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Habibi by Craig Thompson

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:01:00 -0400

Minimalism is in, but beauty isn’t always simple. It can be as intricate as calligraphy or as complicated as love. Beauty can be slender, or it can be opulent, like 672-pages-enshrouded-in-an-ornate-hardcover-binding opulent. This is what Craig Thompson has proved in his long-anticipated graphic novel, Habibi . In this work, Thompson has created something truly spectacular by infusing more instead of less into every pen-stroke, metaphor, and plot twist.

Set in a timeless desert unfettered by any particular time period, Habibi tells the story of Dodola and Zam, two orphaned slave children who find love and security in each other. On the cusp of adulthood, they are torn apart, abused, and left to reckon with the traumas of adulthood on their own.

Nothing in Habibi’ s sprawling landscape is simple, and Thompson is not one for reductionism. The extravagance of his layout and lavishness of his images wonderfully correspond to the excessiveness of the content.

At its center, Habibi is a love story, but the trope transcends sexual attraction. Sex”of which there is a great deal in the story”actually becomes the adversary, resulting in abuse, depression, mutilation, gender-confusion, and self-loathing. In the story’s grim world, sex is a currency at best and death at its worst. Thus, the real love at the center of Habibi is more sacred, less physical; more ultimate, less carnal.

Interwoven with the non-linear narrative of Dodola and Zam are the stories of Islam. “Storytelling is our salvation!” the book seems to roar as it narrates the origins of Arabic letters and mystical number games as well as the familiar but warbled stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Solomon, Abraham, and Job. Though obviously centered on the Qur’an, the Old Testament is very present and everyone within”or even outside of”the Abrahamic faiths is welcomed into the tale. Thompson’s rendering of religion is benevolent and exquisite, a paradigm of open-heartedness.

Thompson grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home and his acclaimed 2003 autobiographical graphic novel Blankets tells not only the story of his first love but also his coming-to-terms with the Christian tradition of his family, culminating in a crisis of faith. “I still believe in God; the teachings of Jesus, even, but the rest of Christianity”its Bible, its churches, its dogma”only sets up boundaries between people and cultures. It denies the beauty of being human, and it ignores all these gaps that need to be filled in by the individual,” he ruminates near the end of Blankets . Habibi , and its interplay between the stories of both Islam and Christianity, seems to be an attempt to rethink those boundaries.

It might not seem so odd, then, to transition from Midwestern evangelicalism to Middle Eastern Islam. In Blankets , Thompson”with heartbreaking beauty”portrays Christianity as a cultural force that operated mainly as a confidence-zapping, guilt-inducing straight-jacket. (And given the nature of his church experiences, some Christians might find themselves sympathetic.) But in Habibi , Islam is the force within that saves and empowers even when the world outside is cruel and nonsensical. In both, religion is the subplot. In both, religion is treated with respect and emotion. In both, the stories of the Abrahamic faiths enlighten the narrative. In Blankets they provide the counterpoint; in Habibi the parallel.

Habibi is even more ambitious than Blankets, not only in the narrative’s dark intensity, or in the art”which is far more intricate”but also in Thompson’s relationship with religion. No longer is he a boy wrestling with the legalism that hampered his childhood, but an artist delving into a tradition wholly other than what he was brought up in. “I went from a little ‘emo boy’ to much more of an adult in a relationship over the course of working on Habibi ,” he said in a recent interview. Whereas Blankets is a vulnerable coming-of-age and into-doubt story, Habibi ”while still a bildungsroman”delves further into the muck of adulthood and back into religion, this time with less hesitation.

Habibi is not only a moving artistic experience”surging off the page and swirling around the reader’s head”but also a reminder of one key aspect of religion: relationships. And as the story rolls out with the richness of a red carpet, Thompson pushes narrow legalism aside to make way for something much more personal: God. The impact of this parting of expectations creates a space in which love, not just judgment, thrives. This love is both horizontal and vertical, as Thompson also ponders the relationship between God and his people.

Throughout Blankets , Thompson was taught to behave, because if he didn’t, he would go to Hell, and if he did, he could go to Heaven. The simplicity of his church’s legalism pushed him away. We aren’t told what Thompson believes now”and his art does not require us to place him in any doctrinal camp”but by the end of Habibi he seems to have least worked his way to a beautiful observation: “God’s followers worship not out of the hope for reward nor fear of punishment but out of love.” And he makes it clear that love is never simple.

Kristen Scharold is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

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Craig Thompson, Habibi

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Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 01:19:00 -0400

Standing on my tiptoes, I shifted my view through the bookshelves to the semi-circle of editors sitting at the front of the bookstore. The staff of a prominent journal was having a discussion on the future of publishing at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Soho, and I was one of many who crammed into the tote-bag haven hoping to absorb the aura of the prestigious journal.

I moved to New York City to be close to the literary scene. I made my home in Brooklyn and took a job in the editorial department at a book publishing house. I emailed famous authors daily and sat in on meetings that determined the future of notable books. In my free-time I went to readings and bookish events. Still, I felt somewhere outside the inner ring and so the siren call was loud in my ears.

My pilgrimage into the literati clique is a weary American tale. It’s been told a hundred different ways from Jo March’s publishing triumph to Esther Greenwood’s undoing after a summer internship at a prominent magazine to Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men , which chronicles three graduates’ attempts to forge literary careers. Now, the story has been told yet again, this time by the novelist Anne Roiphe in her latest memoir Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust without Reason .

Anne Roiphe’s story, however, is not ultimately about how she broke into the guarded elite, but how she got out of it. It is an expose on the limits of literary fame, and all the grime and groveling that can go along with it. By recounting her “lost years,” Roiphe shows what happens when art becomes an altar.

As a student at Sarah Lawrence, Roiphe was instantly seduced by literature. “I believed that art, for me the art of the story, the written word, was worth dying for.” This belief sets the course that soon steers her twenties into a monstrous drift of heartache. She meets Jack Richardson, a promising young playwright, and with no hesitation, drops her own ambitions hoping to lay a red carpet for his. He was a poor writer from Queens who had developed a fake English accent to hide his heritage. She was a rich girl from the Upper East Side offering him rides home to his apartment and giving him as much money as the lubrication of his genius required, even funding a trip to Paris where they soon married because, as Richardson put it, “Why not get married? We don’t have to take it seriously.”

Narrated through scattered morsels spanning the 1950s and 1960s, Roiphe’s memoir is less about her six-year marriage to an artist who left her every night for prostitutes and alcohol, and more about her own devastating dependence on artistic prestige. “Perhaps I was a gold digger and my gold was literary fame,” she confesses. And so even when Roiphe’s husband pawned her family’s silver and pearls and charted a crass course of negligence—abandoning her for four days even on their honeymoon—Roiphe still diligently typed up his manuscripts and kept their home on Park Avenue, which her mother gave them. Why? Literary success was as much her dream as his.

“I believed that I was going to be the muse to a man of great talent. . . . I was going to carry Hemingway’s manuscript on trains. . . . I was going to caress the forehead of F. Scott. . . . ,” Roiphe states. Instead, as Richardson’s pregnant housewife, she carried his typewriter home in the midst of a snowstorm; she wanted him to have it when he woke in case inspiration struck. But then trudging over snowdrifts, with the typewriter resting on her belly, she went into labor. Unsuccessfully, she called her husband from a payphone, but he was sound asleep after a brawling night out, so she had to stumble alone to the hospital, still grasping the typewriter. If that is what it means to sacrifice for art, then Roiphe was on her way to becoming its martyr.

Though Richardson never attained the fame he panted after, he was surrounded by it and consequently Roiphe became a prop at parties hosted by editors like George Plimpton and attended by the likes of E.L Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, and Arthur Miller. Roiphe didn’t have to go to a bookstore and stand in the back to hear the literatichitchat; she lounged on their couches and left her lingerie in their bedrooms. Reflecting on these frequent gatherings in hindsight, Roiphe finally sees their vapidity:

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A Review of Chastened

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex
by Hephzibah Anderson
Viking, 288 pages, $25.95

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Curious George at the Jewish Museum

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:00:00 -0400

A young couple secures their meager luggage and mounts their bicycles. They are fleeing Paris, and they are escaping just in time. Two days later, the Nazis march in. The couple pedals quickly, covering seventy-five miles in three days. When they board a train to Lisbon, they breathe a sigh of relief. That is, until the authorities pull them aside. An official asks to look in their satchels, expecting to find stolen documents or smuggled goods. Instead, the searchers find the couple’s work in progress: a book called Fifi: The Adventures of a Monkey that will become better known to Americans as Curious George .

Self-trained illustrator H.A. Rey (Hans Augusto Reyersbach) and formally trained photographer Margret Rey (Margarete Waldstein) had begun to work on Curious George just before the outbreak of the war. The book was the pair’s fourth collaboration. The two had met in Rio de Janeiro, married, and honeymooned in Paris, where they continued to live in their hotel room for the next four years. During this time, they worked together on charcoal sketches of a motley crew of loveable animals, eventually producing Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys —the story in which the character of Curious George first appeared—as well as Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World and How Do You Get There?

Selections from these works, along with eighty original drawings, watercolors, journals, correspondence, homemade greeting cards, and even photographs, developed in 2002, that Margret took in Paris in the 1930s, are all on display at the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s upper Fifth Avenue. Browsing the exhibit—entitled “Curious George Saves the Day”—children and adults are swept into the Reys’ drama of escape and carried away by the charm of the wide-eyed monkey who sits at the helm of their flight.

For decades, Curious George has had the reputation of a buffoon. This exhibit sets out to change our perceptions, earnestly presenting George as a hero. According to history, when the official on the Lisbon-bound train pulled the Reys aside and searched their belongings, George came to their rescue. After finding nothing but drawings of a harmless simian, the officer let the couple go. “Have had a very narrow escape,” H.A. telegrammed, soon after, to a friend in Brazil.

And that wasn’t the first—or the last—time the unsuspecting monkey rescued his creators. Before having to flee Paris, the couple had taken temporary refuge at the Château Feuga, in southern France. Suspicious of what H.A. and Margret might be up to, their neighbors reported them. Soon, the authorities came to investigate. But when the police discovered paintings of an innocuous monkey instead of bombs, they left the Reys undisturbed. Perhaps the most obvious salvation that George provided, however, was in the form of advances and royalty checks. Since its publication in 1941, Curious George has sold 27 million copies in more than a dozen languages. The little monkey was a financial lifesaver for a couple who, after months of traveling by bike, boat, and train, finally were allowed to settle into a townhouse in Washington Square Park, in New York City.

Thus, Curious George kept the Reys alive during one of the most volatile chapters of modern history. But what is perhaps even more peculiar about George is how he, a chipper little monkey whose cares were as simple as wanting a red balloon or getting rid of soapsuds, survived the Second World War.

There is something absurd about the fact that a monkey like George could thrive in a world haunted by Hitler. “It feels ridiculous to be thinking about children’s books,” H.A. wrote while hiding in the chateau. But he continued to draw because he, along with many other artists of the time, was learning that foolishness often is the only available coping mechanism.

Curious George offered an escape for his readers as well as his creators. Opening the book’s’ bright yellow covers, one entered delves into a child’s carefree world of small trials and large rewards. Entering the Jewish Museum’s exhibit through a playful arch that resembles H.A.’s illustration of the Hotel de l’Europe, into what feels like a child’s bedroom with banana-colored walls, a visitor senses the whimsical refuge the stories have always provided. People needed a place to go that wasn’t fraught with nightmares, and George existed because the war existed.

But even after reading about the Reys’ escape from the Nazis—and George’s role in it—one has to dig a little deeper into the exhibit to learn why the Reys chose to comfort the world with a mischievous monkey instead of a more heroic animal. Why did they create a creature in constant need of saving instead of one that embodied deliverance?

Part of the answer, I think, is in an illustration from the Reys’ lift-the-flap book How Do You Get There? In the picture is a rendering of Charlie Chaplin as his famous little tramp, a vagabond who wanders from town to town. Well before the Reys started painting their vibrant watercolors, Chaplin made films in which he used the ridiculous to temper hard times. Through comedy he provided a much-needed distraction from the First World War and made his audiences laugh in spite of everything. Margret and H.A. followed suit. They, too, were vagabonds with no delusions of saving the world; they simply wanted to be happy as they waited for someone else to end the Second World War. They painted, and they told funny stories.

For the Reys, merrymaking was the preferred means of managing the trials at hand. Just as Guido Orefice, the father in Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film Life is Beautiful , turns a Nazi concentration camp into a game for the sake of his son, H.A. and Margret added sprightly reds, blues, yellows, and greens to their dark circumstances by means of their happy-go-lucky monkey. Heroism wasn’t their ambition. Happiness was.

The Reys lived vicariously through their illustrations. In one scene from Curious George , they depict George and the Man in the Yellow Hat as they joyfully disembark from a ship, display their identification papers, and are welcomed home. Interestingly, this scene was created amid the Reys’ struggles to secure the paperwork necessary to leave France. Or consider How Do You Get There? As the Jewish Museum website notes, the simple premise of this book is that “each destination can be easily reached if the appropriate means of transportation is used.” This, of course, “stands in stark contrast to the difficulties the Reys experienced as they were approaching foreign embassies, banks, and exchange offices in an effort to flee France.”

According to the thesis of the Curious George exhibit, salvation is the underlying theme in the Reys’ work. “I was fascinated by that escape story and wanted to look at the art through that lens,” said Claudia Nahson, the curator for “Curious George Saves the Day,” to The Wall Street Journal . “Art was what saved them.”

Interestingly, the salvation that the Reys experienced in their own life, and that they incorporated into the Curious George stories, is, for lack of a more accurate adjective, salvation of a Christian sort. It isn’t the American salvation of self-propelled heroic deeds and waving banners; it is a salvation that comes from seeing joy in hardship and waiting for the one who will rescue you.

This perhaps raises the question of the Reys’ religion. Where, you may ask, was their faith in all this? I certainly wondered myself, as there wasn’t a single mention of it throughout the exhibit. One assumes that they were Jews because they had to flee the Nazis, but their heritage is never acknowledged. The only conclusion, then, is that Judaism was of little significance to the couple.

What was important to them was keeping on. Their escapism didn’t arise from denial, but from acceptance. The war had turned their lives upside down—that they could not ignore—but the fact that they continued to write their books seems proof that they accepted the conditions that the war brought and chose to carry on joyfully. H.A. at one point even wrote that “life goes on, the editors edit, the artists draw, even during wartime.” And so he continued to draw. And, as Nahson observes, “In 1939, the Reys were fleeing Paris, then going back, then leaving again. They were on the run, but he was still creating art that was very joyous.”

Look at this passage from Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World . Whiteblack, who is considered a comic self-portrait of H.A., has fallen into the ocean, been swept up in a fishing net, and been hauled onto a boat:

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How to Create a Heresy

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:04:00 -0400

Heresy is easy to scrounge up. All one needs is the Bible. I mean just the Bible. And that is exactly how Slate editor David Plotz cooked up a carefree pot of blasphemies in his recent book Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Word of the Bible .

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Are you Ready?

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Before many Christians are ready for the rapture, they apparently have a lot of baggage to unpack. Lucky for them, Daniel Radosh has taken it upon himself to shake out all their dirty laundry.

In his recently published book, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture , Radosh bravely ventures into Christian music festivals, Holy Land theme park, Christian comedy clubs, and even Christian pro-wrestling matches to dig out the hairy secrets buried in the kitschy recesses of pop evangelicalism. And he lives to tell about it. And tell about it he does, spilling the embarrassing facts of this $7 billion industry.

But why? In an interview with Christianity Today , Radosh, a humanistic Jew, explains: “Honestly, I did it because a lot of it is quite funny.” But Radosh, who is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and a contributing editor at The Week magazine, was not on a mission to mock or shock. He goes on to explain: “We think about pop culture as something ephemeral and superficial, and I wanted to try to understand how that could be combined with something like faith, which is eternal and deep.”

In working on this unusual project, Radosh had the earnest desire to look beyond the tacky bumper stickers, tasteless “Testamint” breath fresheners, and humdrum rock and roll in order to discover what is behind many of the strange phenomena that comprise this misunderstood segment of American society. In the end, what he offers is not a scathing review but a brief history and fair-minded analysis of the commercialization of Christianity. And more interestingly, he offers Christians the rare opportunity to be a fly on the wall.

Radosh was not writing with Christians as his audience, and so the book’s side-glanced relevance to evangelicalism is intensified with a raw, simple honesty that too often evades books in the Christian market. Rather than reading like another sermon about how Christians should and should not engage culture, the book simply shines a spotlight on the elephants that have been in the room so long that they now have dirty “Pray for America” made-in-China coffee mugs and dusty Left Behind books sitting on them. Christians could benefit from listening to more respectful and engaged observers like Radosh whose observations, not filtered through a churched colander, could jolt them out of insularity and provide the motivation to finally return these elephants to the zoo.

However, for a reader who is already familiar with the Christian pop subculture, much of the book can be skimmed. Radosh often hovers around the same subject for far too long, and—perhaps because he is so new to the universe—is fascinated with more details than a Christian reader might have the attention span for. Also, Radosh is so intrigued by the general value system of Christians that he devotes a lot of time familiarizing himself with it—often gratuitously filling pages with long quotations of those he has met. These sections are often repetitive, though certainly not dispensable, for a Christian reader.

But readers of all backgrounds will enjoy Radosh’s journal about his bizarre adventure in this parallel universe because it is informative and deeply insightful. While Radosh searches to uncover the most bizarre specimens that pop Christianity has to offer, he also takes the time to engage Christian theology and to ask the much-needed, obvious questions. For example, when conversing with Chuck Wallington—owner of Christian Supply—Wallington insists, “We’re selling stuff that impacts people’s lives.” To which Radosh responds, “Does it, though? There are some people who would say that when Christianity engages heavily in pop culture, that the pop-culture aspect cheapens the Christianity rather than ennobling the pop culture.”

Sometimes Radosh receives satisfactory answers, and sometimes he doesn’t. But astonishingly, after encountering Bibleman, the creationist guru Ken Ham, the demon novelist Frank Peretti, and many more characters who have found their niche in the Christian market, Radosh actually comes away from his adventures less cynical than when he began. “I learned not to trust my first impressions,” he says. “And I came out the other side with a very different perspective than I had going in.”

Recurrently, he befriends kind, sensible, intelligent evangelicals, and these people shift his religious/anthropological paradigm more than his discovery of Christians’ sex tips or their Halloween Hell House. And so it seems that he is able to escape cynicism because he quickly observes that the extremist hell-house Christians are not paddling in the mainstream.

“I could no longer think of [undistilled fundamentalism] as the purest, most authentic expression—the secret id—of evangelical pop culture. Instead it seemed more like the crazy aunt in the attic—part of the family that few were willing to totally disown but that most were a little ashamed of.”

As a side note, Radosh takes more care than most non-Christians do to get his terminology right. He does his homework and tries to make out the squiggly smudges that differentiate all the different Christian species. But overall—because he claims the book is more about pop culture than religion—when he says “Christians” and “evangelicals,” he is still referring to the most general definition. He also tries to be careful about how he uses the term “fundamentalist,” but when he uses the term, he seems to just be referring to the most extreme Christians. And because Radosh realized that Christian pop culture is “almost entirely an exclusively white affair,” he states that he removed African Americans from his samples.

Though most of the book is spent rummaging around in the periphery of American Christianity’s pop universe, Radosh concludes his adventure not by reprimanding the extremist, but by raving about the centrists who are as shocked as he is by his discoveries. In fact, rather than advocating for the annihilation of Christian pop culture, Radosh actually calls for a more complete intersection of the mainstream evangelical subculture with the larger American pop culture.

“As an outsider who has come to support the ascendancy of moderates within evangelicalism, I find myself sharing the goal of erasing that barrier,” he says. Radosh is so impressed by some Christian rock, Christian literature, and the Christian desire to participate as equals in American pop culture, that he wants to see this segment of the subculture adopted by the larger one: “As evangelical artists forgo the safety of the Christian bubble for the greater risks and rewards of competing in the mainstream, I hope the mainstream will make a similar effort to explore this ‘crossover’ Christian culture.” Radosh is like an amusement park caricature of John the Baptist: calling for a repentance of the sacrilegious junk at hand, while proclaiming a better pop culture to come.

By the end of the book, however, Christians should pause and realize that the perspective of a humanist can only be so helpful. Though Radosh might now understand this subculture better than some living in it, he is still operating from a completely different worldview and cannot understand that Christianity must, and always will be, a sort of parallel universe. But, perhaps now that Christian artists have been encouraged from the outside to enrich American pop culture, their parallel universe will become less stigmatized.

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The Emerging Church and Its Critics

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Order a pint of Guinness, turn up Coldplay, and meet me in the corner booth of our local pub because I want to tell you a story.

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