G. Willow Wilson's Genies and Rhinestones

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on July 22, 2006 Sign up now!

By Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 7/22/2006

Cairo author G. Willow Wilson

G. Willow Wilson's first comics byline will appear early next year on a high-profile project: the original graphic novel Cairo, drawn by M.K. Perker and published by Vertigo. Wilson lives in Cairo, and has written about the city, the Middle East and Islam for Cairo magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and the blogs New Cairo and ProgressiveIslam.org. PWCW interviewed her via e-mail about the graphic novel, "politicized knowledge" and her collegiate shrine to Neil Gaiman.

PW Comics Week: Can you tell us a little of what Cairo is about?

G. Willow Wilson: At its heart of hearts, Cairo is an adventure story. Because it deals with characters from a part of the world that is seen in a very controversial light in the West, and issues that are similarly controversial, there are parts that are unusually serious for a comic-book adventure—but at the end of the day, it's about five wildly different people drawn together by a genie in a hookah. It's funny. It's got sword fights and gunfights. The book is also very much a homage to the city after which it's named. Cairo is one of the oldest and strangest great capitals of the world, and living here can be a very surreal experience. Yet it's a city that doesn't really show up on our radar in the West, which I thought was a shame. Cairo itself—or herself; Cairenes always refer to the city as "she"—is almost a character in the book.

PWCW: You're best known as a journalist and commentator; why a graphic novel, as opposed to any other medium, for this story?

GWW: I've always been a comics junkie. As a kid, I was obsessed with the X-Men; as a teenager, I graduated to some of the more literary and macabre Vertigo titles like The Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Preacher and Shade: The Changing Man. To my mind, there are some stories—and Cairo is one of them—that demand to be written as comic books: stories that are too visually complex for prose, and too literary for film. (This is starting to change; film audiences are getting more and more sophisticated and can swallow action and philosophy in the same gulp. The successes of the Matrix trilogy and V for Vendetta are good examples of this phenomenon.) So when Cairo appeared in my mind as an idea, it appeared as the embryo of a graphic novel. I never even considered writing it as a straight prose novel.

Cairo

PWCW: On your Web site, your profile has a great line about "countering the spread of politicized knowledge"; does Cairo relate to that at all?

GWW: Yes, definitely. One of the things I find very troubling as a journalist is how little unfiltered, apolitical information we have access to in the age of global media. What one has to do in order to even approach objectivity is not search for the truth, as one might like to do, but compare and contrast warring agendas. That's a very alarming reality. What I like to think I've done in Cairo is to unpack some of those agendas and lay out the emotional (as opposed to the political) realities they create. One of the characters in the book is a soldier in the IDF (the Israeli army). One is an Egyptian journalist. One is a kid who starts out the story wanting to join a jihadi organization. With such a mix of ideas, you could get really polemical. What I do instead is remove the characters from their political context and send them on this haywire quest through Cairo. In fiction, when you shake up reality and infuse it with the bizarre and the unexpected, you can force characters to become more and more themselves, as individuals. There's no normalcy, no status quo, no jargon for them to fall back upon. This allows you to see how people come to believe what they believe through an emotional and personal rather than a political lens.

PWCW: How did you make the connection with the book's artist, M.K. Perker?

GWW: Karen Berger and Joan Hilty, the book's editors, found him. As I understand it, they had been interested in his work for a while, and were waiting for the right project with which to approach him. Since Cairo really needed an artist who was familiar with the Middle East—the architecture, the faces of the people, the way dress differs from country to country—it was really a match made in Heaven. (M.K. is from Istanbul.) I'm so glad to be able to work with him—he's just brilliant. There's no other word for it. The visual nuance he has been able to bring to the story is far beyond what I had expected. I really feel a kinship with M.K. when it comes to all the wonderful unseen and surreal parts of storytelling and life in general--we had a long and serious conversation once about jinn and their habits. He's a great person, a great artist.

PWCW: One other question: what's the story of the shrine you once made to Neil Gaiman?

GWW: Hah! That's a good story. Neil Gaiman has been one of my literary heroes ever since I started reading Sandman at the age of 15. I've seen him speak several times, and he's just as engaging to hear as he is to read. In college, for fun, I made a maqam (which is like a shrine; a way to remember and honor a Muslim saint) to him out of a shoebox that I decorated with glitter and rhinestones and a picture of him that I cut out of the New York Review of Books. I kept it over my desk to remind myself of the kind of storytelling I wanted to do and the importance of myth. Somehow it survived dorm life and came with me all the way to Cairo, where I moved after I graduated. (I've been here ever since.) Once a week, a sweet, very traditional woman named Umm Rasha came to clean the flat. She was very alarmed by the maqam—she thought I was endangering my immortal soul by worshipping an idol, in this case a shaggy-haired British man in a shoebox. So she threw it out. But she saved the rhinestones in case they were valuable. I found the whole incident so touching and funny that I wasn't even mad. That was the end of Sayyid (Saint) Gaiman.

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