"Habibi" by Craig Thompson - Book Review and Reflection

First published May 3, 2012 at http://www.hercircleezine.com/2012/05/03/habibi-by-craig-thompson/

HABIBI BY CRAIG THOMPSON

As part of inContext’s look at graphic novels and comics (comix), I couldn’t wait to read Craig Thompson’s HABIBI. Thompson is an amazing artist and a master of the graphic novel format. His art takes you beyond the story. He renders emotion in a way that is sublime. I was first introduced to Craig Thompson via BLANKETS, a coming-of-age graphic novel that can be enjoyed as much by adults as by teens. In fact, I’d argue an adult would like it even more for having been through all of what is portrayed amazingly well for an artist who himself was not many years beyond the tale he told. With all this anticipation, and then even glancing at the drawings in HABIBI, I looked forward to the story. However, I was disappointed.

Yes, the world is a mess. Yet, do we need another story, even one gorgeously told through highly artistic images, to remind us of this? The world at large seems a scary place for women so often. Do we need another tale of abuse or rape? Do we need reminders of the horrors women suffer now and have suffered in real and also in imagined histories like those of religious texts? Apparently, Craig Thompson thinks so in his most recent and highly lauded graphic novel, HABIBI.

HABIBI is critically acclaimed. For the art, the tender storytelling, and weaving of religions, yes, the book more than exceeds expectations. Yet, the basic premise I get from this text is that women will never find sex that includes love, and that for love, she might have to forsake sexual fulfillment. I sense the frustration of a man who cannot reconcile his bodily desires with his religious beliefs or determine how sex might not be depraved and a taking from a woman versus an intimate, shared, equal experience. Only through castration might a man not be damaging to a woman, it seems.

I am tired of stories about women “leaving their bodies” during sex to escape the act and/or the person with whom they’re having sex. I understand someone seeking to escape the physical pain of sexual assault and thus attempting to mentally vacate her body. Thus, Dodola leaving her body behind when her middle-aged first husband initiates her into sex when she is about ten years old is appropriate. It is also appropriate that she might seek to mentally “check-out” when she endures sexual attention when she prostitutes herself in exchange for food and provisions. Due to these experiences, Dodola is rendered wholly incapable of being at home in her body.

Men are depicted as merely lusting for women, at the very least. Typically, in HABIBI, men are insatiable, demonic, ravenous rapists and abusers. Even Zam, a child slave who escapes with the help of Dodola, cannot reconcile or come to terms with his own sexuality, and thus seeks to cancel it out. He believes if a man desires a woman, then he is depraved. In the book, we see plenty of depraved men, and actually none who are not. I suppose it stands that Zam cannot find a single example of a man who is not possessed by or obsessed with sex, yet I cannot also come to think of the sale of slaves, the sale of young girls and the subsequent sex acts as anything but criminal behavior. It is really rape and child molestation. So, we see men who would participate in these acts, not just men who might have an interest in sex. For Thompson, there is no middle ground.

Later in the story when Dodola comes to love and even desire Zam, whom she served as a kind of mother for nine years of his early life, she is relieved from this by Zam’s status as a eunuch. Dodola may long for a child of her own, Zam’s child, and yet she is happy to go without this in exchange for the platonic love Zam can provide. I’m not saying that Dodola should forsake Zam and his love just because he cannot function sexually or provide a child. However, Dodola is denied a positive sexuality and just accepts this in order to have shared love. The story ends when Zam and Dodola purchase a young girl, and we are left believing this is at least one woman who will grow up without a threat of having her future sexuality stolen from her. And, yet, with all the examples of child molesters, rapists, and a lively slave trade, whom might this child grow to love in her future? If all men are depraved, and potentially criminally prone in their depravity, who is there for Habibi when she is a woman?

I suppose it might be seen as a happy ending when Dodola and Zam are reunited, for what seems like the remainder of their lives, and they share a bond of love together. Dodola keeps fighting, and thus might be seen as a positive female heroine. For me, the ending is sad and hopeless, however, as I cannot imagine Dodola living without harassment in the street, not being raped or attacked yet again, or her and Zam’s adoptive daughter, Habibi, growing into adulthood without such a fate. I believe the larger story Thompson attempted to tell here was a person coming to terms with the varied religions of the world, and reconciling conflicting stories of the various religious texts. I believe he wanted us to believe in the happy ending, as well. This reader is not so naïve as to don the rose-colored glasses required to imagine such a possibility in the world Thompson provides for HABIBI.

All of the above said, HABIBI is an example of the epitome of what a graphic format can do for a story. Craig Thompson is incredibly talented. The intricacy of what is rendered in HABIBI is humbling. Every compliment one might pay to a drawing could be heaped on Thompson’s work and would still be understatement. Read this book and be initiated into the world of a master storyteller, and an artist beyond compare. It might seem incongruous to, on the one hand, walk away from a book disappointed in the tale it tells and yet compliment it so highly. However, with HABIBI I cannot ignore the art and the way in which the art tells the stories Thompson conveys in this book.