An Egyptian-American woman moves to Cairo to explore her cultural identity. While there, she becomes involved with a man from the village of Shobrakheit, a couple of wealthy locals, and a British man. Between her eyes and those of “the boy from Shobrakheit” (unnamed, as is the narrator), we get an account of her struggles to fit into a place that is considered important to her identity.
This novel explores the feeling of otherness that the narrator experienced growing up as an Arab-America and particularly focuses on her early adulthood during the “great a-wokening.” This fairly academic understanding of culture, class, and gender clashes with her experiences in Cairo.
The third section (much maligned) is written as a writing workshop dialogue about the first two sections largely focusing on boilerplate responses to how the story portrays the people of Cairo and whether it is appropriate to “platform” certain characters/beliefs.
This novel feels like a confrontation between the American academic approach to talking about non-western cultures and the experience of living through them in a way that feels unique and perhaps uncomfortable and too complex (which is the third section).
This short novel gives a lot to chew on even with the main discussion already being played out at the end of the book. It felt a bit extreme at times but was still a well-done, important novel.
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