Ter Maaleh was Abdel-Razak’s home, but he hadn’t been back in seventeen years, and he was nearly as much of a stranger there as his wife, the only woman in the village who didn’t cover herself. 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. He told me that because he did not have stereotypically Arab features he was rarely seen as such. I’d seen teachers beating their children in school. 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. “Those experiences gave me an immense affection for Jews and gays,” he said. Although Sattouf’s work is confessional, in person he is guarded; even his closest friends describe him as secretive. 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.”. Riad was born in 1978. But only a few months later the couple pass one of them on the street. “I knew Syria would never be like the other Arab countries. The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. 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. Clémentine is aghast at the murder, while Abdel-Razak tries to have it both ways: Yes, he says, honor crimes are “terrible,” but in rural Syria becoming pregnant outside marriage “is the worst dishonor that a girl can bring upon her family.” Clémentine pressures Abdel-Razak to report the crime, and the men are imprisoned. Sattouf says he felt no less out of place in school in France—and scarcely less bullied—than he had in Syria. That will teach you never to insult an Algerian businessman!”, Sattouf shares another trait with his father: a sense of destiny. . In one strip, a woman complains that she can no longer wear her miniskirt to work because she’s being hit on by Islamists praying outside her office. 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. With Clémentine transcribing his words and "rendering them intelligible," Abdul-Razak obtains a Ph.D. in history from the Sorbonne. Riad Sattouf's shockingly blunt The Arab of the Future, which tells the story of the French cartoonist's itinerant childhood in the Middle East, is a must for anyone who wants to understand more about the failure of the pan-Arab dream, with all the consequences … 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. She replied, “I want to be a giraffe so that I can observe everyone below.” That would have been an unusually gentle “Secret Life,” however. This is something a lot of illustrators have in common.”. Sattouf’s memoir uses different “colors of emotion” for the places where he grew up. Mis à jour le 2 février 2015, à 11h50. He identifies his relatives by their smell: the sweat of his Syrian grandmother, which he prefers to the perfume of his French grandmother; the “sour smell” of his maternal grandfather. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. “He can leave aside his own sensibility and absorb the sensibility of those around him.” For his first popular hit, “Retour au Collège” (“Back to School”), published in 2005, Sattouf spent two weeks embedded in an upper-class high school in Paris. 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. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. . 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. 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. (He is paid in US dollars, with the funds sent to an account in the Channel Islands.) Sattouf has achieved prominence as a cartoonist of Muslim heritage at a time when French anxieties about Islam have never been higher and when cartooning has become an increasingly dangerous trade. 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. A number of rumors about Sattouf have circulated in the press and on Wikipedia (which, until recently, claimed that he grew up partly in Algeria). To enable Verizon Media and our partners to process your personal data select 'I agree', or select 'Manage settings' for more information and to manage your choices. Then there was his name. All rights reserved. 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. Among French intellectuals, however, particularly those who study the Arab world, Sattouf is a more controversial figure. His older brother, who never expected him to return, had sold much of his land. 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. When he saw me waiting for him outside the café, he said, “What, you didn’t enter? It was utterly confusing.” Sattouf marched in the January 11th demonstration, when four million French people gathered across the country with “Je Suis Charlie” banners, but the spectacle of patriotic unity—something with which he was all too familiar, from his childhood in Syria—left him feeling uncomfortable. 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. He said that his younger brother works as an engineer in Boulogne but that “you will never know anything else about him! *An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Renald Luzier in a list of people killed in the attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. And what was even weirder was that Charlie was being described by people like Emmanuel Todd as this right-wing magazine. It had nothing to do with the journal or the people I knew there, who detested nationalism.”. 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. Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. “I never took notes, and I always changed the looks of the people I drew,” he told me. Sattouf listened quietly to Martin as we strolled along the long nave where most of the museum’s artifacts are exhibited. “This idea of the Arab world is a mirage, really.” Perhaps it is. These washes—“colors of emotion,” Sattouf calls them—create a powerfully claustrophobic effect, as if each country were its own sealed-off environment. Usually, Sattouf speaks in a soft, rather delicate voice; he told me that when he makes a reservation at a restaurant he lowers his voice so that he’s not mistaken for a woman. As a teen-ager in Brittany, Sattouf spent almost all of his time in his room, drawing and reading comic books. Whenever he felt cornered by my questions, which was often, he would cross his arms and glare at me, in a parody of machismo. Sexual segregation was rigorously observed. 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. Martin has been involved in the museum since its conception, in 1998. Sattouf and his father exchanged letters, but he says that “the rupture was total.” Clémentine eventually found work as a medical secretary, but for several years she was unemployed, and the family lived on welfare in public housing. She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. 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. subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. 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. 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. Explorateur inlassable des mondes de l’enfance, le dessinateur à succès Riad Sattouf se penche sur la sienne – sans faux-semblants. “I remembered that every woman I knew in the village had a very different odor. It struck me that there was perhaps a compensatory element to his penchant for adolescent sexual humor. 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. 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, … When we paid the bill, I complimented Daoud on her harissa, and Sattouf asked her when she left Tunisia. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . “Even my Arab friends who eat the Arabs for breakfast have a certain nostalgia for the sun, the nights on the terrace, the countryside.” He characterized Sattouf as an “arabe de services”—a token Arab. En 1984, la famille déménage en Syrie et rejoint le berceau des Sattouf, un petit village près de Homs. By the window stood a pot with three cacti: two short, one long, in the shape of a penis and testicles, a gift from his friend the actor Vincent Lacoste, the star of “Les Beaux Gosses.” Sattouf said he had been reading Chateaubriand but that he mostly reads comic books. Abdel-Razak, who has a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne, is a fierce admirer of Arab nationalism. His early drawings were hyperrealist, feverishly detailed and painterly: he compared them, somewhat dismissively, to swaggeringly virtuosic guitar solos. . 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. 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. “Are you Tunisian?” she asked him. Le père Abdel Razak est issu d’un milieu très pauvre, mais a des ambitions politiques délirantes, en plein crépuscule du panarabisme. In Sattouf’s memoir, his father’s decision to move the family to Syria has the coercive force of a kidnapping. In “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf represents the three countries in which he grew up with washes of color: gray-blue for France, yellow for Libya, a pinkish red for Syria. Sattouf was born in 1978, in Paris. In interviews, he has said that he wrote “The Arab of the Future” out of a desire for “revenge” when France declined to provide him with visas for relatives who were trapped in Homs, under siege by the Syrian Army. Although he is a wry observer of human folly, he said that he could not bring himself to “draw something openly mocking.” He told me that he wasn’t sure whether it was responsible to reprint the Danish cartoons but that he “found them very badly done as drawings.” Drawing the Prophet, he said, “is a personal taboo. Émile Bravo, a comic-book artist who is a close friend of Sattouf’s, met him at a conference in 2002. Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. In the second volume of “The Arab of the Future,” little Riad learns of her death while eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents. I find that’s still true today.”. (Énarques are graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, a mandarin class who more or less run France.) To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Find out more about how we use your information in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. Almost all of Sattouf’s work is drawn from firsthand observation. It’s the readers who think they’ve understood a society as complex as Syria because they’ve read a single comic book.” Until the current war, he said, “Syria was a black hole, an Atlantis, in France. Riad Sattouf photographed in Paris for the Observer last week. They were both students: Clémentine from Brittany, and Abdel-Razak, on scholarship, from a village in Syria. 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. . He was dressed like a college student, with jeans, a black Lacoste T-shirt, white Stan Smith sneakers, and backpack. Wide-eyed, yet perceptive, the book documents the wanderings of his mismatched parents – his bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf. Abdel-Razak tried to ingratiate himself with more powerful men, like his cousin, a general in the Syrian Army. 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. After the January, 2015, massacre, Sapin told me, “I was very afraid for Riad.”, Yet Sattouf’s relationship with Charlie was never close: it was a professional alliance, not a political one. The man we actually hear, growing increasingly testy, replies, “I don’t give a fuck about Charlie Hebdau,” but “you don’t kill someone for that, that’s all.”. The question seemed to startle Sattouf. Riad was born in 1978. . often disquieting, but always honest." 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 Arab of the Future” has become that rare thing in France’s polarized intellectual climate: an object of consensual rapture, hailed as a masterpiece in the leading journals of both the left and the right. Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! . Little Riad, its apparently guileless narrator, is a Candide figure, who can’t help noticing the rot around him, even as the adults invoke the glories of Arab socialism. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor. I hate muscular people. Sattouf writes in a fluid prose, beautifully translated by Sam Taylor." Poor children are beaten by their teachers for not having the right books or uniforms in school. Birds too small to eat are shot to smithereens. 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. My memory of Charlie was of Charb going to demonstrations in factories where people were on strike, and shouting, ‘Down with the bosses!,’ singing the ‘Internationale,’ and making free drawings for the workers. What he’s written is very personal, a kind of self-analysis, really. . 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. “I saw some pretty tough things here.” ♦. Clémentine took her sons to live in Brittany. (The first volume is now being published here; in France, a second volume appeared in May.). At the same time, you felt a little guilty, as if you’d started a war. “The Arab of the Future” has, in effect, made him the Arab of the present in France. In a lacerating critique for the Web site Orient XXI, published two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Laurent Bonnefoy, a young Middle East scholar, argued that Sattouf’s book had seduced French readers by pandering to Orientalist prejudices: “The Arab is dirty . Abdel-Razak muses on the Ypm Kippur War. Little Riad uses his nose to navigate his worlds, Arab and French, and to find his place in them. He read no histories of Syria, barely looked at family photographs, and imposed a rule on himself: never to stray from his childhood perspective, and to write only about what he knew at the time. Ce dernier, Abdel-Razak Sattouf, alors qu’il venait d’une famille très pauvre, bénéficia d’une bourse pour poursuivre ses études à la Sorbonne. . “When I started to remember this period, I realized that many of my memories were of sounds and smells,” Sattouf told me. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. In “The Arab of the Future,” his accommodation is nearly as heartbreaking as the killing itself. When I asked him about these stories in an e-mail, he denied them, joking that his father had “obviously been kidnapped by extraterrestrials one day before meeting my mother but I prefer that you not talk about this in your article.” He went on to say that his brother never returned to Syria; his father barely went to the mosque, much less to Mecca; and there was never a crime against the family. “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. We were met in the lobby by Stéphane Martin, the museum’s president, who is a long-standing admirer of Sattouf’s work and has commissioned him to produce a graphic novel about the museum for its tenth anniversary, next year. His mother and father—whom he calls Clémentine and Abdel-Razak, respectively, in his memoir—met in the early seventies in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. After coffee, we walked over to Sattouf’s apartment so that I could see his studio. He showed me his method one day while we were riding the Métro. (“I used to masturbate a lot thinking of her when I was a teen-ager,” he volunteered.) For all his rants against Jews, Africans, and, above all, the Shia, he remains strangely endearing, a kind of Arab Archie Bunker. 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. 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. I asked him if he had a background in ethnography. The streets smelled of human excrement. A French graphic novelist’s shocking memoir of the Middle East. 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. In the second volume of The Arab of the Future, Sattouf introduces us to Abdel-Razak’s niece, Leila, a thirty-five-year-old widow, who takes an interest in little Riad’s art and teaches him one-point perspective and how to turn his sketch of Pompidou into a caricature of Assad. A French-Lebanese friend of mine, the screenwriter Joëlle Touma, attributed this to his childhood in Syria. 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. Clémentine and Abdel -Razak, pseudonyms for Riad Sattouf’s parents, meet for the first time, as students in the Paris of 1978. 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. “I’m a little paranoid,” Sattouf admitted at one point. Al-hamdu lillah! “I was totally disoriented,” he said. © 2021 Condé Nast. Furthermore, what Sattouf does say about himself can be highly contradictory. * France 24 * Very funny and very sad. “The reality is much less sexy than you think,” he wrote. Nor was he attracted to Charlie’s style of deliberately confrontational satire. Riad Sattouf, for a decade the only cartoonist of Arab heritage at Charlie Hebdo, has tapped into French anxieties about Islam. Riad Sattouf. It was based on conversations he overheard in the Métro, in fast-food restaurants, and on the street. Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. Assad had a destiny, and my father thought that he might, too. Though false, the kidnapping story was curiously apt. Not since “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. 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. “I can already see the first lines in The New Yorker,” he replied. “Sattouf is experiencing something that Marjane Satrapi experienced after ‘Persepolis’ came out,” he said. People in the village, he says, were “beginning to say the Sattoufs were weak” because they had sent to prison “a man who had done nothing but preserve the honor of his family.” We see him turning away from his wife, his hands clasped behind his back. On the first day that we met, Sattouf took me to lunch at Les Comptoirs de Carthage, a canteen in the Marais owned by Kate Daoud, an Englishwoman in her sixties who married a Tunisian and lived in Tunisia for many years before settling in Paris. I ordered a vegetable couscous; he ordered a salad. He implies his father is a fool for turning down a Western university and taking a posting in Libya, positions Abdel-Razak’s long-term goal of building a palatial family home on his Syrian land as a pipe dream. France 24 Very funny and very sad. Riad Sattouf est né en 1978, d’une mère bretonne et d’un père syrien. . One of Riad Sattouf’s favorite places in Paris is the Musée du Quai Branly, a temple of ethnographic treasures from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, not far from the Eiffel Tower. Many note that his bleak and unflattering depiction of a traditional Muslim society comes at a time when the defense of laïcité, the French model of secularism, has increasingly assumed anti-Muslim undertones, and when the far-right National Front was able to beat all other parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections, with nearly twenty-five per cent of the vote. 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. When I rescheduled a meeting with a wealthy Algerian businessman, Sattouf said, “Don’t go back to Algeria for the next forty years! Even Sattouf’s father is not exempt from his sharp-edged satire. My cousins and I used to talk about what he might look like, but I wouldn’t do it. The Jew was “a kind of evil creature for us,” Sattouf told me, though no one had actually seen one. He draws his figures in black-and-white, and distills their features in a few expressive gestures: enormous noses, dots for eyes, single lines for eyebrows. In 1990, Abdel-Razak and Clémentine separated. He turned out to be the source for at least some of them. For our first meeting, Sattouf proposed that I come to a café near his apartment, not far from the Place de la République, where he lives with his partner—a comic-book editor—and their son. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . He claims to have forgotten the Arabic he learned in Syria, has no Arab friends, doesn’t follow the news from the Middle East, and knows no one in the Paris-based Syrian opposition. Shortly after arriving in Paris to complete a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne, Abdel-Razak falls in love with a Frenchwoman, Clementine, and with the country itself. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. If you do, someone at the airport is going to say to you, ‘Please come this way, sir.’ Ten years later, you will have a great article for The New Yorker about life in an Algerian prison. . Designed by Jean Nouvel, it is a museum of so-called “first art,” or what used to be called primitive art. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons of the Prophet that had run in a right-wing Danish newspaper. He landed his first contract in 1998—“before I had even kissed a girl.”. 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. 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. “I think Riad believes the world around him is really scary on a daily basis,” Berjeaut said. His first works were variations on the theme of male sexual frustration, often his own. In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Assad’s Syria—but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation. . 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.

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