He had little affection for the regime, and even less for the Alawite minority that dominated it, but he was desperate to improve his fortunes. In “The Arab of the Future,” his accommodation is nearly as heartbreaking as the killing itself. After getting his baccalauréat, he studied applied art in Nantes, and then made his way to Paris to study animation at the Gobelins School of the Image. “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. 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. Sattouf listened quietly to Martin as we strolled along the long nave where most of the museum’s artifacts are exhibited. 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. Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. That portrait has made “The Arab of the Future” a very popular book among Arab exiles and expatriates in France. 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. I ordered a vegetable couscous; he ordered a salad. I’m not a family guy. “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. It had nothing to do with the journal or the people I knew there, who detested nationalism.”. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . 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. According to Sattouf, it was Bravo who gave him the confidence to begin writing his own stories. Are you a family guy? “Riad Sattouf has lots of money because his book is a best-seller. Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. 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. Clémentine took her sons to live in Brittany. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood 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. Abdel-Razak, who has a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne, is a fierce admirer of Arab nationalism. In France, where the … 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. When I rescheduled a meeting with a wealthy Algerian businessman, Sattouf said, “Don’t go back to Algeria for the next forty years! subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. (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.”). It was still in shrink-wrap. I can’t compete with that.”, “I don’t need to write it down, boss, I’m wearing a wire.”, “Yeah, but good luck getting it peer-reviewed.”. 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 … 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. That will teach you never to insult an Algerian businessman!”, Sattouf shares another trait with his father: a sense of destiny. . 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. It was based on conversations he overheard in the Métro, in fast-food restaurants, and on the street. 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. 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. 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. In 1984, the family moves to Syria and joins the Sattouf family cradle, a … 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. The question seemed to startle Sattouf. But wherever you turn in Sattouf’s Syria, you see the father’s values magnified and put into action. (He is paid in US dollars, with the funds sent to an account in the Channel Islands.) No French Presidency is complete without a legacy-defining monument; the Quai Branly, which opened in 2006, was Jacques Chirac’s. Riad Sattouf is the son of a Syrian man, Abdel-Razak Sattouf and of a French woman, Clémentine. When Sattouf was two, his father accepted a university job in Libya, where Qaddafi was building his “state of the masses.” Like many Arabs of his generation, Abdel-Razak Sattouf was a fervent believer in the pan-Arab dream. After coffee, we walked over to Sattouf’s apartment so that I could see his studio. “I can already see the first lines in The New Yorker,” he replied. . Among French intellectuals, however, particularly those who study the Arab world, Sattouf is a more controversial figure. “Those experiences gave me an immense affection for Jews and gays,” he said. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons of the Prophet that had run in a right-wing Danish newspaper. Sattouf looked riveted and took photographs. 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. Sattouf’s parents met at the Sorbonne in Paris when they were students. Sattouf says he felt no less out of place in school in France—and scarcely less bullied—than he had in Syria. Then there was his name. Even Sattouf’s father is not exempt from his sharp-edged satire. . Sexual segregation was rigorously observed. 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. . 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. 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. “Are you Tunisian?” she asked him. 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. “If you grow up in a dictatorship like Syria, you want to control everything, because you’re afraid that if you don’t, and you say one wrong word, you could end up in jail.” But I sensed that there were other motives at work. In November, 2011, it published a special issue, Charia Hebdo, guest-edited by the Prophet; the offices were fire-bombed just as it hit the newsstands. My cousins and I used to talk about what he might look like, but I wouldn’t do it. “I’m fascinated by the desire that women have for stronger men—that’s where my sexual frustration came from,” Sattouf told me. Find out more about how we use your information in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. 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 think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. At family gatherings, the women cooked for the men, and waited to eat whatever morsels were left. In … * France 24 * Very funny and very sad. Austere and piously Sunni, Ter Maaleh proved even more trying than Libya. “The Arab of the Future,” he said, gives the reader “the raw facts,” untainted by any “political discourse.” But Sattouf’s choice of facts is selective, and it would be hard to read “The Arab of the Future” as anything other than a bitter indictment of the pan-Arabist project that his father espoused. At the same time, you felt a little guilty, as if you’d started a war. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . I asked him if he had a background in ethnography. His blond hair turned black and curly, and, he recalled, “I went from being an elf to a troll. And then you will have great success. That way, he could match and even overtake France and the West by building a … Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. often disquieting, but always honest. “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. Le père Abdel Razak est issu d’un milieu très pauvre, mais a des ambitions politiques délirantes, en plein crépuscule du panarabisme. Birds too small to eat are shot to smithereens. 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. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Your Privacy Controls. 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 book is, in part, a settling of accounts with the man who stole his childhood, a man he once worshipped but came to despise. “If you were a cartoonist associated with Charlie, you were suddenly expected to be an expert on geopolitics. The only book about the Middle East that I could see was one on Islam by Bernard Lewis. 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. Sattouf was born in 1978, in Paris. 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. Little Riad uses his nose to navigate his worlds, Arab and French, and to find his place in them. Though false, the kidnapping story was curiously apt. 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. Sattouf's recollection of the Arab world might have been vastly different if his feelings for his father weren't so divided. 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. “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. France 24 Very funny and very sad. 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. I’d seen teachers beating their children in school. “When I started to remember this period, I realized that many of my memories were of sounds and smells,” Sattouf told me. One day, as we were walking across a bridge over the Seine, I asked Sattouf how he felt after the attacks. And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. Riad was born in 1978. The great drama of the book lies less in Riad’s adventures than in his father’s gradual surrender to local traditions. 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. She said that she sold her house there only after the uprising against the Ben-Ali dictatorship, when the security situation deteriorated. 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. 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. Although Sattouf’s work is confessional, in person he is guarded; even his closest friends describe him as secretive. . 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. He said that his younger brother works as an engineer in Boulogne but that “you will never know anything else about him! Clémentine and Abdel -Razak, pseudonyms for Riad Sattouf’s parents, meet for the first time, as students in the Paris of 1978. He showed me his method one day while we were riding the Métro. When we paid the bill, I complimented Daoud on her harissa, and Sattouf asked her when she left Tunisia. (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. Designed by Jean Nouvel, it is a museum of so-called “first art,” or what used to be called primitive art. 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. 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. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor. 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 . Sattouf brought the same sensibility to his strip for Charlie Hebdo, “The Secret Life of Youth,” which appeared weekly from 2004 until late 2014. 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. Sattouf revisited his memories of the Middle East in … 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 … . 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. 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. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . “I was totally disoriented,” he said. A couple of years later, after the birth of Sattouf’s brother, Abdel-Razak got a job teaching in Damascus, and moved the family to Ter Maaleh, the village where he’d grown up. “My father was a collaborator,” Sattouf says. 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. In Sattouf’s memoir, his father’s decision to move the family to Syria has the coercive force of a kidnapping. Urban life, for Sattouf, is a deeply unsentimental education, an al-fresco hazing. 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. 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. “I had the feeling people were suffering from a lack of freedom, while Europeans were in bars eating tartare de dorade.”. “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. And what was even weirder was that Charlie was being described by people like Emmanuel Todd as this right-wing magazine. 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. “I remembered that every woman I knew in the village had a very different odor. 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. Photo Illustration by Olaf Blecker for The New Yorker, “She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. (“I used to masturbate a lot thinking of her when I was a teen-ager,” he volunteered.) A rough draftsman, Sattouf relies on simplification, exaggeration, and other scrappy effects, in the way that a newspaper cartoonist might. Riad was born in 1978. * France 24 * Sattouf's account of his childhood is a deeply personal recollection of a peripatetic youth that can resonate with audiences across the world. “I saw some pretty tough things here.” ♦. 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. 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. 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. 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. Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . As a teen-ager in Brittany, Sattouf spent almost all of his time in his room, drawing and reading comic books. I hate muscular people. 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. It struck me that there was perhaps a compensatory element to his penchant for adolescent sexual humor. 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 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 … Not since “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The Jew was “a kind of evil creature for us,” Sattouf told me, though no one had actually seen one. “The Arab of the Future” provides an unflinching portrait of the frustrations and the brutality that sparked the revolts against the regimes in both Libya and Syria—and of the internal conflicts that have darkened their revolutionary horizons. He turned out to be the source for at least some of them. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. 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. 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. The Syrian boys Sattouf met were like “little men,” intimidatingly fluent in the rhetoric of warfare. 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. . . Abdel-Razak who moves to Paris to complete a Doctorate in History at the Sorbonne, falls in love with a Frenchwoman named Clémentine. 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.”. . . 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. 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). France is gray-blue; Libya is yellow; Syria, where he spent a decade, is a pinkish red. I find that’s still true today.”. 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. Furthermore, what Sattouf does say about himself can be highly contradictory. His older brother, who never expected him to return, had sold much of his land. A portrait of the children of France’s ruling class, “Retour au Collège” is at once affectionate and sneering, gross and touching: a Sattouf signature. One morning in mid-July, Sattouf, a French-Syrian comic-book artist who has recently emerged as France’s best-known graphic novelist, took me there, along with his year-old son, his son’s Ivorian nanny, and her three small daughters. In a striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervour 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. “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. I should go to the gym, but I’m too lazy!”. Much of the pathos of the memoir comes from Sattouf’s depiction of his father, a dreamer full of bluster, driven by impotent fury at the West; a secularist who can’t quite free himself from superstition; a man who wants to give orders but whose lot is to follow them. His early drawings were hyperrealist, feverishly detailed and painterly: he compared them, somewhat dismissively, to swaggeringly virtuosic guitar solos. A French-Lebanese friend of mine, the screenwriter Joëlle Touma, attributed this to his childhood in Syria. The girl’s mother asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. 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.