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Review: _Shubeik Lubeik_
A while back, I was reading a "Best Graphic Novels of 2023" list somewhere. It was relatively international in its scope, and included a bunch of items that I hadn't seen before, so I picked a few that sounded good and ordered them.
I've been gradually reading Shubeik Lubeik for the past month or two, and wow -- yeah, definitely one of the best of the year. Let's talk about it a bit.
tl;dr -- technically urban fantasy, but far deeper than that term usually implies, telling three stories of modern life and wishes, from a firmly Egyptian POV.
Shubeik Lubeik translates as roughly "your wish is my command" -- it is the beginning of what a genie says when you open their bottle.
This story takes place in a world very much like our own, except that wishes are a thing. Known since antiquity, in the modern era they have been commercialized just like everything else. The best wish mines are largely in the Middle East; the refineries mostly in rich Western countries. (The metaphors here are 100% intentional, and very carefully designed.)
There are three broad categories of wish:
- First-class wishes are rare, expensive, and tend to work well.
- Second-class wishes are still pricey, although less outrageous, but you had better watch your wording, because there is often a catch.
- Third-class wishes (aka "delesseps") are relatively cheap (they tend to come in cans, unlike the fine wine bottles of first-class), but quite likely to backfire unpleasantly on you. They are illegal in a growing number of countries.
The story centers on Shokry's kiosk. He is a friendly, pious man who has run this roadside kiosk for much of his life, selling magazines, beverages, and whatever else is within his scope and people want. And the bane of his life is a small suitcase, containing three first-class wishes.
He is trying to find someone, anyone, who will buy the wishes off of him, but nobody pays attention to his hand-scrawled sign advertising them. Finally, Hagga Shawqia, the older lady who is always hanging around the kiosk and chatting, gets her nephew to make a better sign to advertise them, and the story begins.
The book (which is mammoth -- over 500 large pages, so it's a weighty hardcover) consists of three primary stories, each providing a different lens on life.
First there is Aziza's story. Her husband always wanted a wish, to get a fancy new car. She sees Shokry's sign and buys the first bottle, not realizing the trouble she is letting herself in for.
Fancy wishes need to be properly licensed; being a law-abiding sort, she goes to do so. But no one believes that a common woman like herself could possibly have received such an expensive wish legitimately. So her life gradually falls apart, ground up by a rapacious bureaucracy that is more interested in the value of the wish than the needs of the woman who owns it.
This chapter is a pretty brutal look at the corruption and petty venality of the state, the challenges of being a proud woman who isn't willing to knuckle under to its demands, with the wish more as a symbol of her resistance than something she truly cares about.
Second is Nour -- a college student who is wealthy but depressed, slowly dropping into a downspiral. He is analytical in his outlook (this chapter is full of his charts of his moods and problems), but that does nothing to help him with the sense that he doesn't fit in, and that nobody really wants to be around him.
This chapter is a good examination of depression, taking place heavily in Nour's head (and charts), as he tries to figure out what to do with a first-class wish. Should he make himself smarter? Happier? (Wishes for happiness often don't really solve your problems.) In his bleaker moments, he wonders whether he should just wish he had never been born.
Finally, chapter three is Shokry's own story, explaining his history and how he inherited the wishes in the first place. He can't use them himself (he is a firm believer that wishes are haram, so no good Muslim can use them), so he has to sell them.
But his principles are challenged when Hagga Shawqia gets sick. He drives himself to distraction, torn between his need to help those around him and his belief that using the wish will send him to Hell. Along the way, there are arguments about what is and isn't haram, and the way that some of the rigid current restrictions seem to have arisen from colonialist greed.
In the end, we finally get Shawqia's own backstory, and her own reasons why she firmly doesn't want him to use the wish for her. It's the closest the story gets to actual fantasy, an illustration of the power of the first-class wish, and the consequences thereof.
Overall, it's a brilliant book. The three stories are distinct, but they're deeply related to each other, talking about big topics in microcosm. In-between, we get a bunch of the history and sociology of a world that is so very much like our own, where nothing is so sacred that it can't be commoditized.
The art is distinct, not much like either typical American or Japanese comics, but it is clean, clear, with strong intent and some clever bits of innovation. (Not least in the wishes themselves: genies manifest as Arabic text, ranging from elegant intricate calligraphy for the first-class to something not unlike advertising fonts for third.)
It's worth noting that, since this was originally written in Arabic (back in 2017), it reads back-to-front and right-to-left. I'm used to that from modern Manga, but I suspect it will take some adjusting for folks who haven't read graphic novels that way before. Egyptian culture and Islam are the substrate of the whole story, but there are helpful footnotes for the details you might not be familiar with.
Anyway -- highly recommended. It's a deep story and a fascinating one, and at $35 this big hardcover is downright cheap by graphic novel standards. If you like comics that are off the usual American beaten path, and make you think, you should absolutely check it out.
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