If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

November 1, 2021

After the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman probing her roots and a disillusioned photographer of the revolution meet in Cairo and fall in love. Jobless, cocaine-addicted, and living in a rooftop hovel, he soon moves into her balconied, sun-drenched apartment, but their passion for each other and for what they hope to become through each other leads to disaster. Following the Alexandria-based Naga's award-winning verse novel Washes, Prays, this experimental work won the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 21, 2022
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.

April 15, 2022
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.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 1, 2022

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

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2022
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(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.