Habibi (Pantheon Books)

A Page 45 Comic Book of the Month

Created by: Craig Thompson

Craig Thompson is primarily known as the creator of the critically acclaimed and popular graphic novel Blankets. He worked on Habibi from late 2004, and has put together a beautiful looking book, which is gorgeously packaged. To hold it in your hands is to understand the devotion and love that has gone into this. Clearly this book means something more to the author than just entertainment.

On reading the novel one is made aware of the number of themes flowing through it. Essentially the story concerns a young girl called Dodola, who is a slave who escapes at age 12, taking with her a little black skinned baby called Cham, who she renames Zam and who subsequently becomes the titular Habibi (beloved). For nine years they survive in the desert on a marooned boat, Dodola feeding them exchanging sex for food from caravans that travel nearby. After these nine years they are separated when Dodola is captured and sent to be a part of the Sultan's harem. The remainder of the book deals with the trials they undergo before they are eventually reunited.

On the surface this is a simple story of two people forced apart and tossed about by fate, who come through a number of trials to be together once again. It is an optimistic book, concluding with the idea that people can be treated extremely poorly by society and yet can still break the cycle and not perpetrate the same suffering on subsequent generations. However, the artist interweaves numerous themes within this, including religion (both Islam and Christianity) ownership, the environmental destruction of the planet and sex, which he manages to link together rather wonderfully. To write about all the different themes in this one entry would result in a piece of text too long for my tastes in a blog, so I'll take each in turn over time, beginning with sex.

Sex is unavoidable in Habibi. It is everywhere you look, on a huge number of pages. However the aim is not to titillate but to comment on the use of sex and sexuality within society; to show the problems that can be caused by not dealing with the subject in a sensible manner, devoid of hysteria and puritanism.

A key moment in the drama of the novel is the choice Zam makes to be castrated. Such an extreme and irreversible undertaking demands that we ask why he chose this? What prompted such an extreme undertaking?

The text shows Zam’s experience of sex up to that point as being:

• Innocently washing Dodola’s boobs at age 9 but Dodola getting a little uncomfortable with it.
• Staring in fascination at Dodola’s boobs at age 10 and Dodola being uncomfortable with it, demonstrating an emerging sexuality in Zam.
• Furtively staring at Dodola bathing when he was age 12 andboth being embarressed when Dodola catches him, as shown is the typical exchange that follows when she discovers him spying:

 Dodola: "How long have you been standing there?"

 Zam: "I… I just woke up"

This is the first time Zam lies about looking at Dodola’s nakedness, and so the first indication we have that Zam is starting to feel a shame associated with sex. Later whilst out looking for water, we see Zam imagining Dodola’s clothes slipping off her. Like a lot of adolescent boys he is thinking about sex a lot, and is facinated but clearly does not quite understand what he is feeling as this fantasy segues into Dodola becoming a vision of Eve.

After Eve leaves to go for food, Zam looks out of the window and gets an erection and looks troubled by this. Disobeying Dodola’s instructions, he leaves to follow her to the caravan where she has gone to get food, and witnesses her being forcefully taken by one of the merchants. He fantasizes about killing the merchant, but being so young is able to do nothing and so can only watch in horror.

This is his first experience of sex and it clearly traumatises him. We see him later painfully punching the erection he gets after thinking about Dodola’s naked body, then banging his head against the rock. We see him in the bath doing the same thing, and then waking from a nightmare where he is dressed as the merchant having sex with Dodola, so he sleeps on the floor and not in their bed:

“I’m too big to share a bed anymore.”

The innocence has gone, as it must for all, but Zam’s idea of sex is one of violence and he misinterprets his desire for Dodola as a desire to hurt her and is thus ashamed of himself, and filled with rage at the organ which seems to be responsible for such desires.

Sex throughout the book is depicted as either violent and/or an act of ownership and exploitation, as Dodola encapsulates when she says:

“I’d once used my body to my advantage, but even then it didn’t belong to me, posessed instead by the LUSTS of men."

It is not until the end of the book, when Zam and Dodola have sex together for the first time, albeit obviously non-penetrative, that we are witness to any sort of positive, loving, mutually pleasurable sexual activity.

What can we infer from this? Clearly we have an argument here against sex being used as exploitation or ownership, such as can be found in prostitution and pornography. However there are women who work within the sex industry who do not see themselves as being exploited (e.g. Dr Brooke Magnanti in her Belle-de-Jour blog, and Anna Arrowsmith who as Anna Span has directed some of the most popular porn films by and  aimed at women).

So is the argument for more positive information about sex to be made available to people as they mature into sexual beings? Neither Zam nor Dodola had any guidance as to how to react as first Dodola and then Zam matured into sexual people. Their only experiences where negative, and lead inevitably to tragedy, before their redemption at the end of the book. Should they have been educated in the changes happening within them as they went through puberty; should they have been taught that there was nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of; should they have been taught to be open and had authority figure they could trust to ask qustions of; should the experiences they had or witnessed to do with sex have been positive ones of respect and mutual pleasure; would this have lead to a much more positive and better life for them? These are the questions raised by the book on this theme, and the conclusions you come to will depend on your existing prejudices.