Sattouf revisited his memories of the Middle East in … His caustic, often brutal vision of how boys are groomed to become men has brought him acclaim far beyond the underground-comics scene where he first made his name. Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. One of these young people was a Syrian scholarship student named Abdel-Razak Sattouf, a firm believer in Pan-Arabism and its promise of a unified, prosperous region. * France 24 * Very funny and very sad. . The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. He told me that the first and only time he’d set foot in the Arab world since he left Syria was a weekend in Marrakech a few years ago. According to Todd, those who refused to abide by this formula—particularly if they were Muslim—were susceptible to accusations that they excused or even condoned the killings. This is something a lot of illustrators have in common.”. Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, a French scholar of the Arab world, told me that the book’s appeal in France “rests on an unconscious, or partly conscious, racism,” paraphrasing Emmanuel Todd’s thesis about Charlie. It was impossible for a girl to date a guy whose name meant ‘I laughed at your pussy.’ ” As a result, he said, “I lived a very violent solitude. Not since “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. They were both students: Clémentine from Brittany, and Abdel-Razak, on scholarship, from a village in Syria. For a decade, Sattouf was the only cartoonist of Middle Eastern extraction at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where he drew an acid series on Parisian street life, “The Secret Life of Youth.” He left just a few months before two jihadists stormed the offices and shot dead twelve people, including nine of his former colleagues. Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! They were both students: Clémentine from Brittany, and Abdel-Razak, on scholarship, from a village in Syria. Designed by Jean Nouvel, it is a museum of so-called “first art,” or what used to be called primitive art. Clémentine took her sons to live in Brittany. Though false, the kidnapping story was curiously apt. “This idea of the Arab world is a mirage, really.” Perhaps it is. Food was scarce; sometimes they subsisted on bananas. “Are you Tunisian?” she asked him. I can’t believe it, I am speaking English!” Sattouf immediately shifted to French; he reserves English—to be precise, a caricature of American-accented English—for jokes and impersonations, as if it were intrinsically humorous. Proud and hypersensitive, Abdel-Razak is plainly seduced by France—“They even pay you to be a student!” he marvels—and by extension the West, … “It left me uneasy,” he said. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons of the Prophet that had run in a right-wing Danish newspaper. By moving back to the Arab world, he hoped to take part in this project, and to rear his son as “the Arab of the future.”, In Libya, the family was given a house but no keys, because the Great Leader had abolished private property; they returned home one day to find it occupied by another family. Riad was born in 1978 and The Arab of the Future is a BD about the author’s childhood in different places in the Middle East. Many of his Charlie strips involved scenes of humiliation, often of a sexual nature, and of religious hypocrisy. He drew a scene he had observed near his apartment: a piece of understated yet pointed reportage. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. “If you were a cartoonist associated with Charlie, you were suddenly expected to be an expert on geopolitics. He spends all his days eating in expensive restaurants.”, This was one of the few times I’d heard Sattouf refer to himself as an Arab. The son of Abdel-Razak Sattouf was raised to become the Arab of the future; instead, he became a Frenchman with a “weird name.” That made him a misfit in France, but it also gave him the subject of a lifetime. No French Presidency is complete without a legacy-defining monument; the Quai Branly, which opened in 2006, was Jacques Chirac’s. Son père, Abdel-Razak Sattouf, est détenteur d'un doctorat d'histoire Issu d'une famille très pauvre, le père de Riad Sattouf élève brillant a obtenu une bourse pour étudier à la Sorbonne. . (Sattouf writes, “I tried to be the most aggressive one toward the Jews, to prove that I wasn’t one of them.”) Another pastime was killing small animals: the first volume of “The Arab of the Future” concludes with the lynching of a puppy. Explorateur inlassable des mondes de l’enfance, le dessinateur à succès Riad Sattouf se penche sur la sienne – sans faux-semblants. In “The Arab of the Future,” his accommodation is nearly as heartbreaking as the killing itself. Although Sattouf’s work is confessional, in person he is guarded; even his closest friends describe him as secretive. (She’s the Marge Simpson of “The Arab of the Future,” rolling her eyes as her husband quotes the maxims of Qaddafi’s manifesto, “The Green Book.”). Furthermore, what Sattouf does say about himself can be highly contradictory. I was voted the ugliest person in class.” Accused of being a Jew in Syria, he was now gay-baited because of his high voice. He turned out to be the source for at least some of them. “Sattouf is experiencing something that Marjane Satrapi experienced after ‘Persepolis’ came out,” he said. And as Abdel-Razak returns again to the same fantastical dreams he pursued in previous books, we see him become more and more unhinged, until ultimately he crosses the line from idealism to fanaticism, leading to a dramatic breaking point. Martin has been involved in the museum since its conception, in 1998. Riad was born in 1978. And Sattouf didn’t call the book “The Boy from Ter Maaleh”; he called it “The Arab of the Future.”. By filling them with sperm, Martin explained, the elders were inducting the next generation into leadership. The author of four comics series in France and a former contributor to the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf is now a weekly columnist for l’Obs. What he’s written is very personal, a kind of self-analysis, really. He seemed to have an enormous tableau of the characters in the human comedy.” The son of refugees from Franco’s Spain, Bravo was a kindred spirit; like Sattouf, he had spent his childhood shuttling between France and a rural village under dictatorship, and he knew what it was like to feel permanently out of place. Sattouf listened quietly to Martin as we strolled along the long nave where most of the museum’s artifacts are exhibited. Subhi Hadidi, a leftist member of the opposition who fled Syria in the late eighties, told me, “Sattouf is faithful to what he sees, and he doesn’t beautify reality.” (He had visited Sattouf’s village and found it “full of militants—Communists, Trotskyists, and Muslim Brothers.”) When I asked the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis, who has been more critical of the rebels than of the regime, what he thought of Sattouf, he said, “Sattouf describes things as they are.” I had dinner with a group of Algerian intellectuals who grew up in socialist Algeria, under the rule of Colonel Houari Boumédiène, and who told me that Sattouf might as well have been writing about their childhood. With a young child and a newly minted doctorate in history, Abdel-Razak — whose stated aspiration for his son, to become “the Arab of the future,” lends Sattouf’s autobiographical series its … Abdel-Razak who moves to Paris to complete a Doctorate in History at the Sorbonne, falls in love with a Frenchwoman named Clémentine. The attackers, brothers of Algerian ancestry who were born in Paris, said that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad for the magazine’s mockery of the Muslim faith. Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . Abdel-Razak, who has a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne, is a fierce admirer of Arab nationalism. The Quai Branly is at once a voluptuous tribute to the riches of French ethnography (several of the pieces came from the collections of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others) and a reminder of a history of overseas plunder. Clémentine was fired from her job reading the news in French on Libyan radio: she could not contain her laughter while quoting Qaddafi’s threat to invade the United States and assassinate President Reagan. The youngest child of a poor peasant family, Abdel-Razak Sattouf was the only one to receive an education, eventually earning a doctorate in history at La Sorbonne in Paris. He is a short and compact man, with wire-rimmed glasses, a closely trimmed beard, and somewhat stubby arms that make him look like a cartoon character. The principal boasted that in his school you didn’t hear students saying “Go fuck your mother,” but Sattouf heard much worse, and spared none of the details. He is embarrassed by his son’s vulnerability, which reminds him of his own; he proclaims himself the master of the household but usually defers to his more practical wife. We can’t hear what the other person is saying, but he seems to be either belittling the atrocities or hinting that they were part of a larger conspiracy. I’d seen teachers beating their children in school. Poor children are beaten by their teachers for not having the right books or uniforms in school. The Arab of the Future (French: L'Arabe du futur) is a graphic memoir by award-winning French-Syrian cartoonist Riad Sattouf. It had nothing to do with the journal or the people I knew there, who detested nationalism.”. After coffee, we walked over to Sattouf’s apartment so that I could see his studio. Coming from a poor background, passionately interested in politics, and obsessed with pan-Arabism, Abdel-Razak Sattouf raises his son Riad in the cult of the great Arab dictators, symbols of modernity and viril power. Ad Choices. The child of a passive Breton mother, Clémentine, and a goofy, boorish Syrian father, Abdel-Razak, Sattouf shrewdly restricts himself to the point of view of his age throughout. When I rescheduled a meeting with a wealthy Algerian businessman, Sattouf said, “Don’t go back to Algeria for the next forty years! (“I used to masturbate a lot thinking of her when I was a teen-ager,” he volunteered.) . But, when I asked him about this episode, he would say only that one of his relatives succeeded in getting to France, while the others found refuge in an Arab country that he refused to name. (He is paid in US dollars, with the funds sent to an account in the Channel Islands.) Le père Abdel Razak est issu d’un milieu très pauvre, mais a des ambitions politiques délirantes, en plein crépuscule du panarabisme. Everywhere you looked, the eyes of the President stared down at you from billboards and posters. He remembers Sattouf, he told me, as “very timid and introverted, but with a great sense of humor.” He went on, “Riad had a great analysis of people, a feeling for psychology. But this analysis has entered a very public arena, in a totally explosive context that’s much larger than he is.”, But plenty of French Arabists take Sattouf’s side. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor. Sexual segregation was rigorously observed. Sattouf, whose teens were spent in a housing project in Brittany, often jokes self-consciously about his success. Né d’un père syrien et d’une mère bretonne, Riad Sattouf grandit d’abord en France puis à Tripoli, en Libye, où son père vient d’être nommé professeur après des études en France. It took hundreds of thousands of deaths, a human disaster, for the French to open their eyes. It struck me that there was perhaps a compensatory element to his penchant for adolescent sexual humor. Sattouf’s cartoon was a quiet reminder that there were French citizens—many of them Muslim—who were outraged by the massacre, without being sympathetic to Charlie. I ordered a vegetable couscous; he ordered a salad. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. “I’m a little paranoid,” Sattouf admitted at one point. “My father was a collaborator,” Sattouf says. The author of four comics series in France and a weekly column in the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf also directed the films The French Kissers and Jacky in the Women's Kingdom.The Arab of the Future is his first work to appear in English. Sattouf’s memoir uses different “colors of emotion” for the places where he grew up. Émile Bravo, a comic-book artist who is a close friend of Sattouf’s, met him at a conference in 2002. When I asked for the real names of his parents, he pretended to spot an attractive woman at another table: “Look at those titties!” He told me that his father died in Syria sometime in the first years of this century, but would not give a date. His appearance had insulated him from overt racism in France, his sole experience of which was when, after winning an important comics prize in 2010, he received letters calling him a “dirty Arab.” He said that the very word “Arab” had become highly charged in France; now that the pan-Arabist project is no more, it is purely a racial epithet: “ ‘Arab’ is a word you only hear from racists, as in ‘Ah, those Arabs!’ ” In that sense, the title “The Arab of the Future” has what the sociologist Eric Fassin characterized as “a nostalgic air”: “People in France don’t talk about Arabs; they talk about Muslims.”, In one of our early conversations, Sattouf described his father as having had a “complicated attraction-repulsion relationship to the West.” It often seemed that Sattouf’s relationship to his roots was just as conflicted. “I’m not surprised they’re calling it an Orientalist book, but it’s a false debate,” he said. That portrait has made “The Arab of the Future” a very popular book among Arab exiles and expatriates in France. . In the first book, we see how Sattouf’s recently Sorbonne-educated father Abdel-Razak, mainly out of idealism, accepts a lectureship at the university in Tripoli, turning down an offer from Oxford University in the process. Fighting the Israeli Army was the most popular schoolyard game. According to the book, his father, who was finishing up a dissertation there, was born in a Syrian village near Homs; his mother was from a Catholic family in Brittany. Although he was fond of Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), Jean Cabut (Cabu), and Georges Wolinski*—legendary figures in the world of French cartooning, all of whom were murdered on January 7th—he did not attend editorial meetings, because he didn’t feel that he could contribute to the often rancorous arguments about French politics. In 1990, Abdel-Razak and Clémentine separated. Do you like being with your family?” He responded to follow-up questions by e-mail with a GIF of Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” smiling mischievously and saying, “It’s classified.”. In Sattouf’s memoir, his father’s decision to move the family to Syria has the coercive force of a kidnapping. Then there was his name. As a teen-ager in Brittany, Sattouf spent almost all of his time in his room, drawing and reading comic books. . Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. The youngest child of a poor peasant family, Abdel-Razak Sattouf was the only one to receive an education, eventually earning a doctorate in history at La Sorbonne … “The Secret Life” established Sattouf as a distinctively sour comedian of manners—and, more controversially, as the only Arab cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo, whose mockery of religion took aim at symbols of Islamic piety, notably the image of the Prophet. The interior—hushed, ceremonial lighting, earth-tone colors, leather upholstery—suggests the study of a retired colonial administrator, and an aura of tribal kitsch pervades the place. Assad had a destiny, and my father thought that he might, too. In France, where the … Sattouf’s emphasis of his father’s personal racism, sexism, and xenophobia become almost hyperbolic in their presentation. I’ve never drawn Jesus, Buddha, or Moses, either.”, In the first issue of Charlie published after the massacre, Sattouf revived his “Secret Life” strip. often disquieting, but always honest." Yet that mirage, which Sattouf’s father mistook for the future, is the subject of the memoir. Through Bravo, Sattouf befriended other cartoonists, and joined a studio of young artists who aimed to write comic books for a more sophisticated literary readership. These washes—“colors of emotion,” Sattouf calls them—create a powerfully claustrophobic effect, as if each country were its own sealed-off environment. “I can already see the first lines in The New Yorker,” he replied. Photo Illustration by Olaf Blecker for The New Yorker, “She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. Issu d'un milieu pauvre, féru de politique et obsédé par le panarabisme, Abdel-Razak Sattouf élève son fils Riad dans le culte des grands dictateurs arabes, symboles de modernité et de puissance virile. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. Kate’s Cuisine, as regulars like Sattouf call it, is a quiet, rustic place with wood tables and turquoise placemats, decorated with North African bric-a-brac and photographs. In “The Arab of the Future,” the visual marker of that destiny is his blond hair, the color of his mother’s. A French-Lebanese friend of mine, the screenwriter Joëlle Touma, attributed this to his childhood in Syria. Urban life, for Sattouf, is a deeply unsentimental education, an al-fresco hazing. Soon after he was born, his father, Abdel-Razak, a devout Pan-Arab nationalist, took his family to Libya and then Syria. I should go to the gym, but I’m too lazy!”. He said, “What I love about this museum is that you see that in every society gender relations are structured to preserve the power of men, but it’s always achieved in a different way.”, Masculine power and its violent rituals are at the center of Sattouf’s work. His blond hair turned black and curly, and, he recalled, “I went from being an elf to a troll. When the Sattouf family visits the ruins of Palmyra, there is no mention of its notorious prison, which was destroyed by the Islamic State last May, because Sattouf’s father never mentioned it, and Sattouf wanted to “convey the ignorance of childhood.” The events that reshaped Syria—the death of Hafez al-Assad, the rise of his son Bashar, the uprising and the civil war—are never even hinted at in the first two volumes, which cover the years 1978-85. Sattouf loathes nationalism and is fond of the saying, paraphrased from Salman Rushdie, “A man does not have roots, he has feet.” He says that he feels “closer to a comic-book artist from Japan than I do to a Syrian or a French person.” Yet he has become famous for a book set largely in two countries where some of the most violent convulsions since the Arab Spring have unfolded. Jean-Pierre Filiu, who has written extensively on Syria, believes that Sattouf’s success is a tribute to a French “empathy for the plight of real-life Arabs, rather than the ‘Arabs of the future’ envisioned by Qaddafi and Assad.” Olivier Roy, a French authority on Islam, told me that Sattouf can’t help being “enlisted” in local battles, simply because he’s one of the few artists of Muslim origin who have achieved fame in France. When I first contacted him by e-mail, he warned me that he would not reveal anything that he might discuss in the projected third and fourth volumes of “The Arab of the Future.” That turned out to include most of the events in his life from the age of seven on. “The reality is much less sexy than you think,” he wrote. And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. “If I had written a book about a village in southern Italy or Norway, would I be asked about my vision of the European world?” he said. In Paris, I kept running into people who had just read it, among them a former president of Doctors Without Borders, a young official in the foreign ministry who had worked throughout the Middle East, and an economist for the city of Paris. And what was even weirder was that Charlie was being described by people like Emmanuel Todd as this right-wing magazine. Clementine, reserved and level-headed, is a student from Brittany; she takes pity on Abdel-Razak after a friend sets him up on a nonexistent date, and ends up falling for his charms. That will teach you never to insult an Algerian businessman!”, Sattouf shares another trait with his father: a sense of destiny. In the living room, there were framed drawings by his favorite cartoonists—Chris Ware, Richard Corben, and Robert Crumb, among others—and a collection of electric guitars. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. It is not a sumptuous visual style, but it is an effective one, particularly in its evocation of the way in which a child sees the world. Riad Sattouf is the son of a Syrian man, Abdel-Razak Sattouf and of a French woman, Clémentine. He draws at his desk on Photoshop, facing a wall of bookshelves stacked with comic books and works on Paris photography by Atget and Doisneau. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . Muslims, Todd has written, found themselves pressured to defend not merely “the right, but the obligation, to commit blasphemy,” as proof of their commitment to French secularism. The day was hot, and the smoky fragrance of ham wafted up from a restaurant downstairs. He hoped that the region would overcome the legacy of colonialism and recover its strength under the leadership of charismatic modernizers—secular autocrats like his hero Gamal Abdel Nasser. And then you will have great success. This was a widespread conviction among French citizens of Muslim origin, but it found little echo in the French press during the weeks after the massacre, when the slogan “Je Suis Charlie,” which began as an expression of solidarity, became something of a test of loyalty—a “ritual formula,” as the sociologist Emmanuel Todd has argued. Whenever he felt cornered by my questions, which was often, he would cross his arms and glare at me, in a parody of machismo. Clémentine and Abdel -Razak, pseudonyms for Riad Sattouf’s parents, meet for the first time, as students in the Paris of 1978. It was based on conversations he overheard in the Métro, in fast-food restaurants, and on the street. The question seemed to startle Sattouf. The book is, in part, a settling of accounts with the man who stole his childhood, a man he once worshipped but came to despise. The streets smelled of human excrement. “I was certain everything was going to collapse,” he told me. The first Arabic word he learned from them was yehudi, “Jew.” It was hurled at him at a family gathering by two of his cousins, who proceeded to pounce on him. Mis à jour le 2 février 2015, à 11h50. A French graphic novelist’s shocking memoir of the Middle East. I hate muscular people. Sattouf has cited Hergé as one of his primary influences, but his sensibility is closer to “South Park” than to “Tintin.”, “The Arab of the Future” immerses the reader in the sensory impressions of childhood, particularly its smells. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood His journey from cheerful liberal to quiet authoritarian is the subject of "The Arab of the Future," a graphic memoir by his son, the comic artist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Not so long ago, the French cartoonist Riad Sattouf was signing books at a Paris librairie. Mathieu Sapin, one of Sattouf’s studio mates, told me, “In a very short time, Riad imposed himself as a figure with a set of themes all his own—youth, education, sexual frustration, the things we see in Daniel Clowes, but in a French style.” When readers told Sattouf to “stop with your stories of losers,” he invented a buff, bisexual superhero named Pascal Brutal. violent, backwards, always stupid, vulgar, bigoted, and, of course, anti-Semitic.” The Bonnefoy thesis was widely discussed in Paris, and I heard echoes of it in a number of conversations. often disquieting, but always honest. At one point, the children wandered off and Martin took the opportunity to show Sattouf “a little porno,” directing his attention to a sculpture from Papua New Guinea that depicted a group of young men being penetrated by their elders. His first works were variations on the theme of male sexual frustration, often his own. . Sattouf's recollection of the Arab world might have been vastly different if his feelings for his father weren't so divided. In … His early drawings were hyperrealist, feverishly detailed and painterly: he compared them, somewhat dismissively, to swaggeringly virtuosic guitar solos. “She told a story of dictatorship and revolution, and suddenly she was expected to be an activist.”, I mentioned the controversy to Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian writer and diplomat, who is now Palestine’s ambassador to UNESCO. “No, I’m an énarque,” he said, as if that explained everything. Sattouf had long considered writing a book about the Arab world, but the idea for the memoir occurred to him only after the Syrian uprising broke out, in 2011. . The more he tried to minimize his interest in the Arab world, the more he talked about it, usually in the form of comic riffs. “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. He was dressed like a college student, with jeans, a black Lacoste T-shirt, white Stan Smith sneakers, and backpack. But wherever you turn in Sattouf’s Syria, you see the father’s values magnified and put into action. France 24 Very funny and very sad. Sattouf writes in a fluid prose, beautifully translated by Sam Taylor."