my beloved is mine and I am his
I just finished reading Habibi, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson. This review almost certainly has spoilers and possibly triggers.
Firstly, the book is beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. This was clearly a labor of love; every panel, every border, every pattern has been done with care and detail. Thompson has drawn inspiration from calligraphy and liberally uses complex geometric artwork to complement his visual storytelling. I read through the immense book in just a few evenings, although I tried to slow down to appreciate the simple artistry behind the story.
Main-story-wise, the book takes place in a fantasy generic Islamic setting, which covers multiple time periods, allowing the main characters to interact in both seemingly ancient and modern societies, just down the road from each other. Unfortunately, the transcendental nature of the era feels completely unbelievable, and their emergence in a present-day city feels joltingly out of place. But the book doesn't race just to tell a story, it winds around itself in loops and meanderings, taking its time, telling events out of order, and illustrating numerous stories from Islamic and Christian mythology, as well as making up some of its own.
Also, there's a lot of rape. And I don't just mean oh, the main character gets raped to further her character development. I mean that rape almost felt like the main theme of the book for me for the first half of it. It is, in theory, within the context of the setting: Thompson has clearly defined a world where women are powerless commodities, which means there are all kinds of flavors of rape! Including captured harems, sexual slavery, child brides, prostitution for survival, and violent rape, along with leering bystanders. Sometimes it is only hinted at, and sometimes it is, well, graphically shown. Sure, because of the explicitly chosen sexist cultural setting, all these instances could be considered "normal" if taken in context entirely within the story. But it was written in the present, for an audience of modern society, and in the here and now, we call those things rape.
The rape in this book bothered me more than it has in anything else I've read (and I've read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and had no problems with that), for a few reasons. One, which I suppose is a meta-concern, but I believe is still valid, is that almost none of the reviews I've read elsewhere bring it up. It's glossed over, played down, and redefined. Only after I started digging deeper did I find a few references to "sexual violence" and "sexploitation," buried deep within paragraphs that immediately defend that it is all necessary and helps to form a beautiful story but perhaps should not be read by people with "susceptible sensibilities." I'm not going to argue whether it is gratuitous or not, but I will say that when rape is used to be THAT big of a hammer, I kind of expected more people to notice it as RAPE, and not just a metaphoric tool describing a generic way to exploit the weak, or as just yet another sex scene. The majority of reviews don't even use the word. Are people really so well-trained to turn their head and ignore rape that it's often not worth mentioning even once?
Which brings me to the next reason it bothered me, and that is because both the author and the readers of this book seem to like conflating rape with sex. The reviews describe the book as having "sex, violence, and nudity" or "sex scenes" or "complex sexuality." As far as I saw, there was exactly one consensual, desired, sexual encounter between adults in the entire book. And it was between the main characters, who had grown up clinging to each other for survival, like mother and son, or like siblings. Early on, her rape feeds his initial sexual fantasies about her. The familial and erotic loves are intermingled in ways that don't sit right to me, but sexualizing rape is even more off.
The last way it bothered me is that I -don't- think it advanced the characters. It moved the story, sure. It defined the world, it provided the base for analogies for Thompson to draw his messages of exploitation and metaphorical rape. But for the most part, I didn't feel anything for her. I didn't sympathize with her damage. I didn't see her grow or change or have inner strength. I saw a body, a (usually naked) human, female body, that was used as a giant symbol of cruelty done to something beautiful. His story moved me a lot more. I saw him as person, with unique damage and dreams, and wanted him to -be- something.
[As a side note, it felt vaguely odd to me that, while the female body was drawn naked far more often than clothed, from all angles, inside and out, the one SINGLE time a penis was visible, it was because it was about to be cut off.]
There are also many questionable ways Thompson has chosen to portray race and religion in his societies, by making the land so generically Arab while drawing from stereotypical Oriental mysticism. I do not have well-formed thoughts on that issue, but there are other reviewers who do, and I recommend searching them out.
At it's heart, Habibi feels mostly like a fable chock-full of metaphor and symbolism. It tells of the evils of power, corruption and cruelty, and shows a world where the weak is starved and cracked (both dry from drought as well as mad in the head) as a result. When read with a mind more for the symbols than for the characters, then it is moving and interesting and heart-wrenching and thought-provoking, piling hopelessness on the reader, then leaving them with hope. It goes through an awfully rough terrain to get there. For many, the open-endedness of the imagery and multiple layers of meanings and references combined with the sheer beauty of the art will make it worthwhile. For others, likely for the things I mentioned above, it won't.
Firstly, the book is beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. This was clearly a labor of love; every panel, every border, every pattern has been done with care and detail. Thompson has drawn inspiration from calligraphy and liberally uses complex geometric artwork to complement his visual storytelling. I read through the immense book in just a few evenings, although I tried to slow down to appreciate the simple artistry behind the story.
Main-story-wise, the book takes place in a fantasy generic Islamic setting, which covers multiple time periods, allowing the main characters to interact in both seemingly ancient and modern societies, just down the road from each other. Unfortunately, the transcendental nature of the era feels completely unbelievable, and their emergence in a present-day city feels joltingly out of place. But the book doesn't race just to tell a story, it winds around itself in loops and meanderings, taking its time, telling events out of order, and illustrating numerous stories from Islamic and Christian mythology, as well as making up some of its own.
Also, there's a lot of rape. And I don't just mean oh, the main character gets raped to further her character development. I mean that rape almost felt like the main theme of the book for me for the first half of it. It is, in theory, within the context of the setting: Thompson has clearly defined a world where women are powerless commodities, which means there are all kinds of flavors of rape! Including captured harems, sexual slavery, child brides, prostitution for survival, and violent rape, along with leering bystanders. Sometimes it is only hinted at, and sometimes it is, well, graphically shown. Sure, because of the explicitly chosen sexist cultural setting, all these instances could be considered "normal" if taken in context entirely within the story. But it was written in the present, for an audience of modern society, and in the here and now, we call those things rape.
The rape in this book bothered me more than it has in anything else I've read (and I've read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and had no problems with that), for a few reasons. One, which I suppose is a meta-concern, but I believe is still valid, is that almost none of the reviews I've read elsewhere bring it up. It's glossed over, played down, and redefined. Only after I started digging deeper did I find a few references to "sexual violence" and "sexploitation," buried deep within paragraphs that immediately defend that it is all necessary and helps to form a beautiful story but perhaps should not be read by people with "susceptible sensibilities." I'm not going to argue whether it is gratuitous or not, but I will say that when rape is used to be THAT big of a hammer, I kind of expected more people to notice it as RAPE, and not just a metaphoric tool describing a generic way to exploit the weak, or as just yet another sex scene. The majority of reviews don't even use the word. Are people really so well-trained to turn their head and ignore rape that it's often not worth mentioning even once?
Which brings me to the next reason it bothered me, and that is because both the author and the readers of this book seem to like conflating rape with sex. The reviews describe the book as having "sex, violence, and nudity" or "sex scenes" or "complex sexuality." As far as I saw, there was exactly one consensual, desired, sexual encounter between adults in the entire book. And it was between the main characters, who had grown up clinging to each other for survival, like mother and son, or like siblings. Early on, her rape feeds his initial sexual fantasies about her. The familial and erotic loves are intermingled in ways that don't sit right to me, but sexualizing rape is even more off.
The last way it bothered me is that I -don't- think it advanced the characters. It moved the story, sure. It defined the world, it provided the base for analogies for Thompson to draw his messages of exploitation and metaphorical rape. But for the most part, I didn't feel anything for her. I didn't sympathize with her damage. I didn't see her grow or change or have inner strength. I saw a body, a (usually naked) human, female body, that was used as a giant symbol of cruelty done to something beautiful. His story moved me a lot more. I saw him as person, with unique damage and dreams, and wanted him to -be- something.
[As a side note, it felt vaguely odd to me that, while the female body was drawn naked far more often than clothed, from all angles, inside and out, the one SINGLE time a penis was visible, it was because it was about to be cut off.]
There are also many questionable ways Thompson has chosen to portray race and religion in his societies, by making the land so generically Arab while drawing from stereotypical Oriental mysticism. I do not have well-formed thoughts on that issue, but there are other reviewers who do, and I recommend searching them out.
At it's heart, Habibi feels mostly like a fable chock-full of metaphor and symbolism. It tells of the evils of power, corruption and cruelty, and shows a world where the weak is starved and cracked (both dry from drought as well as mad in the head) as a result. When read with a mind more for the symbols than for the characters, then it is moving and interesting and heart-wrenching and thought-provoking, piling hopelessness on the reader, then leaving them with hope. It goes through an awfully rough terrain to get there. For many, the open-endedness of the imagery and multiple layers of meanings and references combined with the sheer beauty of the art will make it worthwhile. For others, likely for the things I mentioned above, it won't.