If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Written By Linda Malek

If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga

Reviewed by Linda
📙📙📙

This peculiar title and twisted story with its awful characters had me torn: do I hate it or love it? I still don't know but it's certainly left a mark on me and I had the privilege of reading this book at @caferiche where it’s set in downtown Cairo!

Naga gives us a story of post-revolution Egypt, the rush of expats to return to a new motherland, and the bitter disappointment of the years that follow. The reader is transported to the grit and bustle of downtown Cairo where an unnamed American-Egyptian girl leaves NYC, to get in touch with her roots. She knows that she's a cliché, as does the reader and every Egyptian that interacts with her. Having never been to Egypt before, this is a baptism of fire. As an American, she has the power, money, and status but as a foreign woman, she lacks the know-how to navigate the complex capital that only a native man can offer. During the day she teaches English and in the evenings, she frequents the downtown bars namely, Café Riche (pictured here).

And it’s here that she befriends the owners of the establishment and meets the unnamed poor boy from Shobrakheit, a small village in the Nile Delta. He too comes to Cairo with the aspiration of being a photographer, seeking a better life but his poverty, disillusionment, and drug addiction get the better of him.
Seeking solace in one other, they develop a toxic intimacy. The union is doomed from the start but thankfully shortlived - they fetishise and abuse each other and I didn't get why the author couldn't explore the themes in this novel without a destructive relationship at its centre.
The key question is if an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling the story? The author attempts a dual-POV that is well executed for the "woke" American-Egyptian girl but for the village boy, it lacked nuance and at times felt offensive and made me wince. Then again, what can we expect from an ignorant westerner who knows nothing of the country and its people? But just when I thought I knew what was coming, the ending shocked me!

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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