Tova

November 12

So my graphic novel CAIRO came out this week. The day it was released, artist MK Perker and I spent an hour on the phone, alternately basking in our glory and worrying about how the book would be received. There have been some good reviews and some postmodern ones, but overall the response has been positive. Bill Willingham, creator of the hit comics series FABLES and the only Neocon at my chest-heavingly leftie publisher, actually gave the thing a glowing cover-quote. In other words, it’s been a good week, and I should be pleased. And I am, but it’s a pleasure complicated by politics.

On the afternoon of the day the book came out, I did a signing at Zanadu Comics. One of the guys who stopped by--trench coat, glasses, archetypal--picked up the book and flipped through it, then looked up at me with the air of a connoisseur of useless miscellany.

“Clearly she hasn’t learned that a ninja never hands over her weapon,” he said, pointing to a character swathed in a black face-veil and robe, who was giving her gun to a skeptical-looking man in a burnoose. The character’s name was Tova. She was an Israeli soldier, not a ninja. I held my peace. The guy went on to tell me he hoped I was ready for the big-leagues of fiction after something so trivial as journalism. (Journalism is like falling out of bed, he drawled, It’s like, woah, did I just write something? Fiction takes actual work.) Guys like this are an occupational hazard of comic-writing, and if they’re buying what I write, far be it for me to mock. I let him talk, nodding at appropriate intervals. But I had been thinking about Tova too, and about the other people who would look at her and see something she is not.

I knew I was walking a fine line when I wrote an Israeli soldier into the novel. I knew that no matter how complex or conflicted or human I made her, bringing her into a story about Arab Muslims as a protagonist would burn up much, if not all, of the literary street cred I built up in Cairo among Cairenes. Now when I get an interview request from an Egyptian publication (we really like your work; so few westerners take the time to understand these things; what else are you writing?) I cringe. I know my days on the good side of the City Victorious are numbered. After he read CAIRO, my husband sat me down and asked me gently if I realized it was possible I’d put myself in danger if I marketed the book in the Middle East. I knew, but I went into the bathroom and cried for awhile anyway. I want so much for tenderness to be universally understood, and it isn’t. I want not to have to separate the people I love to keep them from hurting each other. At the very least, I want the space to pretend, in fiction, that this is possible. But I may not even have that.

My husband wanted to know why I needed an Israeli character. Without her, the book is a shrine--a sometimes paradoxically irreverent shrine--to Islamic, Arab and Egyptian mythology, fit for all but the most hardline bookshelves. As one reviewer observed, the only unequivocal image in the entire book, the only symbol that is not polluted by shades of grey, is the Qur’an. Without the Jew, the book is kosher. I told him I didn’t need an Israeli character. But I did need the Israeli who was one of my most steadfast friends through my conversion; and the Israeli who held my hand while I was getting a large, pretty but idiotic Arabic tattoo in the days leading up to it, who joked that speaking Arabic would help me learn Hebrew; and the Israeli refusenik who was one of the first people to read a draft of the book, who was robbed of his Nobel peace prize by the tree woman from Africa. I needed those Israelis, and Tova was--is--for them.

I have not yet been asked to choose between the people I love in any lasting way. I have managed to keep an exhausting but worthwhile balance. There are friends I will never be able to introduce to my Palestinian in-laws, and in-laws I will never be able to introduce to my friends. I’ve made peace with that. But when I write a more perfect, bizarre, serendipitous, forgiving world, I sometimes forget not to hope I will someday be able to live in it.

This entry was cross-posted from Dean’s World. 

Black Sabbath Iftar

September 28

On Tuesday Omar and I went to see the remnants of Black Sabbath (minus Ozzy Osbourne) in Denver. It was a unique experience to break the fast while cruising down the highway, calculating sunset with the dashboard clock and tucking into a styrofoam box of Chinese takeout at the appointed moment. Over the years, Ramadan has become, to me, a wholly Egyptian experience, celebrated with Egyptian foods at big ’azoomas of relatives and friends, capped off by soccer games. Ramadan in Egypt is how I learned to cook without needing to taste the food. Now that we’re back in the US, I can buy chicken stock in cans, already strained and seasoned--no need to go to a fararghi and select a live rooster, throw him in a pot, and season the broth myself, gauging the level of salt and onion by sight and smell alone in the last hours of fasting. In the west it seems there’s no need to cook by sense--everything is already prepared and measured out. It’s the perfect place for a fasting cook. There’s some small uneasy irony there that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Right. Here’s how other people are spending the holy month:

Ali Eteraz writes a series of Ramadan Reconciliations that are definitely worth reading, especially if you’ve kept up with his other work over the years.

Muse chronicles her first Ramadan in Cairo.

As the full moon makes its appearance, Aziz of City of Brass reflects on the halfway mark of the month.

Why Comics

August 23

Recently Ibrahim of the wonderful blog From Clay asked me why, with my background in a fairly heavy brand of journalism, I would choose to write comics. It’s a fair question. The answer is two-fold. First: ironically enough, journalism was for me a departure from comics, rather than the other way around. I’ve wanted to write comics almost since I first started reading them regularly, at the age of about fifteen. This would have been 1997-ish--just to put that in perspective, Vertigo was launched when I was eleven years old; early enough, in other words, for me to think it had been around forever. (Frankly, I still sort of feel that way; this will make me sound like a company shill, but everything that happens before you’re twelve automatically takes on an aura of immortality.) My ambition was sealed the first time I saw bestselling comics author Neil Gaiman speak during my freshman year at BU. Someone in the crowd asked him what he would change if he knew he was going to die in two weeks. He paused for a moment, and then smiled and said, “Nothing.” Very close to a religious conversion, I admired anything that was both ascetic and profound, and thought this was one of the more graceful sentiments I had ever heard. I wanted to get to a similar point, psychologically and artistically, and hearing this from someone who’d written very beautiful comics seemed to confirm that comics were a vehicle one could use to get there.

Yes, this is really how I think.

In college I spent a year and a half working for the Kennedys. Mostly this meant sorting and preserving documents in the JFK Presidential Library (the wonderful, vital and under-appreciated art of archival science), and occasionally acting as a page for one of the Kennedys themselves. There, I saw pretty clearly that I could take one of two paths: the path of academia and politics, in which one primarily observes the world; or the path of art and religion, through which one experiences it. After 9/11, students of Arabic and political history were in high demand, and since I was already interning at JFK, various advisers and bosses and soforth suggested I try for the FBI or the Fletcher School. I seriously considered it, but in the end I chose Cairo--I chose, in other words, art and religion. In the current climate, I knew full well that this would wreck any chance I had at a career in politics or intelligence. In Cairo, however, I saw that there were real stories--as opposed to fictional ones--that needed to be told and weren’t being told, and that more often than not there were very few people who could tell them, and that because I was a Muslim and could express myself fairly well in English, I was sometimes one of those people. Getting into journalism was thus more or less an accident. Most mosques and madrassas in the Middle East are closed to non-Muslims, making it hard for non-Muslim journalists (except for very seasoned ones) to get face time with the people who are moving and shaping modern Islam. I was one of the few western writers in Cairo who could walk into a mosque on a deadline. This is probably the only reason I got to write for big-name publications during my rookie year.

The whole time, however, I was writing CAIRO. I never lost sight of comics. I was as excited to hear that editors at DC were reading my articles as I was to publish the articles themselves. There are some truths that lend themselves best to fiction (I expand on this in a Newsarama interview) and they were truths I wanted badly to tell.

Next: Why Comics Part II (The second reason)