Seth Hahne's Reviews > Habibi
My rating:
Habibi
by Craig Thompson
A couple weeks ago, I read and reviewed Chester Brown's Paying For It, a book singularly concerned with separating love from sex. Brown forwards the idea that fewer problems arise if we segregate sex as completely as we can from the relational sphere. He does this to such an extent that he proposes that sex is a pleasure best paid for and made entirely transactional. It's not spoiling anything to say that Brown, as he represents himself in the book, is more wholly concerned with sex than he is with relationship. Despite the author's protestations, readers will almost certainly feel some sorrow for him as he shows himself unable to enjoy the manifold blessing of romantic relationships. We watch his philosophy play itself out and wonder: is it enough?
Craig Thompson's latest work, Habibi, may function well as a companion piece to Paying For It, only emphasizing the inverse of Brown's work: love that excludes sex. Thompson balances several themes throughout Habibi's unfolded history of two runaway slaves but perhaps chief among these is an exploration of love, of true love—and how it can exist, flourish, and grow even in the absence of sexual fulfillment. Chester Brown focused on his women as pure objects, as receptacles for his sexuality to the exclusion of their ability to exist as full-orbed human persons with dreams, hopes, loves, or even (for the most part) personalities; Thompson, on the other hand, uses the objectification of his characters to craft them into noble persons deserving of dignity, of hope, of love.
Thompson walks a narratively perilous path, pushing envelopes with his characters that draw out the terror of the human spirit balancing against the redeeming power of a full-bodied and depth-defying love. His choices are dangerous because as his characters participate in choices that may seem abominable—and in some sense they are abominable choices, made so by their sheer necessity—Thompson risks the reader losing interest in the plight of these two characters. Still, the compassionate reader won't be able to help investment into their two stories, which are really just one story.
In Habibi, Thompson introduces us to his heroine, Dodola, as she is sold into marriage to a scribe who will teach her to read, to understand the power of stories. Dodola is nine and Thompson does not spare us the aftermath of her wedding night. What's worse is that the anguish of such a scene, such an experience, is small in comparison to the fate Dodola and her adopted son Zam will live out. Thompson makes a cruel god for his world and creations; yet it is in his cruelty that we see the beauty of Dodola and Zam spill out in Habibi's nearly seven hundred pages.
Habibi is a major work in comics literature and Thompson's first since the nearly-six-hundred-page Blankets. Comparisons will be obvious. Both works traffic deeply in religious language and colour their texts in displays of sacred ferocity. Both explore the boundaries and need for love and human contact. Both play with non-linearity in storytelling, skipping back and forth and only revealing the past in time to illuminate the future. These two creations are very much the work of the same author and it's a joy to see his voice maturing.
Still, for those hoping for another Blankets, Thompson has something very much different in store. In both tone and scope, Habibi is an entirely more ambitious work. We see Thompson redressing things that were focal points in Blankets. In the former book, Raina is depicted in such sacred light by Thompson that she becomes the ultimate example of female sexual objectification—all with the best intentions of course, but when young Craig deifies her, he makes her into little better than a graven image. In Habibi, however, when Dodola is depicted nude (which is often), she is wholly human. This is a triumph of Thompson's technique for in the midst of the narrative, she is being wholly objectified, yet these instances serve only to drive home her humanity. For the majority of those within Habibi's narrative landscape, Dodola exists much as Chester Brown's ideal woman—she is merely a receptacle for their sexual advances. Thompson, however, prevents the reader from seeing her in this way by refusing to give her the visual lyricism her bestowed upon Raina. Both are sacred and both are holy, but the one is made so by her sexuality while the other is made so by her personhood. It's a difficult line to draw and that Thompson illustrates it so well ably demonstrates why he is one the leading auteurs in the medium.
[Even odds that Thompson actually tried this out at some point in his life.]
Habibi is a book marked by rape, slavery, castration, forced marriages, the murder of children, harems, and love. While in its murk and depths, it may not seem possible that the last of these—love—should so completely over-power all else, but this is the case. Love is not always victorious, but it is always glorious. The love of these two for each other is simultaneously heart-rending and heart-warming. And it is for this reason that I won't soon forget that when Habibi asks of love without sex, Is it enough? the answer, though quiet in the face of the world's roar, is defiant: Yes, it is.
Note
One word about the art: it's manifestly evident why this book took Thompson six years to create. Beyond the research necessary to develop such a well-rounded story that borrows so heavily from the Qur'an, Habibi's art is a wonder. The intricacy with which Thompson approaches his pages staggers the imagination—especially when one recalls the stress-injury pain in his hand that he related in Carnet de Voyage. So many of the pages of Habibi feature delicate ornamentation pulled from Islamic culture, ornament that would take hours to complete. Here's an example:
These are corners from four different pages, showing the kind of decoration that Thompson wrapped around entire pages. At first I presumed that he drew this just the once and reproduced the designwork for subsequent pages. This photo though shows that each page's work was distinct. That Thompson took the care to patiently (or impatiently, it hardly matters) draw out these magnificent designs helps flesh out just how much effort was poured into this production. The six years shows and Thompson outdoes anything I'd seen from him previously.
[Review courtesy of Good Ok Bad]
by Craig Thompson
A couple weeks ago, I read and reviewed Chester Brown's Paying For It, a book singularly concerned with separating love from sex. Brown forwards the idea that fewer problems arise if we segregate sex as completely as we can from the relational sphere. He does this to such an extent that he proposes that sex is a pleasure best paid for and made entirely transactional. It's not spoiling anything to say that Brown, as he represents himself in the book, is more wholly concerned with sex than he is with relationship. Despite the author's protestations, readers will almost certainly feel some sorrow for him as he shows himself unable to enjoy the manifold blessing of romantic relationships. We watch his philosophy play itself out and wonder: is it enough?
Craig Thompson's latest work, Habibi, may function well as a companion piece to Paying For It, only emphasizing the inverse of Brown's work: love that excludes sex. Thompson balances several themes throughout Habibi's unfolded history of two runaway slaves but perhaps chief among these is an exploration of love, of true love—and how it can exist, flourish, and grow even in the absence of sexual fulfillment. Chester Brown focused on his women as pure objects, as receptacles for his sexuality to the exclusion of their ability to exist as full-orbed human persons with dreams, hopes, loves, or even (for the most part) personalities; Thompson, on the other hand, uses the objectification of his characters to craft them into noble persons deserving of dignity, of hope, of love.
Thompson walks a narratively perilous path, pushing envelopes with his characters that draw out the terror of the human spirit balancing against the redeeming power of a full-bodied and depth-defying love. His choices are dangerous because as his characters participate in choices that may seem abominable—and in some sense they are abominable choices, made so by their sheer necessity—Thompson risks the reader losing interest in the plight of these two characters. Still, the compassionate reader won't be able to help investment into their two stories, which are really just one story.
In Habibi, Thompson introduces us to his heroine, Dodola, as she is sold into marriage to a scribe who will teach her to read, to understand the power of stories. Dodola is nine and Thompson does not spare us the aftermath of her wedding night. What's worse is that the anguish of such a scene, such an experience, is small in comparison to the fate Dodola and her adopted son Zam will live out. Thompson makes a cruel god for his world and creations; yet it is in his cruelty that we see the beauty of Dodola and Zam spill out in Habibi's nearly seven hundred pages.
Habibi is a major work in comics literature and Thompson's first since the nearly-six-hundred-page Blankets. Comparisons will be obvious. Both works traffic deeply in religious language and colour their texts in displays of sacred ferocity. Both explore the boundaries and need for love and human contact. Both play with non-linearity in storytelling, skipping back and forth and only revealing the past in time to illuminate the future. These two creations are very much the work of the same author and it's a joy to see his voice maturing.
Still, for those hoping for another Blankets, Thompson has something very much different in store. In both tone and scope, Habibi is an entirely more ambitious work. We see Thompson redressing things that were focal points in Blankets. In the former book, Raina is depicted in such sacred light by Thompson that she becomes the ultimate example of female sexual objectification—all with the best intentions of course, but when young Craig deifies her, he makes her into little better than a graven image. In Habibi, however, when Dodola is depicted nude (which is often), she is wholly human. This is a triumph of Thompson's technique for in the midst of the narrative, she is being wholly objectified, yet these instances serve only to drive home her humanity. For the majority of those within Habibi's narrative landscape, Dodola exists much as Chester Brown's ideal woman—she is merely a receptacle for their sexual advances. Thompson, however, prevents the reader from seeing her in this way by refusing to give her the visual lyricism her bestowed upon Raina. Both are sacred and both are holy, but the one is made so by her sexuality while the other is made so by her personhood. It's a difficult line to draw and that Thompson illustrates it so well ably demonstrates why he is one the leading auteurs in the medium.
[Even odds that Thompson actually tried this out at some point in his life.]
Habibi is a book marked by rape, slavery, castration, forced marriages, the murder of children, harems, and love. While in its murk and depths, it may not seem possible that the last of these—love—should so completely over-power all else, but this is the case. Love is not always victorious, but it is always glorious. The love of these two for each other is simultaneously heart-rending and heart-warming. And it is for this reason that I won't soon forget that when Habibi asks of love without sex, Is it enough? the answer, though quiet in the face of the world's roar, is defiant: Yes, it is.
Note
One word about the art: it's manifestly evident why this book took Thompson six years to create. Beyond the research necessary to develop such a well-rounded story that borrows so heavily from the Qur'an, Habibi's art is a wonder. The intricacy with which Thompson approaches his pages staggers the imagination—especially when one recalls the stress-injury pain in his hand that he related in Carnet de Voyage. So many of the pages of Habibi feature delicate ornamentation pulled from Islamic culture, ornament that would take hours to complete. Here's an example:
These are corners from four different pages, showing the kind of decoration that Thompson wrapped around entire pages. At first I presumed that he drew this just the once and reproduced the designwork for subsequent pages. This photo though shows that each page's work was distinct. That Thompson took the care to patiently (or impatiently, it hardly matters) draw out these magnificent designs helps flesh out just how much effort was poured into this production. The six years shows and Thompson outdoes anything I'd seen from him previously.
[Review courtesy of Good Ok Bad]
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This is an amazing review, I agree completely. The comparisons drawn are useful and I plan on returning to this review to help facilitate a book club on this selection in the future. Again, great review!
Thanks for linking that. It always pays to examine the cultural prejudices that may exist within a work. The article clearly demonstrates how readers, especially those tied to North African or Islamic cultures, might find themselves offended by Thompson's work here. And honestly, it's quite possible that Habibi is an offensive work.However, I did not Fatemeh's argument for the case compelling. It's too facile, lacking a nuanced approach to criticism that I feel is necessary when judging things like ethnocentrism and sexism, probably the two primary accusations here. What I mean is that I don't think Fatemeh understands the text being critiqued—which I think is understandable, as its a sprawling work with many different facets that require a lot of work to fully suss out.
Let's start with the sexism and then move on to the Orientalist charge. Fatemeh points to the dangers of sexualizing rape but really, the issue with problematic depictions of rape is not the sexualizing of the violation (rape is inherently sexual, after all) but the sensualization of it. In Habibi, yes Dodola is raped and sexually abused far too often, but these scenes horrify rather than titillate. There is nothing attractive about these events. And when they begin to play part in Zam's sexual fantasies, he is rightly repulsed by the abuse his mind can conjure.
That both Dodola and Zam suffer numerous sexual indignities is essential to the sexual goal of the story—i.e. that love can save even sometimes in spite of sex, that love can even begin to reverse the anguish caused by abusive sex. For that story to exist, it has to have abusive sexual events. Thompson depicts these things and they always bring the reader to understand the sense of tragedy even as they are occurring. And even when the characters, because of who circumstances have shaped them to be, are choosing these things as an act of their own will.
For Fatemeh to so quickly dismiss this as dangerous and imply Thompson should know better than to treat women in such indecorous fashion in his book doesn't bode well for the strength of the Orientalist argument. That is, if Fatemeh critiques sloppily in one area, it may be likely that there would be sloppy critique in another.
And here again, I don't feel like Fatemeh really took the time to grasp what was going on in Habibi. Yes, Thompson is clearly working with Orientalist tropes. Yes, Thompson is working with stereotypes. But no, I don't think he's doing so either out of some misguided cultural agenda or out of naïveté. And I don't think the Guernica interview cited allows for that reading either. It seems pretty clear after a careful reading that Thompson is subverting tropes for his own fable. He's not simply creating some magical Arabian fantasy.
Beyond the love vs. sex theme that governs the work, he seems to be returning to a similar thread as that which he took up in Blankets. He's evaluating the value of religion, though not just religion. Fatemeh makes a big deal of Thompson's conservationist direction in the modern industrial expression, but that doesn't seem at all the purpose of that half of Wanatolian society in the story.
If you consider the mindset of the 21st century neo-atheist movement, you'll find that evaluation of religious society as the source of all kinds of ills (greed, rape, racism, war, sexism, and all manner of oppression) plays a prominent theme. Thompson, while paying some respect to the idea of the sacred, does seem to fall into this category. So if one considers all the backwards horror in the low-civ section of the story (the part with harems and caravans and slaves and eunuchs) to be his evaluation of a society built on religion, things begin to make more sense.
At the point at which Dodola and Zam escape the Society That God Built, they emerge in the no-man's land between faith and secularism. They're following the path of many apostates—and of Thompson himself. This place is a mess of people grasping at faith and trying to get away from it. It's a hard and lonely place to be.
Then, Dodola and Zam emerge fully into secular society. And here's where Thompson's religious journey (that he's taking us and Dodola and Zam on) meets up with the sex vs. love story. Given Thompson's background, the reader might expect the two to enter into non-primitive society (i.e. non-religions society, since the contemporary atheist tends to view religion as a chief source of barbarism) and find their troubles begin to melt away as reason vanquishes faith. Yet that isn't the case. In both the magical world and the real world, humanity suffers from this corruption that leads it to commit horrors (that is, it leads them to hate). Thompson posits his solution to magic and realism and, whether one buys into it or not (some may label it base sentimentalism), that solution is love—the kind of love that can exist and conquer in spite of sex and religion.
I think if one really wants to be offended by Habibi, the only real place to ruffle feathers is his negative evaluation of religion. It seems pretty clear that he's not perpetrating any kind of sexism in the book and while it's possible that he's being culturally prejudiced, it would take a better argument than what Fatemeh offers up. I couldn't respect the argument because I had no confidence that the text was actually understood or dealt with fairly.
Then, at the end of the day, suppose that someone does demonstrate that Thompson, working under the guise of subverting Orientalist tropes, is actually and insidiously perpetrating Orientalist errors. What then? Here it depends on the reader. The thin-skinned and easily offended will likely think negatively of the book. The rest of us will say, Hmm, that's too bad. and then go on with evaluating it on its literary merits rather than with whether we agree with its conclusions.
Personally, being a man of faith, I'm a fan of neither Thompson's portrayal of religion nor the way I feel he misrepresent (probably through ignorance) particular religious beliefs. I think the way he depicts religion perpetrates errors of evaluation and continues an errant negative perspective that is unnecessary and (in the minds of those of faith) harmful at the end of the day. That doesn't negate the value of his work. It doesn't lessen the literary impact of either Blankets or Habibi. Both stand as powerful, well-wrought works regardless of who we personally feel about Thompson's depictions of people in all their diverse forms.
I would suggest you read the comments."I was surprised to see Thompson say in his Guernica interview that he modeled the eunuch characters and culture after hijra communities -- without mentioning that these are South Asian, not Arabic or Middle Eastern, and are usually (if not always) affiliated with Hinduism, not Islam. (The book excerpt linked to in the interview also mixes South Asian and Middle Eastern imagery.) Even in a made-up country/"fairy tale", that kind of thing seems a pretty damning example of sloppy Orientalism.
I also found a round-table review which discusses the book's Orientalism (Tom Hart mentions the mixing of Middle Eastern and South Asian imagery/cultures, as well as potential others), and in which Katie Haegele brings up her discomfort with the book's "black" characters, which speak in a kind of American black vernacular:
http://www.tcj.com/a-habibi-roundtable/"
And perhaps read about why calling people who find racist diatribe offensive "thin skinned" is perpetuating racism.
http://www.derailingfordummies.com/
Also another, longer review:
http://majjal.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/s...
Even if you found Habibi perpetuating racism (by which are we meaning culturalist or ethnicist?), do you really think diatribe a suitable description? As far as thin-skinnedness, it seems patently true (though I may be mistaken) that the more easily one embraces emotional passion in discourse, the less likely one is to contribute reasonably to that discourse. Case in point, I was showing Casablanca to a group of high-school-aged people with the intent to discuss the film's cinematic qualities and storytelling themes. After the credits rolled, one young woman was so overcome with anger that Ilsa would have spent that time with Rick in Paris while her husband was still alive. It didn't matter to her that Ilsa believed her husband had been killed, that she believed herself single once more. This young woman was so overcome with rage that she could not see the movie as anything but a film about gross marital infidelity. Her passion here led to some interesting discussion certainly, but it also made it impossible to speak about the film in realistic terms.
I found the Derailing for Dummies page less than helpful. Beyond it's extremely patronizing and alienating tone (just because someone might disagree with the blanket assessment of a thing as betraying gross prejudice doesn't necessitate arrogance or a feeling that their knowledge is incontrovertible), it seems to want more than anything to itself derail conversation. Anything other than base acquiescence seems to be viewed with suspicion. Which seems in its own way to be a more insidious form of derailing discourse.
Again, I have never said that Thompson isn't employing Orientalist trappings in a harmful way. I'm only saying that it's not entirely evident that this is the case and that Fatemeh's article did little to argue the point.
I may have time to read the Majjal article later today and look forward to what it has to say. (Though I will say this now: the author unethically hotlinks to an image on my site—which is never great for first impressions.)
Deena, the Majjal article was much better and more thoughtful than the Racialicious post. I'm going to spend some time to think about the points mentioned before I compose a real response. There's a lot of good grist for discussion there. My initial thoughts are that while there are some valid concerns, that Thompson ultimately justifies his use of Orientalist trope by the story he tells. It may be that he doesn't, but my off-the-cuff feeling is that he does.
At first I was put-off by how much the author of the Majjal article invests in the varying interpretations of other reviewers—since critical opinion is not intrinsically related to either Thompson's intent or the content of the work itself. At the same time, while these opinions don't bear any necessary relationship to the actual content of Habibi, they do point to the danger in misreading the text (as I think a number of readers do). In that sense, Habibi *is* dangerous in that its complexity provides a text that can be misinterpreted to realistically portray The Arab World (as if there were any such monolith). I think the fact that there are so many different understandings of what is going on in the text demonstrates ably that most reviewers don't know what they're dealing with—after all, interpretations that are at odds with each other can't possibly both be correct.
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Since you're here, I saw that you rated Fables highly. What did you think of the Arabian fables volume. Did you dismiss its obvious indebtedness to Orientalism because these were clearly mythical characters in a fantasy setting and readers would be less likely to see them as representative of the real-world Middle East? Or did you find them as distasteful as you found Habibi?
