In his twenty-first century re-evaluation of the Egyptian nationalist project, Sunset Oasis (2006), novelist Bahaa Taher revisits the early moments of the British occupation that followed the 1881-82 Urabi Revolution. Tracing the story of Ne’ma, a black Sudanese slave and the male protagonist’s concubine, I argue that despite her scant appearances and the total absence of her voice, Ne’ma acts agentially, resisting epistemic violence by a text that forces on her an identity other than her own. Her real name unknown even to herself, and made to represent an essence of Egypt, Ne’ma is denied her history and memory except as an exotic, jasmine-scented Scheherazade whose folktales captivate Mahmoud, the protagonist, and whose sexuality satiates him. Lying on the margins of the narrative, Ne’ma’s story is central to Mahmoud’s stunted growth as his betrayal of the revolution is paralleled by his betrayal of her, and his failure to reach maturity reflects that of the nation. Despite his attachment to Ne’ma, Mahmoud refuses to acknowledge his love for her, alluding to their position as master and concubine. Ne’ma resists Mahmoud’s and the text’s cultural and sexual colonization. Her decision to leave Mahmoud’s house, in a late nineteenth-century Egypt where even manumitted slaves could be captured and resold into slavery, signifies refusal to be spoken for or constructed by the narrative. Her insistence on her individuality implicates the novel for its complicity in Egypt’s role as colonizer. The novel’s setting in Siwa, a remote village in the western desert whose people see Egyptians as foreign intruders, facilitates the critique of the nationalist project. Mahmoud, who is there to collect exorbitant taxes, sees in Egyptian-Siwan relations a replication of British-Egyptian relations, thus leading to his ultimate disillusionment with nationalist and colonialist ideologies alike. Yet, the novel’s sensitivity to Egypt’s minorities, its exposure of the inequality of the nationalist project, and its effort to recount the point of view of Siwans through use of multiple narrators, is undercut by oblivion to the ultimate minority – Siwan women and female slaves whose voices are erased from both the Egyptian historical narrative and the author’s fictive (re)vision of the history.