Deena Mohamed first attracted attention for “Qahera,” her webcomic about an Egyptian Muslim superheroine, in 2013, when she was 18 years old. She went on to write an undergraduate thesis on the history of Egyptian comics and then to become a major figure in that scene. After Mohamed self-published the first volume of her graphic novel, Shubeik Lubeik, about the interconnected lives of a group of citizens of an alternate-world Cairo in which bottled, wish-granting genies are for sale, it won the Grand Prize and the award for best graphic novel at the 2017 Cairo Comix Festival. In the world Mohamed has invented, cheap “third-class wishes” inevitably backfire on those who make them, “first-class wishes” are outlandishly expensive luxuries, and government regulations on wishes maintain Egypt’s class divisions.
The 500-plus-page English-language edition of Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, Jan. 10) —which reads right to left, as in the Arabic version—collects all three volumes in Mohamed’s own translation. (Shubeik Lubeik is Arabic for, approximately, “your wish is my command,” the title under which it was published in the U.K.) A starred Kirkus review called the book “exceptionally imaginative while also being wonderfully grounded in touching human relationships, existential quandaries, and familiar geopolitical and socioeconomic dynamics.”
Mohamed talked to Kirkus about Shubeik Lubeik over Zoom from her home in Cairo. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You're a scholar of the history of Egyptian comics, and your work also draws on Franco-Belgian and Japanese and Anglophone comics. What’s particularly distinctive about the Egyptian comics tradition?
In the 20th century, the biggest comics in Egypt were children’s comics, but the artists who were working on them were usually also working as satirical political cartoonists and designers and illustrators. So even their work for children had a sharp sense of humor. A lot of contemporary Egyptian cartoonists were influenced by those comics growing up—their work has characters with exaggerated features and a preference for social critique. You don’t get a lot of long graphic novels or fantasy strips that don’t address a specific real-life thing.
Shubeik Lubeik, as playful as its concept is, is very much about the political and historical reality of Cairo.
I wanted it to be on Egyptian shelves. For people who haven’t read a comic since they were kids, you have to trick them into believing that this is a story that they can believe emotionally [laughs].
Your work has appeared in both English and Arabic, and you’ve talked about how you reworked Shubeik Lubeik’s narration for the English version—the narrator explains both the magical aspects of the world you’ve invented and aspects of Egyptian culture that might be unclear to English-language readers. What else were you thinking about in the translation process?
When I was writing Shubeik Lubeik, sometimes I would be working on something in Arabic and think, this is going to be so annoying to translate...and then I would think, well, that’s a problem for my future self! I wanted English-language readers to feel that they’re reading a translation, something like fansubbed [fan-subtitled] manga, where the translator has a bit of a personality, too. I also thought it might add on to the tactile experience of reading, because the book is already so chunky and so big, and you get the experience of opening it right to left. Even though the concept is very “Oriental”—wishes and all that—the treatment isn’t. So it sets up an expectation of magic and fantasy, and then you read it and realize it’s not really that magical.
The world where genies grant wishes is still very recognizable as the world as we know it!
If you have enough money you can get almost anything, to an almost fantastical extent. It really helps to conceptualize wishes as prayers sometimes—it anchors what people want and how they would treat it. In the stories I grew up reading, there are good genies and bad genies and lesser djinn and greater djinn. Except in those stories, genies tend to be the central characters, like Kazaam, that movie with Shaquille O’Neal where he was a genie trapped in a boombox. Here, the wish itself is the focus.
The middle section of the book focuses on Nour, a depressed character who’s trying to figure out what exactly to wish for. Even in your fictional world, depression isn’t something you can just wish away.
I mean, you could if you knew specifically what the problem was! That’s the issue. I think once you make the decision to help yourself, it is quite possible in our world as well. I also didn’t want the conclusion to be too depressing to the reader, because in our world there aren’t first-class wishes, and if you’re reading about a character who solves it like this, you might think, well, I’ve gained nothing here [laughs].
Nour’s story also incorporates diagrams as a way the character tracks their mood.
Those were really fun for me. Part of representing depression was that I didn’t want it to be too depressing. I see a lot of comics and infographics about mental health that use diagrams of some kind, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to put it that way. Nour’s in a very numb depressive state—there’s not a lot of crying or spiraling—and the graphs are a way to keep it sort of clinical, since Nour’s an analytical character. We did have a design issue with graphs reading right to left; that was a thing I had to spend some time on. But I think it works out.
You pay a lot of attention to the setting of Shubeik Lubeik. Which are the parts where you feel like you really nailed a visual sense of place?
Honestly, I think I captured the kiosks and buildings and the general feeling of Cairo pretty well. I think that’s what a lot of Egyptian readers are attracted by—the novelty of seeing their city in illustrations. We had a lot of media growing up, but when you’re constantly receiving media that doesn’t reflect you, there’s a sense of novelty to realizing oh, I can draw that! When I went to New York, I thought, there is so much art about this place! I’ve seen this drawn a million different ways!
You spent about five years working on Shubeik Lubeik. What changed in that time?
The biggest difference, I think, is that by the third book there were people waiting for it. For the first part, obviously, nobody knew it was happening. For the second part, nobody expected it, because in Egypt, comics projects usually lose steam—we talk a big game and then everyone runs out of money or time. By the third part, there were quite a few people who knew the characters and were excited to read it, and to me, that was really exciting. It’s the same with the English version—I had been telling people for years that there would be a translation, and I think people thought I was lying, so when it came out I was like, yes! I told you!
Douglas Wolk is the author of All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told.