When Deena Mohamed tells me that her grandmother, keen to encourage her love of art, used to let her draw on the backs of old cigarette cartons as a girl, it feels strangely significant. Mohamed’s new graphic novel, after all, is inspired by the koshks (kiosks) that can be found on every Cairo street corner: beloved, Tardis-like stands that make it possible to buy, among many other things, tobacco at any hour of the day or night. To me, Your Wish Is My Command now feels more than ever like the book she was born to write: a future classic that may one day be spoken of in the same breath as Craig Thompson’s Blankets, or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.
Originally published in three volumes as Shubeik Lubeik in Arabic, and the winner of the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comix festival, Your Wish Is My Command is set in an all too recognisable modern-day Egypt: here is heavy traffic, and even heavier bureaucracy. But the Cairo Mohamed depicts, noisy and teeming, isn’t precisely the place in which she was born and still lives (though we’re talking on Zoom, alas). In this city, as in those across the rest of the world, wishes can literally be bought, and thus, lives changed for ever, overnight. There is, however, a catch (you knew there would be). These precious wishes, stored in bottles and carefully controlled by the state, vary in quality, and access to first-class ones, the only truly reliable kind, is restricted either to the rich or to the extremely lucky – until, that is, a man called Shokry, the owner of an unassuming kiosk, puts three of them on sale.
“I was thinking about the kiosks,” says Mohamed, casting her mind back to how she got started on this project. “I’ve always had an interest in them. They’re bright spots of colour in the city, and all of them are different because they’re personalised by their owners. I knew I really wanted to draw them. But I love fantasy too, and I thought it might be fun to have a koshk that sold magical objects. What kind of magical object? Once I had the idea of wishes, the story came together. I started building a world.”
Hers is a realm in which detail is everything. The regulations surrounding wishes, not to mention their possible uses and abuses, are complicated to the point where Mohamed is sometimes moved to step out of her narrative, the better to explain both their long history (first mined from ancient tombs, the UN created “the Declaration for Human Wishing” after their “brutal and excessive use” during the second world war), and the tricky rules governing the way they work (“wishes must be clearly enunciated by one person within a minute of unbottling”). She even presents a guide to the slang that has grown up around third-class wishes. In Egypt, for instance, they’re known as “delesseps”, a word that emphasises their treachery (Ferdinand de Lesseps was a French diplomat notorious for betraying Egyptian anti-colonialists). The British, on the other hand, simply refer to them as “duffers”. In the case of the unreliable delesseps, it is important to be careful what you wish for.
Mohamed’s story features characters from across Egyptian society: Nour is a middle-class student; Aziza is an impoverished young widow; and then there is Shokry, a devout old man half-hidden behind piled cardboard boxes. But while it’s easy to read Your Wish Is My Command as an extended metaphor for Egyptian politics – the desperate, who need wishes more than anyone else, can afford only the risky third-class kind – Mohamed thinks her book’s scope extends far beyond her own country. “I wanted to look at what people most want, and once you start doing that, the book’s themes start to seem universal,” she says.
Just as the commodification of wishes reflects a capitalism that extends across the world – Coca-Cola can be bought everywhere, including in places where many basic goods and necessities are unavailable – so the book’s politics are also global. “It used to be that some people assumed bureaucracy was a problem only for other countries,” Mohamed tells me. “But now they recognise that the corruption of politics doesn’t only exist in one part of the world. The book works on many levels. It’s not specific to Egypt.” The three stories at its heart, she hopes, reflect common desires: in the end, human beings want nothing more than health and happiness for ourselves and for those we love: “I conceptualise wishes in the same way some might think of prayer. They’re for extreme life events. But then I complicate that. Wishing for happiness isn’t simple. You have to consider what happiness is.”
Mohamed, who is 28, comes from a medical family. “My parents are doctors and so are my brothers,” she says. “But I have a theory about the doctor-to-artist pipeline. I think once you’ve got enough doctors in the family, someone has to take on the burden of becoming something else.” As a child she was always drawing, but she read Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie rather than comic books. “My mother had a big collection of their books in English, and for a long time I used to say things like ‘jolly good’ whenever I spoke in English [she taught herself the language].”
During her first year as a student of graphic design she began – “mostly to let off steam” – anonymously drawing a web comic, and only when it went viral did she finally begin reading other people’s cartoons. “That’s my confession: that I only got into comics after I started making them. My web comic was about women’s issues. It talked about sexual harassment, freedom of dress, things like that, and I was surprised when Egyptians were excited by it. When it went viral I felt a little out of my depth, so I thought I would research the history of Egyptian comics.” She found the groundbreaking quarterly magazine (the name given to three-wheeled scooters in Egypt) especially inspirational.
Was it hard to break into comics as a woman in Egypt? “No, because it’s a small world here – 20 or 30 people – and in the wider Arab world, for example in Lebanon, the comics industry is dominated by women. People have been very supportive. They’re excited to welcome artists into the fold because it’s not a competitive industry; there’s no money in it, and there’s no sense of hierarchy. I think it’s much more welcoming than comics communities in France or the US.” Nevertheless, she loved the residency she did at the 2018 annual Angoulême international comics festival in France (her prize when her book won an award at its Cairo counterpart). “I saw people there who draw a page five or six times just to get one small thing right, and it made me feel that I could do better myself; that I should be more proud of my work.”
Until recently, Mohamed worked on her comics alongside freelance jobs as an illustrator and graphic designer. But thanks to the sale of the translation rights for Your Wish Is My Command, she’s hoping – for a while, at least – to concentrate only on her next book, whatever it may be (she isn’t saying). And what about Egypt? Is her book a hit there? Has it had a lot of attention? “Again, that’s relative,” she says. “You know, for a long time my aim was just to finish it. There’s no funding for comics here, and people often run out of steam midway through, especially with long graphic novels. That was my goal. But the response has been surprising. The first volume is on its eighth printing, which my publisher and I really didn’t see coming. You can buy it in any bookstore now, and when we do signings lots of people attend.”
Even if it’s still on the small side, the readership for adult comics in Egypt is much bigger than it was, something that pleases her: she wrote her own book with her compatriots in mind. But this is also, as she surely knows, why it works so brilliantly in English, or any other language. If its particularities give it a certain warmth, they also make it feel all the more subversive and original. As she puts it: “I wanted everything to feel familiar and comfortable to Egyptians so the magic involved wouldn’t be jarring. But everyone seems to love how Egyptian it is, across the Arab world and beyond. I’m relieved, because when I was writing it, I could never have imagined it would go that far.”
• Your Wish Is My Command by Deena Mohamed is published by Granta (£19.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
