The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The effect of this omission is one of time travel, back to the vanished future of pan-Arabism. The first volume of the series deals with Sattouf’s years as a toddler in Qaddafi’s Libya, where at one point he was frightened awake by a 4 a.m. call to prayer he calls “the saddest sound in the world;” later, his father reflected that “Westerners think the whole world should be exactly like them, just because they’re the most powerful ... but that’s only temporary.” The second volume, The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984-1985, was recently published in the United States, and follows Sattouf’s first year of school in Ter Maaleh, his father’s ancestral village. The images in this article have been excerpted from Riad Sattouf’s book, The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984-1985: A Graphic Memoir. 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 hate muscular people. He had told various people I interviewed that his father kidnapped his brother and took him back to Syria, where the brother later joined the uprising against Assad; that his father had a mystical epiphany while making the hajj to Mecca; and that he later committed a terrible crime against the family. 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. 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. His early drawings were hyperrealist, feverishly detailed and painterly: he compared them, somewhat dismissively, to swaggeringly virtuosic guitar solos. “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. The novelty of his blond hair and French origin drew attention and interrogations from classmates, who accused him of being Jewish. In “The Arab of the Future,” the visual marker of that destiny is his blond hair, the color of his mother’s. Riad’s father, Abdel-Razak, had left his remote village outside Homs to study at the Sorbonne, where he earned a doctorate in history and fell in love. There will be a presidential election! Timeline: 2004 – No Sex In New York. Without him, Syria would destroy itself and we would no longer exist.” (As in the previous two elections since the older Assad had come to power in 1970, he was the only candidate on the ballot. 2014 – The Arab of the Future: A Childhood In The Middle East. “The reality is much less sexy than you think,” he wrote. 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. “When I started to remember this period, I realized that many of my memories were of sounds and smells,” Sattouf told me. Riad Sattouf continúa desgranando su aguda y desternillante autobiografía en este nuevo volumen gráfico de El árabe del futuro, una de las series más celebradas del último lustro a nivel internacional, traducida a veintidós idiomas. 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. Martin has been involved in the museum since its conception, in 1998. France is gray-blue; Libya is yellow; Syria, where he spent a decade, is a pinkish red. Abdel-Razak fought against the image of the “‘Arab of the past,’ [who was a] bigot, ignorant, and dominated by the colonial regimes.”. 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. “I can already see the first lines in The New Yorker,” he replied. During these years, Sattouf would return to France each summer, spending it with his mother’s family in Brittany. (“I used to masturbate a lot thinking of her when I was a teen-ager,” he volunteered.) He has been living in Paris on and off since the sixties, and is a sharp observer of France’s relationship to the Arab world. Food was scarce; sometimes they subsisted on bananas. “I’m a little paranoid,” Sattouf admitted at one point. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. The first volume of L'Arabe du futur won the 2015 Fauve d’Or prize for best graphic novel at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Abdel Razak Awudu Emmanuel O Darko Activity concentrations of 238U, 235U and 234U were determined in different sources of drinking water at the Obuasi gold mines and its surrounding areas in Ghana. Driving the Sattoufs’ move east was his father’s commitment to pan-Arabism. He returned to Syria with his wife, Clementine, and his son in hopes of contributing to his homeland and raising Riad as an “Arab of the future.” The books illustrate how Sattouf straddled the Western world of his mother and the Middle Eastern world of his father. “This idea of the Arab world is a mirage, really.” Perhaps it is. I felt very comfortable knowing that he was known as one of very the best surgeons in obstetrics. 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. That means we must all say yes to our president, Hafez al-Assad! “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. A French graphic novelist’s shocking memoir of the Middle East. 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. In 1984, the family moved to Syria and joined the cradle of Sattouf… At the same time, you felt a little guilty, as if you’d started a war. Sattouf brought the same sensibility to his strip for Charlie Hebdo, “The Secret Life of Youth,” which appeared weekly from 2004 until late 2014. . 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. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. 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. When he saw me waiting for him outside the café, he said, “What, you didn’t enter? The Arab of the Future 4 continues the saga of the Sattouf family and their peripatetic life in France and the Middle East. His blond hair turned black and curly, and, he recalled, “I went from being an elf to a troll. “Are you Tunisian?” she asked him. In the second volume of “The Arab of the Future,” little Riad learns of her death while eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents. My cousins and I used to talk about what he might look like, but I wouldn’t do it. Whenever he felt cornered by my questions, which was often, he would cross his arms and glare at me, in a parody of machismo. Émile Bravo, a comic-book artist who is a close friend of Sattouf’s, met him at a conference in 2002. “Sometimes I am surrounded by memories of smell, details, colors. 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. He landed his first contract in 1998—“before I had even kissed a girl.”. “I think Riad believes the world around him is really scary on a daily basis,” Berjeaut said. One of those traditions was honor killing. 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. “I was certain everything was going to collapse,” he told me. Nephrology/Renal Medicine. Although Sattouf’s work is confessional, in person he is guarded; even his closest friends describe him as secretive. “I knew Syria would never be like the other Arab countries. Last year, he scored his greatest success so far when he published the first volume of a graphic memoir, “The Arab of the Future,” recounting his childhood, which was split between France and two of the most closed societies of the Arab world, Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. Designed by Jean Nouvel, it is a museum of so-called “first art,” or what used to be called primitive art. Tell me about you, Adam. 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. 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. I’d seen teachers beating their children in school. Assad had a destiny, and my father thought that he might, too. Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. And Sattouf didn’t call the book “The Boy from Ter Maaleh”; he called it “The Arab of the Future.”. In the next volume of “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf told me, he’ll be writing about an experience no less harrowing than his childhood in Ter Maaleh: his adolescence in France. Sattouf's father influenced the … Al-hamdu lillah! Although he recognized my pain and gave me an extra day to recover in the hospital. He said that his younger brother works as an engineer in Boulogne but that “you will never know anything else about him! 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. En 1984, la famille déménage en Syrie et rejoint le berceau des Sattouf, un petit village près de Homs. “My father was a living paradox, that’s what I want to show in the book,” Sattouf wrote to me. Urban life, for Sattouf, is a deeply unsentimental education, an al-fresco hazing. Corporal punishment, dealt by his formidable teacher for the smallest of infractions, was a feature of each school day. Not since “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. © 2021 Condé Nast. “I’m fascinated by the desire that women have for stronger men—that’s where my sexual frustration came from,” Sattouf told me. The novel follows 2-year-old Sattouf, his mother Clementine, and father Abdel-Razak. “Riad is a sponge,” the comic-book artist Jul Berjeaut told me. “I saw some pretty tough things here.” ♦. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . And then you will have great success. Nor was he attracted to Charlie’s style of deliberately confrontational satire. 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. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. “Ah, putain, it stinks!” Sattouf screamed, running to shut the window. 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 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. 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. Everywhere you looked, the eyes of the President stared down at you from billboards and posters. “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. He also directed the films The French Kissers and Jacky in the Women's Kingdom. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. In October 2015, Macmillan released The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf. 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. “He was torn: [on one] side, he was for modernity and education, and at the same time he believed in Satan and black magic. 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 … When we paid the bill, I complimented Daoud on her harissa, and Sattouf asked her when she left Tunisia. I have very vivid memories of that period. Coming from a poor background, aroused with politics and obsessed with pan-Arabism, Abdel-Razak Sattouf raises his son Riad into the cult of great Arab dictators, symbols of modernity and manly power. It is an episode that, for a moment, makes the reader feel a pang of hope. Sattouf listened quietly to Martin as we strolled along the long nave where most of the museum’s artifacts are exhibited. It’s strange to see that a part of the world still live[s] somewhere in our brain. 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. 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. He stayed there until last year, when he set up a studio at home. “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. 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. Riad Sattouf, for a decade the only cartoonist of Arab heritage at Charlie Hebdo, has tapped into French anxieties about Islam. Riad’s schooling was replete with religious and political indoctrination. 2007 – La vie secretes des jeunes. He was completely fascinated by power.”. 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 . . . Dr. Albiruni Ryan Abdul Razak may practise medicine only, (i) in a setting that is approved by the Chair, Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology, University of Toronto, in which Dr. Abdul Razak holds an academic appointment at the rank of Associate Professor, and (ii) in accordance with the requirements of his academic appointment. 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. Sattouf’s classmates echoed what they had been told, including that women were susceptible to Satan. (Énarques are graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, a mandarin class who more or less run France.) 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. His older brother, who never expected him to return, had sold much of his land. Abdel-Razak tried to ingratiate himself with more powerful men, like his cousin, a general in the Syrian Army. . . She didn’t adhere to the strict gender rules, but she also wasn’t subject to the villagers’ judgment. View Abdel Razak Mahrousseh’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. Author Profile: Riad Sattouf is a French cartoonist, comic artist and film director of Franco-Syrian origin. He went on, “Because he’s part Arab, everything he says becomes acceptable, including the most atrociously racist things. Clémentine took her sons to live in Brittany. He’s a rich Arab. Abdel-Razak is a pan-Arabist who believes the people (“stupid filthy Arab retards!”) must be educated out of religious dogma. “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. Among French intellectuals, however, particularly those who study the Arab world, Sattouf is a more controversial figure. 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. I find that’s still true today.”. That portrait has made “The Arab of the Future” a very popular book among Arab exiles and expatriates in France. I spoke to a number of Syrian intellectuals in Paris; all of them vouched for the accuracy of Sattouf’s depiction of Baathist Syria, whatever their views about the current war. In Sattouf’s memoir, his father’s decision to move the family to Syria has the coercive force of a kidnapping. Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! Name: Riad Sattouf. It was still in shrink-wrap. And what was even weirder was that Charlie was being described by people like Emmanuel Todd as this right-wing magazine. 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. These washes—“colors of emotion,” Sattouf calls them—create a powerfully claustrophobic effect, as if each country were its own sealed-off environment. ... People felt ignorant in front of him, and so did not dare to criticize him face-to-face.”, Abdel-Razak exhibited a complicated relationship to religion, an oversized sense of self that his small village could barely contain, and a commitment to progress that didn’t always match up to the reality of Syria under Hafez al-Assad. 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 first volume is now being published here; in France, a second volume appeared in May.). 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). Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria, Libya, and Algeria, and now lives in Paris. In “No Sex in New York,” inspired by a trip he made there not long after 9/11, he depicts himself as a schlemiel with an inconvenient Muslim name, a natural-born loser in a ruthlessly competitive sexual marketplace. The day was hot, and the smoky fragrance of ham wafted up from a restaurant downstairs. I asked him if he had a background in ethnography. In the previous books, his childhood was complicated by the pull of his two cultures—French and … 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.”. No French Presidency is complete without a legacy-defining monument; the Quai Branly, which opened in 2006, was Jacques Chirac’s. In Arabic, the names Riad and Sattouf had what he described as “an impressive solemnity.” In French, they sounded like rire de sa touffe, which means “laugh at her pussy.” When teachers took attendance, “people would burst out laughing. The Jew was “a kind of evil creature for us,” Sattouf told me, though no one had actually seen one. Let’s enter! “I had the feeling people were suffering from a lack of freedom, while Europeans were in bars eating tartare de dorade.”. I knew how things worked there. It was instinctive.” He wrote the book in “a kind of trance,” he told me, drawing almost exclusively on memory. 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.”. It struck me that there was perhaps a compensatory element to his penchant for adolescent sexual humor. 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. 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. 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. I should go to the gym, but I’m too lazy!”. 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. According to Sattouf, it was Bravo who gave him the confidence to begin writing his own stories. Abdel Razak has 3 jobs listed on their profile. “Netanyahu, Abbas, all the heads of state, French people singing the ‘Marseillaise’: I think Cabu and the others would have been traumatized if they’d seen the demonstration—horrified, really. 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. 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. Though the context has changed drastically, Sattouf can still draw lines from his childhood experience through to the ongoing clash of cultures and the question of what it means to assimilate. A cartoonist draws his childhood in 1980s-era Syria. 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. Almost all of Sattouf’s work is drawn from firsthand observation. As a teen-ager in Brittany, Sattouf spent almost all of his time in his room, drawing and reading comic books. The book chronicles several struggles, each unique to the country that they they go through in Libya and Syria , under the respective dictatorships of Muammar Gaddafi and Hafez al-Assad. One day, as we were walking across a bridge over the Seine, I asked Sattouf how he felt after the attacks. (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. “I was totally disoriented,” he said. He showed me his method one day while we were riding the Métro. They never tell their stories. 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 … 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.