In spring 2011, when pro-democracy protests in Bashar Al Assad’s Syria were met with the crushing violence that would shape five years of conflict, a young French cartoonist in Paris decided to help some of his Syrian relatives get out.
At the time, Riad Sattouf was well known as a big talent on France’s thriving comics scene, drawing funny and scathing works of social observation. He had branched into cinema, winning the French equivalent of a Bafta for his first film “The French Kissers”, a nerdy take on teenage angst. From his comfortable life in Paris, Sattouf was convinced that Syria was going to be “completely destroyed”, so he went through official French state channels to apply for visas for some of his family members.
It proved so maddeningly difficult that he felt he had to write about it. But to write about it, Sattouf knew he would have tell his life story, which he had kept carefully shut away: his childhood growing up in Libya and Syria with a Syrian father and French mother, his parents’ divorce, his teenage years in Brittany.
Three years later, when he released the first volume of his comic art autobiography, “The Arab of the Future”, it immediately became one of France’s biggest-selling graphic novels, translated into 16 languages and hailed as a work of genius. French comic book art, or bande dessinee, is a vast and highly respected literary genre, but it is rarely exported or widely translated abroad. Sattouf’s childlike, witty and deceptively simple work is part of a growing tradition of comic book autobiography that captures dark periods of history — the pinnacle is Art Spiegelman’s “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” about how his parents survived Auschwitz, but there was also a precedent in France with Marjane Satrapi’s award-winning “Persepolis”, about growing up in and then fleeing from Iran.
Sitting in his Paris publisher’s office, as the second volume of “The Arab of the Future” is released in English and the third volume comes out in French, Sattouf is hesitant about being seen as a voice of the Middle East. He views himself as stuck somewhere, neutrally, in the middle of his mixed French and Syrian roots and hates any kind of flag-waving or identity politics.
“I waited so long to tell this story partly because when I started to make comics I didn’t want to be the guy of Arab origin who makes comics about Arab people,” he says. “I didn’t want to be the official Arab comics artist. So I made a lot of comics in France which weren’t related to this part of me. I made a movie. But even during all that other work, I was thinking I have this good story, how could I tell it?”
Sattouf’s story so far — the series will eventually be five volumes going up to the present day — is a tiny slice of family life in an authoritarian state, first in Libya, then Syria in the late 1970s and 1980s; Arab leaders, such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Syria’s Hafez Al Assad, father of Bashar, weren’t then regarded in the way they are today. (Sattouf recalls magazines such as “Paris Match” portraying Gaddafi as a kind of seductive playboy of the east.)
What sets Sattouf apart is that he tells the story through the eyes of a very young child. At the start of the first volume, his bouffant blond, eager self is aged two. In the second volume he is six, still wide-eyed and cheerful, but his sweet ideas and funny jokes deepen the unease at the underlying repression. In the first volume, Sattouf’s dad pops a bucket over his son’s head to avoid him spotting two men hanging from gallows in a public square.
In the second volume, it’s the rich-poor divide and the crushing fate of women, including “honour” killing, that comes to the fore. Children’s and teenagers’ innocent yet incisive take on life is a theme that runs through all of Sattouf’s work, but he found it essential in describing the absurdities of daily life under a dictatorship. “A child’s point of view renders things even harsher, I think.”
Sattouf’s parents met at the Sorbonne in Paris when they were students. In the books his father, Abdel Razak, is a pan-Arabist who believes education will lift the people out of religious obscurantism and free from the legacy of colonialism. By moving back to the Arab world from France, Abdel Razak hoped to take part in this transformation, and to raise his son as an “Arab of the future”. Sattouf’s father, who died before the book came out, is an awful authoritarian, macho and racist, yet also somehow touching. He’s a seemingly modern man who went back to live in his tradition-steeped village. But in the second volume he’s happy to stand by and do little to challenge the harsh injustices there.
Sattouf could have simply laid him bare and judged him, but instead he shows him from the point of view of a tiny son who idolises him. “So the reader thinks: ‘My God, this man is saying horrible things in front of a child!’” he says. “It’s more sincere ... I wanted to try to describe the dark side and the positive side — if there was a positive side — all together ... I wanted to express the paradox that was in my father between modernity and tradition. It is a very common and human paradox. How can you be modern and progressive and still respect ancestral tradition? It generates conflict in the mind, I think.”
School, and all its terribleness, is in the foreground of the second book. Teachers administer violence that — in comic book style — makes the children’s eyes pop out. One female teacher bizarrely shows the young class how to make the sound of rain with their hands, and sits hypnotised by the tap-tap of a fake storm they create. Yet, in a flash she’s whacking them with a stick. “The education system was like that,” Sattouf says. “If you look at videos on YouTube made by cellphone before the war, there are Syrian schools where you can clearly see a teacher hitting. It was like military methods applied to school.”
But he is also making a universal comment on schooling. “It’s still like that in a lot of Middle Eastern countries and it was like that in France in the beginning of the century.”
Older readers at book signings in France tell him they recognise scenes from their own childhood. The school in the book is a general comment about how the stage is set for society. “I think sad things are easier to accept and are even sadder when they’re told with humour. It’s very easy to make a drama. I prefer to make something funny out of a drama,” he says.
Right now in Paris, French politicians obsess over national identity in the run-up to a potentially fraught presidential election race next year; Sattouf sees his mixed Syrian-French roots simply as part of life. He prefers to describe his nationality as “cartoonist” than be dragged into the identity debate. He says he never suffered racism. He neither looked or sounded “Arab”, and as a teenager in Brittany he was never presumed to be of Maghreb heritage, which, in France, can be fraught with discrimination.
“I think it’s lucky to be from two different origins. Seeing things from two points of view is always enriching,” he says, while warning: “I don’t want to be representative of something. This was just my experience when I was young ... I’m recounting what I have seen in the most honest way I can. I know it’s a subjective way. But I won’t be involved in the politics or geopolitics. I don’t have the knowledge for that. I’ve seen things in my youth and I’m just telling them and I let the reader make their own interpretation.”
He adds: “I really hate nationalism. And I don’t like it when people express their pride in coming from the place where they were born. I’m not at ease during the football World Cup, for example. I’m not at ease during the Olympics when people represent their country, when they cry when they hear the national anthem ... But it’s not specific. I don’t like French nationalism and I don’t like the extreme right wherever and whatever they are, but whether it’s Egyptian, Algerian, American, Spanish, French, it’s always annoying ... Because it’s down to chance where a person is born. And the fact that I’m of dual nationality means it’s difficult for me to be proud on one side or the other.”
The blond child in the book with “Hollywood actress hair” is now a dark-haired man. Did he deliberately draw himself fairer and cuter? “No, I was really like that. I’ll tell the rest of the story of how my hair changed. But this is exactly my point: when comic artists draw themselves, I often think they draw themselves too kindly, more beautiful than they are in real life. And it’s awkward.”
He is fiercely protective over other parts of his story, which will appear in later volumes.
He shrugs off the term “graphic novel”, and prefers to call “The Arab of the Future” simply “a book”. While he was writing and drawing it, he started another piece of work about children that became a weekly page in the French news magazine “L’Obs” and was published last year as a well-received book, “Les Cahiers d’Esther”. In it he chronicles the life of a 10-year-old girl in Paris, based on interviews with a friend’s young daughter. “I was retelling my youth in Syria and I had this impression of being 10, being stuck in my memories. When I met Esther, I felt as if we were the same mental age and it would be good to recount a French childhood at the same time as mine.”
In her own way, Esther is as much an outsider as Sattouf himself. For nine years, he drew a series called “The Secret Life of Youth” for the satirical paper “Charlie Hebdo”, dissecting overheard conversations and scenes on the Metro and around Paris, spying on and chronicling the city. Yet he was never a political cartoonist, and never drew caricatures or political satire for “Charlie Hebdo”, nor did he ever attend their weekly meetings, preferring to work from home.
He left the magazine six months before the 2015 attack in which 12 people were killed. He feels that since then, cartoonists have been pushed on to the political stage, somewhere he’s not comfortable.
He won’t say what happened to the relatives he tried to help leave Syria during the violence of 2011. He’s saving it for the next volumes. “I wanted to show how hard it was to bring foreigners to France,” he says. “Because I think sometimes in France, people think there are too many foreigners here and that it’s too easy to come. I wanted to explain that no, it’s not easy. It’s very difficult, in fact.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
“The Arab of the Future 2” is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
