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What Egyptians wish for

In ‘Shubeik Lubeik,’ a new graphic novel by Deena Mohamed, genies really do come in bottles — but only for those rich enough to afford them

Review by
January 19, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EST
Art from “Shubeik Lubeik” by Deena Mohamed. (Deena Mohamed/Pantheon Books)
8 min

In the opening pages of Deena Mohamed’s graphic novel “Shubeik Lubeik,” we watch a televised public service announcement in which a woman purchases a “delesleep,” a “third-class wish” granted not by a genie in a bottle but one confined to an aluminum can. When the being within emerges, the woman makes a simple request. “I want to lose weight! About,” here she hesitates a moment, “ten kilos?”

The results are as immediate as they are horrifying. Her right leg and left arm fall to the ground, bloodlessly severed by the force she has unleashed. Her wish granted, the woman screams.

Welcome to a Cairo where donkeys talk, dragons destroy villages and posh suburban homes can hide under a cloak of invisibility.

Cairo — the real city, that is — has long been a nerve center of Arab comic art’s revival. Across the Middle East, political cartoonists and caricaturists have been experimenting with strips and visual stories for more than a century, with cartoons often representing the most audacious voices in the press. But graphic novels remain relatively rare. In 2007, the writer and artist Magdy El Shafee published what many consider the first Egyptian one: “Metro,” a Cairo-set noir about a broke young computer programmer driven to rob a bank in a megalopolis plagued by crony capitalism and unfreedom.

The rise of Egyptian collectives publishing alternative comic zines for adults coincided with the 2011 revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, and the phenomenon has endured despite political repression, media censorship and a faltering economy. Several political cartoonists and humorists now work in exile (Mohamed lives in Egypt), but many have told me that the hardest part can be making a living as a comic artist.

In the past decade, the number of Arab graphic novels has quickly multiplied. Mohamed, 27, emerged as a viral auteur in 2013 with her webcomic “Qahera,” the story of a superwoman in hijab who fights street crime and harassment, and is named after Egypt’s capital. The arrival of “Shubeik Lubeik” — its title translates from Arabic as “Your wish is my command” — from a major American publisher is an indication of how much the Arab alt-comix scene has developed, from short, episodic, independently published issues featuring a coterie of artists to long-form graphic novels with deep narratives. At more than 500 pages, it’s an ambitious feat of storytelling and a historic accomplishment for Arab comic artists.

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No page is boring. Mohamed herself has translated her original text from Arabic into English, with occasional footnotes and asides to guide the uninitiated. Her use of intricate Arabic calligraphy to illustrate the genies (or, in Arabic, “djinn”) who climb out of the bottles is stunning. Above all, the panels move briskly, full of big movement and emotional pacing, including the clever use of full-bleed pages, and storytelling that zooms in and out of modern Egyptian history. The book reads right to left, as it was drawn in Arabic (like some manga translations do).

Ultimately, “Shubeik Lubeik” is all about life in Cairo, a city afflicted by inequalities and disparities of all kinds, and Mohamed’s attention to the politics of place is of a piece with what makes a comic Egyptian — much of the alt-comix movement there has focused on urban life. Mohamed, with her fantastical but grounded exploration of wishes, captures this stratified society.

But her work is more than a mere diagnosis of the way things are in her own country. As the wishes of her characters evolve, she reminds us that the real world of 21st-century capitalism is already a wish-culture where the wealthy can get almost everything they want, even as those beneath them are allowed only the most perilous of satisfactions.

“Shubeik Lubeik” opens in a kiosk at an urban junction. It is a place that will be intimately familiar to the 20 million-plus residents of Cairo, where there is a kiosk or two on every corner. These are sites where people of different classes, professions and ways of life coexist and clash, all in search of a pack of cigarettes, a sweet or salty snack, or a cold drink.

The graphic novel’s three parts spiral out of this central hub, tracing the fate of three different first-class wishes improbably on offer from the kiosk’s hardscrabble owner, Shokry. Unlike the “delesleep,” whose malign effects play out in the opening scene, these are more generous objects of power, capable of fulfilling what the wisher actually asks for and not just what they say they want. Under ordinary circumstances, they’re also enormously expensive and carefully controlled by the government.

For the most part, wishes — whatever their class — are deployed for personal reasons and to meet individual needs, though there are glimmers of other, broader possibilities. On one page a scruffy gentleman reads an Arabic newspaper with a headline attributed to the Egyptian president: “If we all wish together for the liberation of Palestine, I guess we could swing it.” For whatever reason this text is left untranslated.

As we eventually learn, Shokry’s father had received the three wishes from an Italian archaeologist; the story of how this foreigner came to possess them in the first place is a pointed and barbed allegory of colonial theft and dispossession. Since Shokry’s family tradition sees using a wish as contrary to Islam, he seeks to sell them. They’re worth a bundle of cash, but it’s unlikely that anyone who has the means to splurge on such a treasure would think to buy it from a kiosk at a busy intersection. So Shokry watches television under the kiosk’s sun-drenched awning, between a fridge of soda and a rainbow array of chips, waiting and waiting, as he struggles to provide for his family.

After Aziza, a working-class woman, toils overtime to buy Shokry’s first wish, she gets snared in Egypt’s arbitrary, labyrinthine justice system. The government functionaries overseeing the licensing of dreams cannot fathom how someone of Aziza’s social strata could have purchased a precious first-class wish. The impossibility of her officially registering it shows the cruelty with which the Egyptian regime treats everyone, especially the country’s underclass. As Aziza’s imprisonment drags on, Mohamed’s panels blur into one another, capturing how time itself sometimes grows indistinct for those who fall into the state’s disfavor.

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The next wish is purchased by Nour, who comes from Cairo’s upper crust (and uses they/them pronouns). Their neighbors casually wish for flying Porsches and pet dinosaurs, but Nour struggles to determine what might pull them out of their malaise. Innovative charts and graphs quantify Nour’s shifting emotional journey. Counterintuitively, their desire to cure their depression through a wish ultimately leads them to confront their issues.

In between these sections, marvelous tangents further build the world of wishes, with definitions and timelines and histories. “After the brutal and excessive use of wishes during World War II the United Nations creates the Declaration for Humane Wishing,” reads one such section. In another laugh-out-loud segment, Mohamed critiques the NGO-ification of good deeds in the global south, exploring the post-colonial environment in which wishes have become a scarce resource dominated by the West.

But for all its global and historical views, this graphic novel all comes down to the kiosk. The third major chapter tells the story of Shokry the shopkeeper, burdened by a wish he cannot sell and refuses to use himself, in search of a way to do good that doesn’t violate his own code.

The contrast between the wishes of Nour and Aziza is the story of Egypt today. While they belong to different classes and have different vantage points on Cairo, they share an anger with the government’s oppressive monitoring of desire, but are unable to do much about it beyond using their prized bottles to address their personal circumstances. Both find fulfillment outside the confines of their much-deliberated wishes, yet perhaps the very act of wishing can lead to broader reflection. “Because in some places the system strives to accommodate the wishes of the people, even the frivolous ones,” Nour yells to their parents in one heated scene. Not so in Egypt, “because we live in this garbage country!!!”

When Aziza articulates her deepest desire, it’s so personal that it doesn’t make much sense that she got mired in and abused by the state’s convoluted, discriminatory system of wish licensing. It’s less tangible and less materialistic than the Mercedes her husband had long wished for and something that, in the end, only she can provide for herself. That doesn’t mean material goods don’t matter.

“In most situations,” Aziza says, “what stands between you and your wish is merely a mountain of money.”

Jonathan Guyer is a senior foreign policy writer at Vox. He researched comics in Egypt for six years with support from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Fulbright program.

Shubeik Lubeik

By Deena Mohamed

Pantheon. 568 pp. $35

correction

An earlier version of this review used the wrong gendered pronouns to refer to Nour, a character in "Shubeik Lubeik." Nour uses "they/them" pronouns rather than "he/him" pronouns.

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