In “Which Languages?” (2013) Arabic literary scholar Wail Hassan proposes critical investigations of relations that do not center on the US or Europe but which form networks in which the US and Europe are nonetheless implicated. Hassan proposes that one way of doing this it to consider “tertiary relations” in which the west is not necessarily or always the controlling term. Analyzing representations of Egypt in Sudanese literature written in English, my paper proposes such a triangulation. Focusing on the Sudanese writer Leila Abouleila’s Anglophone novel Lyrics Alley (2010), I study the representation of Egypt from the vantage point of the Sudan set during a charged political moment -- the moment after Egypt’s independence from British colonial rule but before Sudan’s independence from Egypt. Inspired by the life of Abouleila’s paternal uncle, a popular Sudanese poet and lyricists, the novel focuses on unfulfilled love, marriage and interpersonal family relationships. In the text, Egypt, being both colonizer and colonized, is configured on the woman’s body. Although the anti-colonial uprisings of the 1950’s are absent in the novel, colonial injustice, gendered and non-gendered power relations between Egypt and Sudan are played out in the marriage plot. And, the same vectors or measures of civility that are perpetuated by western colonialism are metaphorized in the figures of the two wives – the Sudanese wife is seen as “backwards” and “traditional” while the Egyptian wife is portrayed as her European opposite. Focusing on the implications of the persistence of these Eurocentric frames of analysis, as well as the erasure of Egypt’s vexed position as both colonizer as well as colonized, I argue that the novel, despite its focus on the Sudan and Egypt, upholds a two-dimensional east/west model.