My house is isolated, up on the tip of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, but daybreak sounds rise and reach my window, where I sit reading your book. Someone heckles from a road below to someone else, whom I imagine is trudging uphill. I recognize the Arabic words individually, but strung together, they are senseless to me. I write them down, a small digitalized scribble, on the concluding page of your book, and I mouth them repeatedly, as I do with any new word or phrase in this place, which is also new to me, to cast them in memory. Later, I’ll find someone kind enough to attempt a translation. You would know, Noor, that street calls show for nothing in the online Arabic-to-English dictionary — and that there is a particular kind of angst, a wanting and waiting, at the periphery of a language.
I have long known that languages house worlds unique to them. I was born and raised in Pakistan. English, the language of the colonizers, was drilled into me along with Urdu, my mother tongue. Arabic was the language of religion, indecipherable to me as a child, when its utterance a matter of heaven and hell. My life remains polyvocal: I love in English, weep in Urdu, pray in Arabic. There is a vault in my mind brimming with stories in Urdu and Arabic. When I write these stories in English, well-meaning editors switch the words around, flatten them out, then fold them into new shapes. My other-language stories, caught between the skirmish of explaining too much and too little to an English-speaking audience, return to me in pitiful states.
But the stories in the first section of your book, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, exist as they were meant to be, the cadence of their original language mimicking the emotional urgency of your words. You write in English from the periphery of the Arabic language — which is to say, you render the stories in English as they were told to you in Arabic. In this section of your book, you write as if unconscious — or in refutation — of the Western gaze, in stories at once beautifully oriented and perhaps, for those outside of Arabic, disorienting. You use the Western construct of the comma as a musical note, sculpting the flow of your words. Your anecdotes read like song lines, both spectacular and supple, in English made capacious by the poetic rhythm of your prose.
Your book seems deceptively simple: a love story told in three sections, against the backdrop and drama of the revolution that swept Cairo’s streets. It’s there where, in section one, the lovers meet: she an Egyptian American girl, and he a boy from the village of Shobrakheit, about ninety miles to the north. His Arabic is “rustic,” “princely,” and hers “elementary,” “infantile.” In pendulum-like shifting perspectives, each narrates their world. They first meet in the upscale Café Riche, a place that exclusively admits those whom, you write, are “clean,” with enough money and social links to tie them to the Western world. Here, and across Cairo, the Egyptian American girl is an American, and she is welcomed into the café prima facie; the boy from Shobrakheit scrapes through as someone who once made hefty money by selling photographs of the revolution to Western media outlets. Between them, they barter the knowledge of their unique worlds: he is drawn to her status of being “the other kind of other,” an Egyptian woman born in the US; she sees in him an authentic Egyptian man with life stories of the highs and lows of a world-famous revolution. And she is here, in part, for authenticity: to authenticate her sense of belonging to Egypt, and to a language that she only ever heard her parents speak in the intimate space of her American home.
Somewhere, in the complicated foreignness between them, you draw an intimacy, an ephemeral meeting place. Their relationship progresses, and he ends up living with her in her upscale downtown apartment, its riches beyond his imagination, with balconies that afford light in all corners of her home. But in such close proximity, the very foreignness that drew them to each other begins to decenter them, scrambling their senses of identity and pulling them apart.
The first section of your book, then, is the beginning and the end of a romance, not only between an American girl and a village boy but also between the American girl and what would’ve been her mother tongue if migration hadn’t disrupted the natural order of inheritance, between home and the spectral idea of return, between the grandeur of the idea of revolution and its crippling reality in the Arab world.
I read your book transgressively, which is to say, I make it mine. You start each chapter in the first section of your book with a different question, designed to coax confidences. I read in the questions a ruse — an invitation, a provocation, and I acquiesce, letting your plot entangle with mine. I left my country of birth two decades ago, and I toil with the idea of return incessantly; the women who get to return in my stories are bolder versions of myself, better equipped than I am for journeys that disrupt the forward trajectories of their lives. They bear wings on their backs or possess wills stronger than mine. The American girl’s return, her living out the struggle to arrive at a place and a language that explains, if not creates, the substance of herself, presents to me an extension of a thought experiment that I’ve been toying with for years. There is freedom in this kind of reading, an intimacy between my reader’s life and your page.
The second section of your book begins after the end of the romance between the American girl and the Egyptian boy — after he flings a table at her, hitting the wall with it after she ducks; after they reconcile; after he sneaks out of her apartment, for good, while she sleeps. Their story ruptures, and so do your tools. Your premeditative questioning ceases; instead, you bow deferentially to the presence of an unfamiliar audience: you scatter footnotes through the text, and I sense the others at the periphery, looking on, in need of information that those of us closer to the center of your story already have. Footnotes serve as semiotic clutches, buttressing a text with explanations; they presuppose not only the existence of the other but also the loss of hope in a text for it to be understood on its terms.
And here, again, is a ruse; the footnotes that rove through the second section of your book may perform factuality, but the more I read, the more I realize that you’re winking at me, a fellow polyvocal writer. I thought I was now lingering near the margins, but then the footnotes shift. Some are solemn definitions, but others become ludicrous, exaggerations waiting to be called out by those who know better.
I proceed, destabilized in my reading. The nameless boy from Shobrakheit yearns to return to the intimate orbit of the American girl’s life. It is he who lingers on the margins, spiraling in his cocaine addiction, wanting and waiting to be let back in. The wanting morphs into obsessive yearning as he daily positions himself on a bridge overlooking the American girl’s balcony. Eventually, he finds his way back, only to be tipped over the balustrade, to his death, by her new lover.
I still trace all the Arabic words I hear back to their roots, and here, in simplistic terms, the Arabic syntax of your scenes builds up like a tree. I recognize that شرفة — the Arabic word for “balcony” — at its root translates to “social dignity.” Suddenly, you’ve complicated what might seem, as a simple matter of plot, like the story of a man stalking a woman with gender politics, through the layers of meaning piled, in different linguistic lineages, into your words.
The third section of your book opens with a trial of sorts, where the presiding judges are Western. They are English-speaking writing students with Anglophone names, the overseers in an orb-like classroom where they workshop the ending of your book. You reveal that the story I had been reading is framed within another; the preceding sections were part of the memoir the American girl had written and previously presented to the workshop. The American girl shares your name: Noor reads from an excerpt of her memoir about an Egyptian boy’s death, her complicated sense of guilt, and her eventual exit from Cairo back to her old world. In the exercise, Noor subsumes the Arabic-speaking boy’s voice, becoming the sole narrator of another world, one she fashions into a marketable commodity for a Western audience.
The workshop participants dissect her work, their fixed subjectivities and American imaginations on shining display. They demand: We need more cultural context here, I just think we need to see it. And: Like, the description of the body — that whole part with the angles of the bones. And: You have to remember we have zero references, so unless we’re given a shit-ton of description, we’re probably going to get it wrong. They complain: It was really hard to follow, plot-wise, and just left so many questions unanswered — literally. And: But you can’t be swapping voices that frequently and jumping around temporally and then also have these koan-riddles at the top of every page. And: I don’t mean to sound rude, but why were you grieving so much? They make judgments: I think the boy from Shobrakheit had a death wish anyway. The sole dissenting voice in the workshop is vehemently silenced by the others.
You thus turn the concluding section of your book into a spectacle of the Western gaze encountering a story from a place foreign to them. You indict me in the proceedings as a consumer, and yourself as the creator of your book. I feel the burden of carrying the weight of other worlds in these pages. I see you drawing a caricature of yourself; I imagine you fashioning it in the shape of your worst fears; and I understand how hard it is to get the world right and then see it slip away in someone else’s self-assured opinion.
I read your novel in post-revolution Lebanon. Here, I’m the other kind of other, connected to the place only through language. While I write this, a man has entered a bank in Beirut with a shotgun, demanding that a teller return his money — cash the bank withholds from him and from countless others in the midst of Lebanon’s financially engineered liquidity crisis. The man needs the money to pay his father’s hospital bills. A riot squad and the military surround the bank. The story explodes across social media in real time. People ask: Does the man have a death wish? Is his act of violence justified? The answers vary depending on who you ask, what language they speak, and which part of the world they find themselves born into. But your novel reminds me that there are other questions to be asked, questions that never make it into the immediate frame, that hold the heart of a story.
