Tova
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.
