If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

By: Noor Naga

Narrated by: Amin El Gamal, Noor Naga

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?

©2022 Noor Naga (P)2022 Recorded Books

Tale as oldest time

This is why women should never date below them socially and especially financially why do women move to foreign countries and lose all common sense if you wouldn't bring home a drug addicted homeless person after only knowing them for 2 months while living in NY why do it Cairo?

Perfect

This has been on my tbr list for a few months now, but I am so glad I chose the audiobook because I would not have had the same experience reading it to myself.

Captivating Read

It held my interest interest the whole time intently. A riveting, unexpected story, Highly Recommend.

A male hating book, but well disguised.

Interesting format. Although at times the book seems to balance male and female “bad characteristics”, it is really another current men bashing book. The author pretends to recognize nuances about the gender critical times we live in, in the end the author is a blatant opposite of a mysogenist.

Beautiful work

A wonderfully rendered depiction of how love and capitalism cannot coexist. The tale of a woman who returns to her ancestral lineage and finds the contradictions that arise when a nation is idealized. The story is told through the lens of a complicated relationship between the fantasy of home or a mother land and the ways that contemporary politics impact our everyday lives.