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  • Wish for a different world: Interview with Deena Mohamed

    Wish for a different world: Interview with Deena Mohamed

    The Egyptian author, present at Lucca Comics with Shubeik Lubeik and a collective exhibition, shares her journey and insights into her work, Shubeik Lubeik.
    Shubbek Lubbek

    If one were to compile a list of the year’s standout works, Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, published by Coconino Press, would undoubtedly be among them. This speculative urban fantasy intricately weaves together Arab culture, reflections on capitalism, and an analysis of Egyptian society—its flaws and potential. Composed of three interconnected episodes, Mohamed’s work is a layered and complex narrative. With impeccable world-building and clearly defined internal rules, it reaches readers in a straightforward and non-pedantic manner, captivating them through its character development and the vividly depicted world—an Egypt that feels both fantastical and deeply real.As a guest at Lucca Comics & Games 2024, Deena Mohamed is also featured alongside Takoua Ben Mohamed and Zainab Fasiki in a remarkable exhibition (Kalimatuna – Our Words of Freedom) dedicated to North African women’s comics and their themes. We had the pleasure of meeting Deena Mohamed, who, with great kindness and enthusiasm, shared her journey and some insights into her work.

    Hi Deena and thank you for your time. I’d like to talk about your background, how you came to comics and how you decided to go down this path.
    I actually never decided to do comic books because it did not seem like something that was possible to me. That is why I ended up studying graphic design, I thought graphic design was like a practical art career. It seemed like something people who like art but want a job study.
    Actually, I rather hated it. There was no drawing at all and I really like drawing. So, I started making comics on the side while I was in college. I started with a web comic and then that web comic became quite popular, went a little viral, so I started to get more into comic. I also had the opportunity to get into contact with Shennawy, the founder of Cairo Comics, who has an anthology called Tok Tok. It’s an amazing work of art. It gathers all of the best comic artists in Egypt and they make short comics about topical things. It was so well produced, so beautiful. Shennawy gave a lecture at my university that really inspired me: up until then I had hated graphic design, but he started talking about design from the perspective of a comics artist. He made me realize there were so many things about design that I wasn’t appreciating. At the time, my web comic was anonymous. So I didn’t tell people I was doing it. But I told him and he already knew my comic, at Cairo Comics they were wondering who was doing that. After that I started to get into the Egyptian comic scene, which I really liked. I also decided I wanted to work my next book as a print novel instead of a web comic, and my goal was to just have it at Cairo Comics, I wanted a seat to this table, it seemed like such an ideal life for me. I actually didn’t think of it as a career, up until then this was just a hobby, it was something I was doing on the side and I had other jobs in the meantime. But then Shubeik Lubeik won the prize at Cairo Comics, I sold the English translation and to a really big publisher in America, which gave a big advance, that was even bigger if you apply the currency change in Egypt. Thanks to this I was able to sit for three years and just work on Shubeik Lubeik. Because of this, I’m kind of in a unique position as an Egyptian artist.

    You anticipated my question, about your inspiration. I wanted to ask more in general, but also focus on Egyptian comics because they’re not that well known in the world, but it is a country with a quite active comic scene.
    Yes, I love the Egyptian comics. I always tell people Cairo Comics is the best comic festival in the world, I’m very biased about it. Talking about inspiration, Shennawy to me is one of my comic and design idols. He’s incredible and also very welcoming, a very a good mentor. Same for also Mohamed Salah (not the football player!) (laugh). He’s just a really, really good artist. There’s also May Korayem, who is an Egyptian graphic novelist from Alexandria, she makes cool historical and fictional narratives, really amazing graphic novels. There are so many different artists that were part of the community that inspired me. And to drop some other names, I would say Migo Rollz or Doaa el-Adl, you should look them up. On the international level, I find many artists whose work I love, it’s difficult to make a list here.

    Screenshot

    Shubeik Lubeik is a very layered and rich work. I would like to start, first of all, by talking about the world in which the stories are set, which is very clear and codified in all its rules. How did you work on the world building, and particularly on its main part, that of the wishes and their functioning?
    It all started with the kiosk. I wanted to just draw a kiosk and things happening there in the form of a graphic novel. Then I started thinking, what if this kiosk sold something magical? And what if it’s a wish? What kind of a world is it where you can buy a wish at a kiosk?From these questions I started to build the world of Shubeik Lubeik. For example, if you can buy a wish, then for sure there is a price for it. This was one of the keys to the story: how can a wish have a price? There must be classes of wishes, like everything in our world. This is something common in many traditional wish stories. Some stories will have classes of genies. They’ll have powerful genies and less powerful genies. The main change was to make the genie as a product, not as a person, and people will then put a price on a thing they want. It was a really immersive thing, in two hours I outlined the world. After arguing with myself, I started throwing ideas at a friend, and then I just put in all the rules. I really like speculative fiction, so I enjoyed a lot thinking about this in this way. I was also thinking of what kind of wish people would ask for. There will be the most obvious questions, of course: wishing for peace, wishing for life, wishing for all these basic things. And there’s always rules when it comes to wishes. The important thing was to have a world with proper rules so that the reader feels like it is a world they can trust, they can get into. Nobody likes something that is flip-floppy.

    Nobody likes a fictional world that is not working following some rules…
    Yes, I wanted to construct this world very carefully. So that the story would stand on its own. For the Arabic Market I did three separate books that then were put together in this version. The infographics in the Italian and the English version are not actually in Arabic, they were a separate booklet that I did for free and gifted together with the third part.
    It was like a small part, not really a part of the story, but I introduced it for the translated version. All of this was just something I created in order to then think about the characters, to give them a believable life. SO yeah, I came up with the entire trilogy in those first few hours, and then I spent like 6 years drawing it.

    Speaking about translation, was it difficult to adapt some concepts and cultural aspects into another language? Arabic and English are deeply different, not just as a language but also in their cultural references.
    Before I worked on Shubbek Lubbek I was working on a webcomic which was both in English and in Arabic, and I was constantly thinking about how to convey my culture in English.
    With this worked, I actually wanted to do the opposite, I was doing first of all only for an Egyptians audience, so I decided to not think to a foreign audience. The goal was to have it successfully in Egypt, after selling the translation I would deal with it when I got to it. But when I started doing it, I hated myself a little bit (laugh) because it was actually very, very hard to translate, and I’m not a professional translator. I actually made a comic about the process of translating, actually explaining all of the difficulties.

    Shubek Lubek

    That would be good to be published together with the actual book!
    You can check on my website and on my Instagram. The American translators some issues with the sort of cultural stereotypes in it, like for example the one portrayed in the episode of Aziza and her husband. The translator weren’t exactly sure about the nature of their relationship, because in Egypt it’s a very famous archetype, the one of the cold wife and the jokey husband. They were a little worried she didn’t love him, so I had to expand this part in the English version to make it clearer, although I didn’t change the story at all. Another main difference compared to the Arabic version is that the narrator there only explains the world of wishes, while in English is also a translator, explaining the meaning of the words. I think this really helped me with the translation a lot. Because I wanted it to feel like a translation. Another thing I liked was the possibility to keep the reading order from right to left, and this make people more open to a new story but also to a new culture. Like for mangas, people knew it was a translation, you had to read in a different direction, and then your brain is more ready for something that it is unknown, it becomes more welcoming to a new experience. It is something physical, it involves your eyes, your tactile sense.

    Yes, it’s like saying since the beginning that this is something different, a new world, and the reader has to accept its roots, the one you created but also the one of your culture, which are not the same as his.
    Exactly, that’s how I feel when I read a manga, or a Korean or Chinese story. And I wanted to bring that spirit to an Arabic graphic novel, because we often have to flip ourselves for foreign readers. But it was nice to be able to say: “Wait, Arabic is not any lesser than Japanese. Why do we flip our books?”

    Let’s talk about themes. In this work you talk about the rule of law and repression, depression and mental illness, and the relationship between religions. Starting from the stratagem of a fantasy world but very similar to ours, you talk about the ambivalences, the distortions but also the potentials of contemporary Egyptian society. How did you develop this type of narration?
    I was already doing comics about social issues, my webcomic was social commentary. It was about different issues that were annoying me, so I already had this experience. With Shubeik Lubeik I actually wanted to get away from having a message, I didn’t want to be didactic and teaching people, giving lessons.  I actually want to tell a story, and from the process of the story, I think the discussion on specific issues arisen. For me it is impossible to tell an interesting or honest story without looking at the world in this way.
    You cannot tell a story about wishes, about what people want without talking about what stops them from getting what they want, especially when a wish cost money. You have to talk about class society, about poverty, about bureaucracy. But first of all I wanted to tell an interesting story. I wanted a story that felt like people would read it. And feel like it’s not going in the cliché way. I tried not to take easy answers, like for example reflecting on who is wishing for happiness. Who is the type of person that would spend the equivalent of a million dollars (the cost of a first class wish) for his happiness? It is a huge cost. It’s something only someone for whom happiness is the center of their world would do. Same thing if you are talking about an issue like depression, it’s better not to talk about it in a shallow or a cliché way, otherwise the story is pointless, it does not have an impact. So I rather tell a good and honest story, take a new way of looking on what is the meaning of a wish.

    The style and construction of your panels are very clear and direct, the storytelling is primarily focused on conveying the story more than having more elaborated drawings. How did you work on this aspect?
    As I said, the focus was to sell the book in Egypt, so I wanted the style and narrative to be as clear as possible for Egyptian readers. Therefore I tried not to overwhelm the readers, as I know a lot of Egyptian readers have two issues with graphic novels. At first they always think that comics are for children, so when they see a novel that has a little more philosophical content they’re not prepared for it. Their mind isn’t yet open to thinking conceptually.
    I tried then to bring these concepts in step by step: the story starts with a very simple panel, it’s almost one drawing per page, and then it gets more and more complex, it brings in humor and once you are attached to the characters, you believe they are real people, they you are really into the story. This is also why the first part has a narrator, to guide the reader through the story, to somehow teach them and to emphatize with the characters. It also brings in some balance, because the story is very dense.

    There are actually three stories in the book.
    Yes, the original project was a trilogy. And since it is so full o things happening, I wanted to  be sure nothing was confusing in the art. The storytelling could not be too fancy. You can’t tell a complicated story in a complicated way. You have to tell a complicated story in a simple way, so that people understand it quickly. They don’t stop in a place you don’t want them to stop. So one of the reasons I put the infographics at the end of each part in the international version was because I wanted people to stop there, in between the episodes, to sit with the story for a while (a thing I did not need in Arabic, because between the stories there was a whole year).
    For me the most important thing in a comic is rhythm, something that most of the people underestimate. When I write, I think about the number of pages I want to have, and the pause in it, to set the rhythm of the story.Another important aspect was to balance fantasy and realistic details. The story is an urban fantasy, a speculative fiction. It’s not high fantasy, so I need this sense of realism to balance, representing the objects people uses, the clothes, the food they eat, the background, the city. In this way,  the dilemma of the wishes becomes so much more real. I know I’m probably talking about this in such a technical manner, but to me this is what actually storytelling amounts to. If you have a big story and you want to convey a big emotion, you have to deconstruct the structure like this.

    Shubbeklubbek Genie

    There are many things we could talk about, but I was particularly fascinated by the depiction of the genies, I imagined their voice and movement, almost as an animation. What were you inspired by in their creation? You’re putting the Arabic language directly into the drawing of the genie themselves.
    There are two elements that guided me in the creation of the genies. First of all I wanted the story to be more Arab and more Egyptian, in a way that most stories about genies haven’t been in a long time. Genies come from Middle Eastern and the whole oriental culture. You can find them in Chinese mythology, in the Persian one, in the whole Arab world. So I just wanted to make it more Egyptian in some way. The second element, as I said, is that genies are products. Traditionally, in every story about genies, they are the main character. The genie is usually a slave or maybe it has it’s own story. In my work I wanted to depersonalize them completely, therefore I didn’t want them to have a human shape. At the same time, I wanted them to be expressive. Islamic art tends to go away from human figures, it tends not to depict human figures, which is why there’s so much calligraphy and there’s so much geometric art. So when I was looking into how would a genie look like, I was thinking Islamic art might be interesting in that aspect. And by representing them using calligraphy, as the words that they ask, I would depersonalize them. This also allowed me to define the different classes of genie: the first class one are represented with a really fancy handwriting, they speak very politely. Whereas the third class genie, they’re kind of like a scribble monster, and they speak really rudely. A thing the I wanted also to point out about calligraphy is that it suits each character as well. For Shawqia, the genie that comes out for her, it’s actually a little bit of more like Coptic and Byzantine era calligraphy, it comes with this sort of miniature painting style. Whereas for Shukri, it’s like the very classical Arabic style.
    So even just through the Arabic text, I was able to portray so much personality, but still convey that they are not treated as persons, although they are living beings, they are exploited. Through all three parts the reader slowly learns that actually these are products, built on exploitation. They’re sentient beings that have been manufactured to take all the willpower out of them. And third class genies still have willpower, that’s why they trick people, because they hate them. So I think this is the undertone of the story: a reflection on capitalism, essentially.

    Yes, I would say both capitalism and colonialism, what it left in the countries it exploited.
    Yes, very much so. Even though it’s not addressed, you do get the sense of unease. And I think this is why some people find the third part, Shukri’s argument, convincing in some way, because there is a sense of unease that surely using wishes can’t be right. This story is about what people want, but at the end the question remains: is it even ethically right to make a wish? And this is also how we live in our world. We’re constantly making decisions that are not ethically right, because this is how the world is constructed. I wanted it to have this sense of almost the helplessness of not even addressing this. The story revolves around characters, not around structural things about society, and the characters have no say in this, except for Shukri, who is looking at it from a religious perspective.
    Thanks a lot for your time and your answer Deena!

    Interview done on 2nd November in Lucca Comics and Games 2024

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    Deena Mohamed
    Deena Mohamed is an Egyptian comics artist, writer, and designer. She began making comics at the age of eighteen with Qahera, a semi-satirical and semi-sincere webcomic about a visibly Muslim Egyptian superhero tackling issues such as Islamophobia and misogyny.
    During her undergraduate studies in graphic design, she researched the history of Egyptian comics for her thesis, which inspired her to create her graphic novel trilogy,
    Shubeik Lubeik. This urban fantasy explores a world where wishes are bought and sold. The first part was self-published at the Cairo Comix Festival, where it won the Best Graphic Novel award and the Grand Prize of the Cairo Comix Festival in 2017.
    The Arabic trilogy was later published as three separate graphic novels in Egypt by Dar El Mahrousa. The English edition, translated and published as a single collected volume, was acquired by Pantheon Books for North America and Granta for the UK, with a release in January 2023, and by Coconino Press for Italy in 2024. In addition to her personal projects, Deena works as a freelance illustrator for local and international clients, including Insider, Viacom, Google, UN Women, Harassmap, and Mada Masr. She is passionate about projects that involve community development, awareness, and outreach, particularly editorial illustrations and children’s books.
    Deena currently resides and works between Cairo and New York, focusing on comics and creative collaborations.

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