I’m Not Your Habibi: Thoughts on Craig Thompson’s Graphic Novel

By Special Correspondent Fatemeh Fakhraie

Sir Richard Burton is most famous for sexing up The 1,001 Arabian Nights. Two centuries later, Craig Thompson has graciously provided some accompanying imagery.

I feel like I have no choice but to hate Thompson’s latest graphic novel, Habibi. I’ll admit that it was beautifully drawn, though some of the panels seem needlessly garnished with alchemy symbols or random Arabic letters. But I’ll let Robyn Creswell’s review for The New York Times handle the fact that Thompson clutters his story—my beef with Thompson is about his staggering Orientalism, which I’ll get to shortly.

Themes of longing and survival permeate Habibi. The protagonists, Zam and Dodola, long for each other, likening this to a yearning for the Divine – Middle Eastern poets have done this for centuries. Zam and Dodola endure horrible events in the name of survival, perhaps tying in with Thompson’s conservationist theme by implying that our disregard for the earth is tantamount to rape and castration of the planet. These themes, however, are often drowned out—no matter how much Thompson underlines them—by the towering gaffes of his misrepresentation. The country of Wanatolia may be fiction, but the cultures it mimics and clumsily muddles together are real.

When one opens Habibi, one might assume that it takes place a long time ago, in a fictional, far-away land that happens to look and feel just like Disney’s Agrabah. But, lo! Wanatolia has steam punk-themed palace guards and high-rise condo construction that flies in the face of a village’s pollution and resulting poverty and famine. Is it to represent the “Global South,” as Thompson claims in a Guernica interview?

No. It’s simply an Orientalist reimaging of a modern Arabia—Thompson needs modern machinery to further his conservationist theme, but he still wants his pre-modern harems full of odalisques with no cell phones and his pre-modern camel caravans crossing a desert that his very same construction companies would build roads through.

Thompson admitted to Guernica that he drew inspiration for Habibi from the Orientalist art movement. Orientalist paintings are a primary example of Orientalism as a racist point of view because they are Western depictions of Arab lands based on preconceptions of the painters (who often had never been to the region they were depicting). Thompson traps himself by not realizing that his magical land full of djinns and harems is exactly the kind of fantastical interpretation that many Middle Eastern people and Muslims have had enough of.

And then we come to the other huge problem: its portrayal of women and the sexualizing of rape. The female protagonist, Dodola, is raped constantly: as a child, by her first husband; as a child and teen, by men in the caravans she tried to steal food from; by the sultan whose harem she lived in. Dodola’s history is a history of rape, also falling into the Orientalist trope of brutal male savages and their oppressed women. And once Zam (or Habibi, the male protagonist) witnesses one of these rapes, both his consciousness and his dreams are plagued by sensual reenactments of her rape. Do I really have to make the point here that sexualizing rape is dangerous and unacceptable?

Page 1 of 2 | Next page