When I rescheduled a meeting with a wealthy Algerian businessman, Sattouf said, “Don’t go back to Algeria for the next forty years! 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. 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. Whenever he felt cornered by my questions, which was often, he would cross his arms and glare at me, in a parody of machismo. Sattouf says he felt no less out of place in school in France—and scarcely less bullied—than he had in Syria. . 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. 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. 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. Birds too small to eat are shot to smithereens. 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. . Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. 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. My cousins and I used to talk about what he might look like, but I wouldn’t do it. A young, working-class man of North African background, with a shaved head and wearing a parka and sneakers, speaks in thick banlieue slang on his cell phone, often with his back to us. The effect of this omission is one of time travel, back to the vanished future of pan-Arabism. Wide-eyed, yet perceptive, the book documents the wanderings of his mismatched parents – his bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf. 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. 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. That will teach you never to insult an Algerian businessman!”, Sattouf shares another trait with his father: a sense of destiny. 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. 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. 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.”. “Ah, putain, it stinks!” Sattouf screamed, running to shut the window. “People will be surprised,” he said. “No, I’m an énarque,” he said, as if that explained everything. He turned out to be the source for at least some of them. I knew how things worked there. . 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. Designed by Jean Nouvel, it is a museum of so-called “first art,” or what used to be called primitive art. Abdel-Razak, effusive and irrepressible, is a Syrian emigre, a brilliant student awarded a scholarship to study for a doctorate in modern history at the Sorbonne. One of those traditions was honor killing. Sattouf, whose teens were spent in a housing project in Brittany, often jokes self-consciously about his success. 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.”. 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. 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. There was an old photograph of the Italian actress Valeria Golino, whom he cast in “Les Beaux Gosses,” a hit movie about a provincial high school that he made a few years ago. . She said that she sold her house there only after the uprising against the Ben-Ali dictatorship, when the security situation deteriorated. Clémentine is shocked, and her husband reveals that the sentence was commuted as part of a deal between the authorities and the family. I should go to the gym, but I’m too lazy!”. Tell me about you, Adam. “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 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. “If you were a cartoonist associated with Charlie, you were suddenly expected to be an expert on geopolitics. 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 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. And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. In “The Arab of the Future,” his accommodation is nearly as heartbreaking as the killing itself. the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . He went on, “Because he’s part Arab, everything he says becomes acceptable, including the most atrociously racist things. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . “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. 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. 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). We and our partners will store and/or access information on your device through the use of cookies and similar technologies, to display personalised ads and content, for ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. All rights reserved. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. 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. Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. Abdel-Razak declares. . That way, he could match and even overtake France and the West by building a … 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. In Sattouf’s memoir, his father’s decision to move the family to Syria has the coercive force of a kidnapping. 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. 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. Clémentine and Abdel -Razak, pseudonyms for Riad Sattouf’s parents, meet for the first time, as students in the Paris of 1978. The day was hot, and the smoky fragrance of ham wafted up from a restaurant downstairs. But wherever you turn in Sattouf’s Syria, you see the father’s values magnified and put into action. “I was certain everything was going to collapse,” he told me. He drew a scene he had observed near his apartment: a piece of understated yet pointed reportage. . His first works were variations on the theme of male sexual frustration, often his own. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. “Are you Tunisian?” she asked him. I find that’s still true today.”. Among French intellectuals, however, particularly those who study the Arab world, Sattouf is a more controversial figure. 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. (The first volume is now being published here; in France, a second volume appeared in May.). 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. Le père Abdel Razak est issu d’un milieu très pauvre, mais a des ambitions politiques délirantes, en plein crépuscule du panarabisme. “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. 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. Assad had a destiny, and my father thought that he might, too. “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. Little Riad uses his nose to navigate his worlds, Arab and French, and to find his place in them. 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. © 2021 Condé Nast. 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. “I saw some pretty tough things here.” ♦. . often disquieting, but always honest * 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. often disquieting, but always honest. The Arab of the Future (French: L'Arabe du futur) is a graphic memoir by award-winning French-Syrian cartoonist Riad Sattouf. 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 . the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . “It left me uneasy,” he said. When I spoke to Guillaume Allary, Sattouf’s editor, he described the book as a work of almost pure testimony. “Those experiences gave me an immense affection for Jews and gays,” he said. The girl’s mother asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. 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 reality is much less sexy than you think,” he wrote. The only book about the Middle East that I could see was one on Islam by Bernard Lewis. An eternal optimist, he believed the Arab of the future must go to school, escape ignorance and achieve enlightenment. . Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! Not so long ago, the French cartoonist Riad Sattouf was signing books at a Paris librairie. Abdel-Razak muses on the Ypm Kippur War. After coffee, we walked over to Sattouf’s apartment so that I could see his studio. Many of his Charlie strips involved scenes of humiliation, often of a sexual nature, and of religious hypocrisy. 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. Sattouf’s emphasis of his father’s personal racism, sexism, and xenophobia become almost hyperbolic in their presentation. 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. 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. It was instinctive.” He wrote the book in “a kind of trance,” he told me, drawing almost exclusively on memory. It was based on conversations he overheard in the Métro, in fast-food restaurants, and on the street. His blond hair turned black and curly, and, he recalled, “I went from being an elf to a troll. 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 … Furthermore, what Sattouf does say about himself can be highly contradictory. The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Sattouf, 37, who grew up in Syria and Libya, ... Abdel-Razak, a Syrian pan-Arabist, the whole family is dragged along in the pursuit of his father’s epic dreams for the Arab nation to become a unified, prosperous region. 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 … “I never took notes, and I always changed the looks of the people I drew,” he told me. 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. 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. 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. Let’s enter! I’d seen teachers beating their children in school. He’s a rich Arab. 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. “Sattouf is experiencing something that Marjane Satrapi experienced after ‘Persepolis’ came out,” he said. “The Arab of the Future” has, in effect, made him the Arab of the present in France. 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. I’m not a family guy. often disquieting, but always honest." For all his rants against Jews, Africans, and, above all, the Shia, he remains strangely endearing, a kind of Arab Archie Bunker. In the second volume of “The Arab of the Future,” little Riad learns of her death while eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents. 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. 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. When Sattouf was seven, a cousin of his, a thirty-five-year-old widow who taught him to draw, was suffocated to death by her father and her brother, who had discovered that she was pregnant.

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