Rare are books that can truly—in the most genuine and fascinating sense—be called experimental, but Alexandrian poet and writer Noor Naga’s first prose novel is one such rarity. Sharp, switched-on, and self-interrogating, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English masterfully continues, long after the last page is read, to provoke uncomfortable yet imperative questions about what we demand from literature that represents otherness … Naga ridicules our naive expectations of ‘marketable’ literature depicting otherness. As a writer, Naga does not excuse herself from this scrutiny, the final revelation of this inventive and brilliant book scathingly proving her very point.
