Habibi. Craig Thompson. 2011.

The word habibi means “my beloved” in Arabic, as explained in an expository section of this graphic novel, which tells the story of two children, one sold into slavery, the other born a slave. Dodola, a twelve-year-old, escapes a human-trafficking ring with the child of a fellow slave who has despaired and left her child to be killed by the slavers. Dodola raises the child, whom she renames Zam (and calls Habibi), by trading food for sex. As Zam/Habibi grows up, Dodola comforts him with stories of Abraham, Moses , Noah, Job, and the Garden of Eden. Habibi is well paced, coordinating the central story of Dodola trapped in the harem of a sultan, Habibi’s ordeal as a young man upon being separated from Dodola after nine years, flashbacks to Dodola being sold as a wife at the age of nine to the scribe who taught her to write, stories of angels and jinn and struggling prophets, and expository sections on the meaning and power of the written word and the numbers one through nine. The blatantly expository sections detail features of the nine magic squares, the luoshu or “river map” that was delivered to humanity on the back of a river-god tortoise. The number/word sections are beautifully organized, as is the overall pattern of the novel’s interlacing narrative segments into nine chapters. The depth of the story comes from the expository sections that explain the mathematics of the magic squares and the phonemic and morphemic figures of Arabic writing related to the luoshu. They are illustrative of the sacredness of writing and, in particular, of the sacred shape of Arabic sounds, syllables, and words in the Qur’an. The novel is further deepened through a thematics of environmental consciousness, for the story is set in the contemporary world, with its urban blight, pollution, and politicized corporate control over water distribution.