Habibi: A Story of Stories

By the flickering flame of a candle, a scribe toils at his writing desk, painstakingly lettering and inking as he copies sacred texts, books, and important documents.

When he puts brush to paper, he imparts a certain kind of power to the written word. Within the ink lie magical and mysterious powers that are at once beautiful and frightening.

Sadly, the art of the written word has been all but forgotten today. There is no romance in using a laser printer, no nuances to be explored in a dot-matrix document.

Craig Thompson’s latest graphic novel Habibi pays homage to this art that we have forgotten. His hardcover tome, weighing in at 672 pages, stirs up long-lost memories of handwritten scripts and how words and illuminations were once more valuable than gold, because it meant that knowledge was in the hands of the literate few.

But Thompson’s ode to calligraphy is just one of the many underlying themes of Habibi. Over the course of this richly illustrated book, Thompson weaves together stories from the Quran and the Old Testament, scenes reminiscent of A Thousand And One Tales, and even modern-day arguments like capitalism and sustainable resources.

As the title of the book implies, however, (habibi means “my beloved” in Arabic), this is essentially a love story.

“From the Divine Pen fell the first drop of ink. And from a drop, a river.”

And so the B&W drawn book begins, in the Middle East of our fantasies. As caravans thread through the sand dunes, the book’s main female protagonist, Dodola, finds herself sold into child marriage, where her scribe-husband teaches her to read and write.

Calligraphy and scripture feature strongly throughout Habibi. Thompson does not just rely on them as illustrations and background material, but as storylines and supporting characters in themselves.

With Habibi, Thompson has proven himself to be a worthy scribe – one who treasures the stories and words of others, and shares them with the world with utmost respect for their beauty.

“From the Divine Pen fell the first drop of ink. And from a drop, a river.”

Source: The Star Online