If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Set in post-revolution Cairo around 2017, the novel tells the story of two unnamed narrators, an Egyptian-American woman and an Egyptian man, whose volatile romance exposes deep fissures of class, language, and cultural belonging. It is structured in three parts: The first uses alternating first-person perspectives headed by philosophical questions, the second employs longer prose blocks with footnotes, and the third takes the form of a creative writing workshop that reframes everything preceding it.

The boy from Shobrakheit recounts how he left his small farming village in Beheira, a Nile Delta province, about 10 years earlier, after his grandmother died by suicide in the kitchen oven. She raised him after his parents' marriage fractured. When the boy was seven, she took him into her riverside house, and they lived together in what he describes as royalty. She sold her wedding gold to buy him his first camera at age nine and filled a room with paper cranes she folded herself. When the boy was 16, his mother secretly sold the house. Police evicted them, stepping on the grandmother's paper cranes, and they moved in with his parents, where humiliation destroyed the grandmother's spirit. Fleeing to Cairo after her death, the boy found four thousand pounds she had hidden in his camera.

The American girl, an Egyptian-American woman with a shaved head, arrives in Cairo from New York after graduating from Columbia University. Her parents are divorcing. Her father, Fouad, reverted his name from Freddy and styled himself as New York's first holistic dentist. Her mother arranged everything: a sublet apartment downtown, a teaching job at the British Council, and a driver. From her first hours in Cairo, everyone asks the same question: Why would someone with an American passport come willingly to a country everyone is trying to leave?

Both narrators enter downtown Cairo's social world through Café Riche. The American girl meets Sami, the half-British son of Riche's owner, and Reem, a French-educated muralist who is openly gay. The boy from Shobrakheit frequents Riche because Sami owes him money. Their first encounter occurs when she borrows his spoon to eat her coffee grounds, a gesture he reads as intimacy. That evening, Sami turns away girls in hijabs by claiming Riche is a restaurant. On the street afterward, the boy explains: "They don't hate Muslims, they hate the poor." Her shocked reaction bonds them.

The boy begins texting the American girl relentlessly: poetry, origami tutorials, film clips, Palestinian newspaper archives. His formal, classical Arabic contrasts sharply with her infantile grasp of the language. They meet at his ahwa, a cheap traditional coffeehouse under a bridge. She notices the frayed hems of his pants, his single pair of socks washed nightly, his lack of toothpaste. She recognizes that her money and freedom to leave erode any claim she has to this place.

The boy's backstory includes the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which he documented with his camera, selling photographs to news outlets. Six years later, the revolution's promises have collapsed: The pound has depreciated, activists have been imprisoned, and photographs meant to memorialize martyrs have been used by al-Sisi's government to identify and arrest those they depicted. The American girl, who watched the revolution on television from the Upper West Side, arrives in the riskless aftermath claiming belonging, a fact the boy holds against her.

After the boy walks out of an exhibit at the Townhouse Gallery, the American girl brings him home. Their first sexual encounter is marked by ambiguity: She says no, he insists, and each narrator frames what happens differently. He never leaves, and she has a key while he does not, trapping him inside when she goes to work. The apartment becomes a site of class confrontation. She lives among kilims (flat-woven rugs) and orchids; he contrasts her curated space with his rooftop shack of unfinished concrete. His cocaine withdrawal makes him volatile. He grows controlling, and she stops seeing friends. He calls her a whore, accuses her of sleeping with British colleagues, throws a glass against the wall, and swings a side table at her head, missing. He crumbles weeping: "I'm not well. Can't you see I'm not well?" When they watch the 1971 Egyptian film The Thin Thread and he calls it a romance, she understands what he wants and that next time he will not miss.

One morning the boy is gone, along with his cigarettes, his sandals, and her mother's pearls. She closes the shutters, deep-cleans the apartment, and watches television for days. She returns to Sami and Reem but cannot explain what happened. Sami reveals he wanted to warn her: The boy came to Riche because Sami owed him something, "not because he's clean." Sami calls the boy a kherty, a derogatory term for a man who provides informal services to foreigners.

Part Two tracks diverging paths. The boy, having relapsed, descends into homelessness, following the American girl to work and standing for hours on the 6th of October Bridge trying to glimpse her on a balcony. He elaborates violent rescue fantasies. The American girl begins sleeping with William, a charming but oblivious British teacher at the British Council. She reflects on her ex Elijah, a Black activist from Philadelphia with whom she performed a version of Blackness, and on a Blackfishing accusation (adopting Black aesthetics despite not being Black) that drove her offline.

When the American girl's handbag is snatched, the boy witnesses it but decides the moment is not dramatic enough for his return. Weeks later, a bald, clearly unwell man accosts her on an empty street, and the boy tackles him. She recognizes the man is not dangerous but unwell, though she says nothing. She takes the boy upstairs and cares for him. They resume a platonic arrangement: She slips money into his coat pockets, and neither acknowledges the transfer. He references nude photographs he took of her, though his analog camera has been broken since 2014 and the photos never existed.

One night, with William in her apartment, the boy comes to her door, having relapsed on cocaine. She opens it wearing William's T-shirt, but the boy pushes past. He moves room to room while she follows, pleading. He reaches the dining room balcony, where William stands in the glow of his phone. The boy charges. William catches the boy's momentum over his shoulder, lifts him by the knees, and tips him over the balustrade. The boy falls from the seventh floor and dies.

Part Three shifts to a creative writing workshop. A character named Noor presents Parts One and Two as her memoir to an Instructor and fellow students, reading an excerpt about weeks of isolation, unable to tell anyone that a boy from a village they have never heard of is dead because of her. Laura argues that Noor's grief risks normalizing abuse. Tim suggests that Sami and Reem "flattened" the boy by spreading word that his death was a junkie's suicide, and that the police's failure to investigate reveals why he died. Jacques suggests ending the manuscript at the climactic death.

The Instructor announces that Noor has received a publishing deal, calls the boy from Shobrakheit "the dark heart of your book," and closes with: "Almost worth it now, wouldn't you say?" The remark implicates the literary apparatus in the commodification of the boy's life and death. The workshop format enacts the novel's deeper concerns: the power dynamics of who tells whose story, the way cultural fluency determines whose suffering is legible, and the uncomfortable closeness between empathy and consumption.