herself as solely a victim of abuse. When she's with the boy from Shobrakheit, she can't hold simultaneously being a victim and a perpetrator. It's not in her Western theory, nor is there language for it in either Arabic or English.
This is the moral, linguistic and cultural conundrum at the heart of this book: what happens to stories like hers? How do we understand relationships "without clearly demarcated roles of victim and abuser, where the partners take turns leading, as in a Madrid-style schottische"?
Clearly, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English refuses to take the easy route when it comes to examining the shifting nature of power. Instead, it settles into the seeming contradictions: how a person can have power and privilege over another in one situation, then be at the mercy of that same person the next.
Who is the more powerful, the novel asks: the man who has never left Egypt, and so knows its history, customs and contours in ways that can keep him relatively safe; or the well-off woman who grew up elsewhere and has no clue how to move through Egypt, but always has the option — and money — to flee?
Who is the more dehumanized: the woman who can't speak the language of the misogynistic country she's in, who is harassed whenever she's in public for being a woman and foreigner with a shaved head; or the man who does not have enough money to eat some days, and is discriminated against because he's visibly poor and addicted to drugs?
Who deserves more pity: the man who doesn't feel he can leave his girlfriend's apartment because classist building employees won't allow him back into the building if he leaves and she won't make him a key; or the woman who makes him dinner and lets him live with her, despite his yelling at her any time she doesn't come straight home from work?
As the narrative continues, the answer of who has power and who is wielding abuse is always sliding. "I would never tolerate this dynamic in New York," the American girl admits of her boyfriend's verbal abuse, "but here, somehow, it is harder to speak to. He is punishing me for something, and I am letting him." Despite her Western understanding of sexism and racism, the girl sees misogyny as part of being Egyptian, and therefore sees her Arabness as something she must "earn" via this toxic, sexist relationship.
In this way, the boy from Shobrakheit is less a person than a symbol to her, less a lover than a tour guide. He teaches her how to buy vegetables, which butcher to go to, which pharmacists are licensed, who sells fresh bread. He helps her with her Arabic and protects her in the streets from harassment. In other words, she is using him, too, just like the white women who came to Egypt from the West during the Arab Spring, looking for an exotic rendezvous.
The American girl herself admits as much: "I made it clear to him… that our relationship was transient, that he was an experience… In fact, I did not even resent his mooching, because I understood that everything has a price." The boy from Shobrakheit knows this. And yet, despite the economic power the girl has over the boy, or perhaps because of the economic power the girl has over the boy, he still erupts in violence one night, making it clear that he always has the physical advantage over her. He's still a man, after all, and she is still a woman. And so their relationship seesaws back and forth, even after he leaves her the following morning, severing any remaining chance at continued romance.
How is one to classify a relationship like this, then, particularly after a fatal accident kills the boy? This is what the American girl, who we learn is a fictionalized Noor, is trying to figure out.
In the last part of the book, we realize everything we just read was a memoir Noor submitted to her writer's workshop for them to critique. Her fellow writers are non-Arab Westerners who are well-versed in social mediated understandings of abuse, power, privilege and identity politics. We quickly realize, however, that their rather simplistic way of understanding and interpreting the world doesn't make space for a messy story like hers.
"I don't mean to sound rude, but why were you grieving so much?" one writer bluntly asks her. "I'm not saying the Shobrakit (sic) guy deserved to die," says another, "but I think he did it to himself. His chauvinism was killing him from the beginning."
The writers around Noor take turns referring to the boy from Shobrakheit — a real person they know she loved — as a homeless addict with a death wish, a thief, rapist, abuser and/or attempted murderer. They tell Noor she should feel relief, even joy, that her former lover has died, and if she depicts any guilt or shame in her writing about him, she's actually hurting other victims of abuse. "Is a narrative like this… normalizing cycles of abuse? Is it perpetuating misogyny?" another woman writer asks, ridiculously, as if merely representing abuse or misogyny in one's work means one is endorsing it.
Such is the danger of making art, particularly as a marginalized artist: having your art wildly, even offensively misinterpreted. As Naga points out in this section, marginalized authors like her are not allowed to simply make art that's meaningful to them: they are expected to make art that educates people outside their communities, that somehow both refutes and upholds harmful stereotypes in ways that ultimately affirm the feelings and worldviews of the majority.
The art of marginalized folks is always expected to centre the majority, allowing them to voyeuristically enter, view, understand and — most importantly — judge diverse communities without the inconvenience of having to actually interact with or understand them. Western readers like those in Noor's writing workshop approach a story like hers and prefer to feel confident that the relatively well-off Egyptian-American girl is the good one, and the poor, drug addicted Egyptian man is the bad one. And when the bad Arab man dies, they want this to be a victory implicitly confirming that Western morals and worldviews won.
This is the moral, linguistic and cultural conundrum at the heart of this book: what happens to stories like [these]? How do we understand relationships 'without clearly demarcated roles of victim and abuser, where the partners take turns leading, as in a Madrid-style schottische'?
Noor's fellow writers are especially frustrated that she refuses to subscribe to such a narrative. They'd rather she censors her own complicated feelings than come face-to-face with the possibility that the black-and-white, Westernized way they see and understand the world has failed her. By showing us how the writers in Noor's workshop misunderstand and manipulate her story to suit their own ideological ends, Naga turns the narrative gaze back on the reader.
She asks: is this what you think of what you've read, too? Even after all I've told you, all I've shown you, that resists such a simplistic, even lazy characterization? Do your ideas of victimhood, abuse, power and privilege make space for a story like mine, or do they force me and those who feel like me out, casting us, our emotions, our histories and our interpretations as somehow "wrong"? And if they do, what does that say about your ideas and their so-called inclusiveness?
"If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who gets to tell his story?" This question is posed in the first section, and by the third, it seems clear.
The answer is not just the fictional Noor, and in a meta sense, not just the author Naga. It's also every reader, particularly non-Arab Westerners, who learns about the boy from Shobrakheit and could be tempted to take his story and flatten it, dehumanizing him until he's only another example to bolster their own ideology or morality. Even if they themselves have done the same things the boy from Shobrakheit has. Even if they've done worse. This is the same way that so many North Americans view real-life Egyptians: denying them complexity or humanity because of what they perceive as their culture's moral failings, never once considering the moral failings of their own.
"Truly the most depressing kind of relationship is one where the blood runs in both directions and it's unclear who is to blame," says the American girl. I can't help but wonder what it might be like if there was less focus on who's to blame for the blood, and more on how to stop the cutting and staunch the bleeding.
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