G Willow Wilson first made a name for herself in comics in 2007 when the graphic novel Cairo which she wrote was published by Vertigo and made a splash, combining fantasy and realism in an attempt to capture life in Egypts capital city. She followed up the book with the series Air, which was also illustrated by her Cairo collaborator M.K. Perker and other comics work including Superman, The Outsiders, Vixen and most recently Mystic. Shes also published nonfiction in many places including The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. In 2010 her memoir The Butterfly Mosque, was published about her move after college to Cairo where she met her future husband and came to fall in love with the country.
Her new book is her first novel, Alif the Unseen. The story of a hacker in an unnamed Arab Gulf country, the book involves the jinn, a battle with the state security services overseen by The Hand, the nature of storytelling, the power of the internet and climaxes in a revolution. Its also a book that was written before the uprisings known as the Arab Spring erupted last year. We caught up with Wilson and spoke about the book and the current political climate in the Middle East following the Egyptian Presidential election.
Alex Dueben: Where did book begin for you?
G. Willow Wilson: It started from a number of seeds of ideas. One of which was the fact that I was really passionate about writing something about the impact that the internet was having on youth culture and the discussion of religion in the Middle East and bleeding over into the blogosphere here in the United States. Id been living in Cairo and the internet was one of the main ways that I was able to not only keep in touch with people back home in the U.S., but also to reach out to others in the Middle East. What I found was really surprising to me. People were using the internet as a way to circumvent the censorship that is so prevalent in parts of the Middle East because the internet is still harder to censor than print media or television media. All of these different groups of people, who would ordinarily have no reason to talk to one another, were all of a sudden having conversations. Islamists and secularists, modernists and traditionalists, and all of the different demographics of people who would have to band together in order to enact any kind of change. For a long time pundits in the West said that change in the Middle East was going to be slow or impossible because these groups had such different ideologies, but what I was seeing was that people were actually trying really hard to find common ground because they had common problemsmainly the absolute lack of the freedom to chose their own government.
I thought that was very exciting, but at the time I really couldnt get any traction here in the U.S. for an article or a book about this phenomenon because people really didnt understand why the internet was such an important tool of communication. I think a lot of people in traditional media because they didnt understand what was going on on the internet, they assumed that nothing was going on on the internet. Which today seems silly, but I said, you know what, I am going to put this in a novel. Sometimes people will latch onto an idea in fiction that they wont necessarily latch onto in nonfiction because in fiction we expect the unusual. That was a big part of it. And another part was a desire to combine all of these things that I was interested in all of these audiences that I usually address separately and write about all of those things at once. It has modern fantasy and that could drawn on my comics-reading audience and its also got religion and politics which I write nonfiction on, so for me, it was also when I stopped censoring myself.
AD: Why did you decide to write a prose novel and not another graphic novel or comic series?
GWW: The scope of Alif the Unseen seemed big enough that I wanted a prose book because I knew that there were going to be things that are difficult to portray in pictures. Theres literary slights of hand that you can do in prose that are harder to pull off when you need concrete visual images as you do with graphic novels. I thought it was too big to be a graphic novel, so I decided to go with prose.
AD: You made the point that there wasnt an awareness or interest in youth culture or Middle East culture is, I think, spot on, but its interesting you used a novel to address this. By focusing on the internal life of a character, it allows the reader to get into the characters head and bypasses that orientalist notion of the other.
GWW: To me thats the beauty of fiction. And in particular, the beauty of genre fiction. Taking people so far outside the realm of their own ordinary experience that theyre forced to give up a lot of their preconceived notions and react spontaneously to the characters in the story and the events in the story instead of drawing in with a notion of how things should work. To me that was what was so valuable about Alif as a novel, and not only as a novel but a work of speculative fiction.
AD: Its been interesting to read non-genre critics respond to the book often in very interesting ways because theyre drawn to the book because of the subject matter but then they seem confused by the fantastic elements in some entertaining ways.
GWW: [laughs] Its such a genre-bending book that I think people who are used to reading literary fiction, which has a limited set of tropes, get caught off guard a little bit. But thats part of the fun of reading a book that takes you a little bit outside your comfort zone. Or at least I hope it is.
AD: I think so, but again if youd written a book about a hacker in a Gulf country that ends in revolution with no fantastic elements, the book would have had a slightly different readership and a slightly different response.
GWW: Probably so. I wasnt really interested in making a straight up political statement or disguising what should have been nonfiction as fiction. I wanted to tell a good story. I wanted to tell an exciting story that had the touchstones of modern politics and real life events and real life people, but at the same time break away from expectations about what the middle east is like. I wanted it to be the kind of book that I love to read, the kinds of books that I enjoy reading, so thats the kind of book that I wrote.
AD: Youve written about the jinn before, in your graphic novel Cairo. What do you find so interesting about them?
GWW: Theres so much fascinating mythology surrounding the jinn, analogous in a lot of ways to the mythology surrounding elves or faeries in Western mythology. Theyre largely an untapped resource in English-language literature because theyre really not part of our typical fantasy canon. There was a lot there that I thought was worth talking about and theyre also a very interesting and convenient way of speaking about the ways that we people living in the modern, rational 21st century could be religious. Jinn are in fact mentioned in the Quran. Theyre part of the canon of Islamic literature, but among the increasingly practical scientific people in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world youll often see reluctance to talk about jinn and the unseen in a literal way. They fall outside that very pragmatic way that we see the world. This is true in the book as well. Alif of course is very reluctant to believe that the shady character he meets whose help he needs is anything other than a human being and really resists the idea that theres anything more going on. It was a very interesting way to examine how we as modern humans interact with our own myths and our own religion.
AD: Thats true of many religions, Judaism and Christianity, just to stay in the same family, have fantastic elements that are largely or completely ignored.
GWW: Thats very true. Its become somewhat uncool to talk about these things and I think the more academic our understanding of religion becomesand this is equally true for people who practice religion in some ways, this is not a statement about atheists or non-practicing peopleeven practicing people prefer to focus on law and on ethics. We become increasingly nervous at the more transcendental aspects of religion that were very important to our pre-modern ancestors. As a writer of fiction and a longtime fan of Neil Gaiman and the modern fantasy writers of that generation, this was a really interesting topic for me to kind of dig my teeth into.
AD: I dont want to give away much of the plot but theres a point where Alif is in prison and The Hand has a great line talking about how if the citizens were given the right to vote, they would vote for either their own tribe, the Islamists or whoever paid them. Thats been what many people including lots of powerful Arabs and lots of influential Americans have been saying for decades.
GWW: Yeah. Thats the cynical, realist traditional interpretation of what would happen if you gave democracy to people in the Middle East. One of the reasons why we, though we are in theory the great spreader of democracy, have been reluctant to court democratic movements in the Middle East is because of that exact fear. I started writing the book before the Arab spring broke out and I didnt want The Hand to be right, but I had a terrible inkling that if there were to be revolution or a series of revolutions in the Middle East, that that might be the outcome. In the book I chose the optimistic route and I back Alifs assertion that freedom is not a dead idea. That people do want that choice and no matter the outcome that is a noble struggle to undertake.
Its been interesting to see the Arab Spring unfold and compare it to what happened in the book. I pay particularly close attention to Egypt because thats my second home and its where my husbands family is and where most of my books still are. [laughs] A good chunk of my life is there. Its been very very interesting to see the aftermath of the first free Presidential election in really the history of Egypt. To see this, in theory, moderate Islamist elected and everybodys waiting to see what hell do. So far the threat of popular revolt, the reminder that the only reason that hes in power is because a popular revolt put him there, seems to have been enough to at least make him appear to toe a line of equality. Hes made promises to appoint women and Coptic Christians to his cabinet. Hes done everything short of bend over backwards to reassure people that hes not out to create a Saudi Arabia in Egypt because thats not something that the people in Egyptand I think, in most of the Middle Eastwant.
I think Islamism has had a chance to play itself out. Weve seen it in Saudi Arabia. Weve seen Shia Islamism in Iran. Weve seen Islamist groups take control of parts of Somalia and parts of Sudan. People are, I think, cynical of that dangerous, golden age thinking. That if we just roll back the clock to the seventh century, everything will be okay. And it seems that even people who are practicing Muslims are becoming skeptical to that idea because theyve seen the terrible fallout that goes along with some of these ultraconservative regimes in various places. I think its healthy for these ideas to be aired in public so that they have a chance to be tested and criticized so I think theres good reason to be optimistic. I, like many people, are watching with anticipation to see what happens next in this new Middle East.
AD: Its incredibly interesting and as you point out, now-President of Egypt Morsi was running against a candidate whose platform was essentially, forget about my career and what Ive done, Ill keep the Islamists in check.
GWW: Right. And he got a very good showing. Morsi only beat him by a few points. That shows that people are deeply worried about these things. But at the end of the day theyre not interested in a repeat of the old regime. The threat of Islamist takeover was the excuse that Mubarak used for thirty years to jail and torture dissidents of all stripes including secularists and to impose this emergency law that strips Egyptian citizens of even their most basic rights of free assembly and free speech. I think the election of Morsi shows that the people are willing to take that risk in the name of freedom. I think the people went the optimistic route and I and a lot of people are hoping that is rewarded by a government that works, but well see. Its too early to tell.
AD: Its been exciting to see as across the region in Tunisia and Libya and Egypt, different governments emerge.
GWW: Its exciting and chaotic. Revolutions are not easy things. They take a long time. You look back at our own history, even though we enshrine the year 1776, it took almost one hundred years for us to really get things sorted out and decide what it meant to be a United States. It took a series of small wars and a Civil War before we really sorted that out. Revolutions are not easy things and sometimes it takes a while for things to shake out.
AD: Your book touches on that at the end where it may be a hopeful ending, but its not a perfect, utopian ending.
GWW: I was at that point projecting forward and thinking about what mob justice means. Even if the mob in question is a revolutionary mob and has the highest ideals when it comes to giving the power of government back to the people, at the end of the day, a mobs a mob. Sometimes innocent people get caught up in that momentary fury that is necessary to topple a dictatorship. Look at Tahrir Square. Innocent people have suffered when crowds get angry and I wanted to keep that in mind. When I was writing that scene, because the events in Tahrir Square had not unfolded yet, I was thinking about the French Revolution and some of the similar things that occurred during that time period. Theres no reason this wouldnt happen in this situation in the Middle East as well where you get so many people in the same place at once who have been so angry for so long. For a brief period of time, mob justice prevails and that certainly comes through in the book. It is not meant to be an entirely sunny, wonderful you have a revolution, the end, happily ever after sort of an ending. I try to take into account what inevitably happens when great great upheaval is experienced.
AD: What are you working on now?
GWW: Right now Im working on another novel. Its set about five hundred years ago during the age of exploration. One of the characters from Alif the Unseen appears in it. Since it takes place so many centuries ago, Im sure you can probably guess which one. [laughs] Its high seas adventure with a twist so its been a lot of fun to write. Its not finished and possibly wont be for a while.
AD: Just as a final question, and weve been touching on this, Im curious about your thoughts on the future, especially in Egypt.
GWW: I wish I had a crystal ball so I could see. What I hope will happen is that after a period of adjustment, which I think will consume the entire first termpossibly only termof Morsis Presidency and at least the next Parliament, that people will get down to the business of fixing the economy. Thats my hope. I think we forget that really the breaking point that brought about revolution in Egypt was the fact that people were starting to find it difficult to feed themselves in many circumstances. Inflation was so high that a pound of meat cost more in dollars in Cairo than it does here in the United States. This is a country where a lot of people live on the global poverty line of two dollars a day. You cant sustain that. The real problem is the economic tailspin that the country has spiraled into and I think the real test will be whether the Morsi government can start to pull it out of that tailspin. Irregardless of the discussion of religion, irregardless of the discussion of foreign policy, that is going to be the real test. I hope and pray that theyre able to at least begin to turn it around because thats going to determine the future of not just for this generation of Egyptians but for the generations to come.
Her new book is her first novel, Alif the Unseen. The story of a hacker in an unnamed Arab Gulf country, the book involves the jinn, a battle with the state security services overseen by The Hand, the nature of storytelling, the power of the internet and climaxes in a revolution. Its also a book that was written before the uprisings known as the Arab Spring erupted last year. We caught up with Wilson and spoke about the book and the current political climate in the Middle East following the Egyptian Presidential election.
Alex Dueben: Where did book begin for you?
G. Willow Wilson: It started from a number of seeds of ideas. One of which was the fact that I was really passionate about writing something about the impact that the internet was having on youth culture and the discussion of religion in the Middle East and bleeding over into the blogosphere here in the United States. Id been living in Cairo and the internet was one of the main ways that I was able to not only keep in touch with people back home in the U.S., but also to reach out to others in the Middle East. What I found was really surprising to me. People were using the internet as a way to circumvent the censorship that is so prevalent in parts of the Middle East because the internet is still harder to censor than print media or television media. All of these different groups of people, who would ordinarily have no reason to talk to one another, were all of a sudden having conversations. Islamists and secularists, modernists and traditionalists, and all of the different demographics of people who would have to band together in order to enact any kind of change. For a long time pundits in the West said that change in the Middle East was going to be slow or impossible because these groups had such different ideologies, but what I was seeing was that people were actually trying really hard to find common ground because they had common problemsmainly the absolute lack of the freedom to chose their own government.
I thought that was very exciting, but at the time I really couldnt get any traction here in the U.S. for an article or a book about this phenomenon because people really didnt understand why the internet was such an important tool of communication. I think a lot of people in traditional media because they didnt understand what was going on on the internet, they assumed that nothing was going on on the internet. Which today seems silly, but I said, you know what, I am going to put this in a novel. Sometimes people will latch onto an idea in fiction that they wont necessarily latch onto in nonfiction because in fiction we expect the unusual. That was a big part of it. And another part was a desire to combine all of these things that I was interested in all of these audiences that I usually address separately and write about all of those things at once. It has modern fantasy and that could drawn on my comics-reading audience and its also got religion and politics which I write nonfiction on, so for me, it was also when I stopped censoring myself.
AD: Why did you decide to write a prose novel and not another graphic novel or comic series?
GWW: The scope of Alif the Unseen seemed big enough that I wanted a prose book because I knew that there were going to be things that are difficult to portray in pictures. Theres literary slights of hand that you can do in prose that are harder to pull off when you need concrete visual images as you do with graphic novels. I thought it was too big to be a graphic novel, so I decided to go with prose.
AD: You made the point that there wasnt an awareness or interest in youth culture or Middle East culture is, I think, spot on, but its interesting you used a novel to address this. By focusing on the internal life of a character, it allows the reader to get into the characters head and bypasses that orientalist notion of the other.
GWW: To me thats the beauty of fiction. And in particular, the beauty of genre fiction. Taking people so far outside the realm of their own ordinary experience that theyre forced to give up a lot of their preconceived notions and react spontaneously to the characters in the story and the events in the story instead of drawing in with a notion of how things should work. To me that was what was so valuable about Alif as a novel, and not only as a novel but a work of speculative fiction.
AD: Its been interesting to read non-genre critics respond to the book often in very interesting ways because theyre drawn to the book because of the subject matter but then they seem confused by the fantastic elements in some entertaining ways.
GWW: [laughs] Its such a genre-bending book that I think people who are used to reading literary fiction, which has a limited set of tropes, get caught off guard a little bit. But thats part of the fun of reading a book that takes you a little bit outside your comfort zone. Or at least I hope it is.
AD: I think so, but again if youd written a book about a hacker in a Gulf country that ends in revolution with no fantastic elements, the book would have had a slightly different readership and a slightly different response.
GWW: Probably so. I wasnt really interested in making a straight up political statement or disguising what should have been nonfiction as fiction. I wanted to tell a good story. I wanted to tell an exciting story that had the touchstones of modern politics and real life events and real life people, but at the same time break away from expectations about what the middle east is like. I wanted it to be the kind of book that I love to read, the kinds of books that I enjoy reading, so thats the kind of book that I wrote.
AD: Youve written about the jinn before, in your graphic novel Cairo. What do you find so interesting about them?
GWW: Theres so much fascinating mythology surrounding the jinn, analogous in a lot of ways to the mythology surrounding elves or faeries in Western mythology. Theyre largely an untapped resource in English-language literature because theyre really not part of our typical fantasy canon. There was a lot there that I thought was worth talking about and theyre also a very interesting and convenient way of speaking about the ways that we people living in the modern, rational 21st century could be religious. Jinn are in fact mentioned in the Quran. Theyre part of the canon of Islamic literature, but among the increasingly practical scientific people in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world youll often see reluctance to talk about jinn and the unseen in a literal way. They fall outside that very pragmatic way that we see the world. This is true in the book as well. Alif of course is very reluctant to believe that the shady character he meets whose help he needs is anything other than a human being and really resists the idea that theres anything more going on. It was a very interesting way to examine how we as modern humans interact with our own myths and our own religion.
AD: Thats true of many religions, Judaism and Christianity, just to stay in the same family, have fantastic elements that are largely or completely ignored.
GWW: Thats very true. Its become somewhat uncool to talk about these things and I think the more academic our understanding of religion becomesand this is equally true for people who practice religion in some ways, this is not a statement about atheists or non-practicing peopleeven practicing people prefer to focus on law and on ethics. We become increasingly nervous at the more transcendental aspects of religion that were very important to our pre-modern ancestors. As a writer of fiction and a longtime fan of Neil Gaiman and the modern fantasy writers of that generation, this was a really interesting topic for me to kind of dig my teeth into.
AD: I dont want to give away much of the plot but theres a point where Alif is in prison and The Hand has a great line talking about how if the citizens were given the right to vote, they would vote for either their own tribe, the Islamists or whoever paid them. Thats been what many people including lots of powerful Arabs and lots of influential Americans have been saying for decades.
GWW: Yeah. Thats the cynical, realist traditional interpretation of what would happen if you gave democracy to people in the Middle East. One of the reasons why we, though we are in theory the great spreader of democracy, have been reluctant to court democratic movements in the Middle East is because of that exact fear. I started writing the book before the Arab spring broke out and I didnt want The Hand to be right, but I had a terrible inkling that if there were to be revolution or a series of revolutions in the Middle East, that that might be the outcome. In the book I chose the optimistic route and I back Alifs assertion that freedom is not a dead idea. That people do want that choice and no matter the outcome that is a noble struggle to undertake.
Its been interesting to see the Arab Spring unfold and compare it to what happened in the book. I pay particularly close attention to Egypt because thats my second home and its where my husbands family is and where most of my books still are. [laughs] A good chunk of my life is there. Its been very very interesting to see the aftermath of the first free Presidential election in really the history of Egypt. To see this, in theory, moderate Islamist elected and everybodys waiting to see what hell do. So far the threat of popular revolt, the reminder that the only reason that hes in power is because a popular revolt put him there, seems to have been enough to at least make him appear to toe a line of equality. Hes made promises to appoint women and Coptic Christians to his cabinet. Hes done everything short of bend over backwards to reassure people that hes not out to create a Saudi Arabia in Egypt because thats not something that the people in Egyptand I think, in most of the Middle Eastwant.
I think Islamism has had a chance to play itself out. Weve seen it in Saudi Arabia. Weve seen Shia Islamism in Iran. Weve seen Islamist groups take control of parts of Somalia and parts of Sudan. People are, I think, cynical of that dangerous, golden age thinking. That if we just roll back the clock to the seventh century, everything will be okay. And it seems that even people who are practicing Muslims are becoming skeptical to that idea because theyve seen the terrible fallout that goes along with some of these ultraconservative regimes in various places. I think its healthy for these ideas to be aired in public so that they have a chance to be tested and criticized so I think theres good reason to be optimistic. I, like many people, are watching with anticipation to see what happens next in this new Middle East.
AD: Its incredibly interesting and as you point out, now-President of Egypt Morsi was running against a candidate whose platform was essentially, forget about my career and what Ive done, Ill keep the Islamists in check.
GWW: Right. And he got a very good showing. Morsi only beat him by a few points. That shows that people are deeply worried about these things. But at the end of the day theyre not interested in a repeat of the old regime. The threat of Islamist takeover was the excuse that Mubarak used for thirty years to jail and torture dissidents of all stripes including secularists and to impose this emergency law that strips Egyptian citizens of even their most basic rights of free assembly and free speech. I think the election of Morsi shows that the people are willing to take that risk in the name of freedom. I think the people went the optimistic route and I and a lot of people are hoping that is rewarded by a government that works, but well see. Its too early to tell.
AD: Its been exciting to see as across the region in Tunisia and Libya and Egypt, different governments emerge.
GWW: Its exciting and chaotic. Revolutions are not easy things. They take a long time. You look back at our own history, even though we enshrine the year 1776, it took almost one hundred years for us to really get things sorted out and decide what it meant to be a United States. It took a series of small wars and a Civil War before we really sorted that out. Revolutions are not easy things and sometimes it takes a while for things to shake out.
AD: Your book touches on that at the end where it may be a hopeful ending, but its not a perfect, utopian ending.
GWW: I was at that point projecting forward and thinking about what mob justice means. Even if the mob in question is a revolutionary mob and has the highest ideals when it comes to giving the power of government back to the people, at the end of the day, a mobs a mob. Sometimes innocent people get caught up in that momentary fury that is necessary to topple a dictatorship. Look at Tahrir Square. Innocent people have suffered when crowds get angry and I wanted to keep that in mind. When I was writing that scene, because the events in Tahrir Square had not unfolded yet, I was thinking about the French Revolution and some of the similar things that occurred during that time period. Theres no reason this wouldnt happen in this situation in the Middle East as well where you get so many people in the same place at once who have been so angry for so long. For a brief period of time, mob justice prevails and that certainly comes through in the book. It is not meant to be an entirely sunny, wonderful you have a revolution, the end, happily ever after sort of an ending. I try to take into account what inevitably happens when great great upheaval is experienced.
AD: What are you working on now?
GWW: Right now Im working on another novel. Its set about five hundred years ago during the age of exploration. One of the characters from Alif the Unseen appears in it. Since it takes place so many centuries ago, Im sure you can probably guess which one. [laughs] Its high seas adventure with a twist so its been a lot of fun to write. Its not finished and possibly wont be for a while.
AD: Just as a final question, and weve been touching on this, Im curious about your thoughts on the future, especially in Egypt.
GWW: I wish I had a crystal ball so I could see. What I hope will happen is that after a period of adjustment, which I think will consume the entire first termpossibly only termof Morsis Presidency and at least the next Parliament, that people will get down to the business of fixing the economy. Thats my hope. I think we forget that really the breaking point that brought about revolution in Egypt was the fact that people were starting to find it difficult to feed themselves in many circumstances. Inflation was so high that a pound of meat cost more in dollars in Cairo than it does here in the United States. This is a country where a lot of people live on the global poverty line of two dollars a day. You cant sustain that. The real problem is the economic tailspin that the country has spiraled into and I think the real test will be whether the Morsi government can start to pull it out of that tailspin. Irregardless of the discussion of religion, irregardless of the discussion of foreign policy, that is going to be the real test. I hope and pray that theyre able to at least begin to turn it around because thats going to determine the future of not just for this generation of Egyptians but for the generations to come.