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.
