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How Riad Sattouf uses his cartoons to open a window to the Middle East


One early evening in December, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad escaped His country’s rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the most watched TV channels in the country turned to the cartoonist for an expert opinion on the news.

“Did you think it could have happened so soon?” News for the channel, BFMTV, asked the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.

Over the past decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has become one of France’s biggest literary stars, thanks in large part to his master, “Arabic of the future”, series of A graphic memoir. Over six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was split between the Middle East and France, and the breakdown of the marriage between his French mother and Syrian father.

The books – in a genre known as “Bandes Dessinées” in France – have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into some 23 languages. Although told from a child’s perspective and couched in a deceptively simple style, they touch on some of the worst questions about the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They are also full of subtle but wry social satire.

For Mr. Sattouf, this demeanor informs not only his art, but the way he interprets the world. In his TV appearance in December, he told viewers that the fall of Mr al-Assad was a moment of “immense hope” for Syria. But when asked to predict what might happen next, he warned that he tends to see things “extremely pessimistically”.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” he said, “that the terrible dictatorship will not be replaced by another dictatorship.”

Mr. Sattouf, who was born in France, grew up enamored of the brutally honest and occasionally offensive work of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. His work also follows in the tradition of comics that offer readers an intimate look at characters living through pivotal historical moments, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi.

For years, Mr. Sattouf wrote a cartoon strip for Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. He stopped contributing months before January 2015, when the magazine’s offices were targeted in a deadly terrorist attack over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf did not draw cartoons of Muhammad; His comics focused on amusing and sometimes depressing scenes of everyday life that he encountered on the streets and metro in Paris.

In “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf paints a complex portrait of his father, who made his way from a small rural village in Syria to the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he earned a doctorate in history and met the woman who would become Mr. Sattouf’s mother. The cartoonist also depicts his father over the years as slipping into a state of permanent bitterness towards the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen.

Some of the most memorable pages in the series depict Mr. Sattouf’s experience as a child in Ter Maaleh, his father. He moved there in the 1980s, when he was in grade school, and lived there during the dictatorial rule of Mr. al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.

Mr. Sattouf’s memories of Ter Maaleh are vivid and haunting. French journalist Stéphane Jarno recently described depictions of the city as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a micro-society imbued with blind piety and a struggle for power, with seemingly little love but much violence.”

This willingness to pull no punches about his experience in Syria puts Mr. Sattouf in a loose but important category of French public figures with roots in the Arab world who are not afraid to criticize him. It can be a crowded position.

Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who currently lives in France, recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, for a novel that dealt with the complex history of the Algerian civil war. In the past, Mr. Daoud, who has openly discussed sensitive religious issues, has been a target death threat from an Algerian imam. More recently, Mr. Daoud has regretted that he was castigated by elements of the French left because “he is not a good Arab, who is in a constant state of decolonial victimhood.”

Somehow Mr. Sattouf largely avoided that fate. He has been a critical darling of the French news media since at least the mid-2000s, when, as a young man, he published what he called “sexually and provocatively funny” comics. At the same time, he said in a recent interview that he had never confronted Islamist groups.

“Never,” he said, smiling. “Because my comics are so good.”

The line is delivered with flourishes of banter and banter.

Mr Sattouf met for an interview in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, at the end of last month. He comes across as both Iffish and earnest, in a soft voice that veered between French and passable English in an interview he said he learned from “Seinfeld.”

He insisted, as he has in many interviews he has given since Mr. al-Assad’s flight, that he is not an expert on the Middle East. “It’s very complicated for me,” he said. “My books are about Syria, but in my books I tell the stories of my family. I tell my memory, my point of view as a child.”

The books describe a childhood of change in the miser, with a love of drawing and drawing as a refuge and constant.

When he was 12, he left Ter Maaleh, moving back to Brittany with his two younger brothers and mother as his parents’ marriage began to falter. Since then he has not returned to Syria.

In France, he said, he found the freedom of expression crucial to his craft. He also watched with concern as some French leaders embraced Mr. al-Assad. He especially noted the decision from 2008 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president, Invite Mr. al-Assad to Paris For Bastille Day festivities.

As revelations of the Syrian regime’s atrocities came to light, Mr Sattouf said he felt a sense of revenge.

“We see that the story I told in my books was closer to reality than what you could see in the media,” he said.

Mohamed-Nour Hayed, 22 years old, Franco-Syrian activist and writer who received asylum in France in the middle of France Civil war in Syriahe recalls that he first read “Future Arabic” at the age of 15. He said he was concerned that Mr Sattouf’s negative portrayal of Syria could reinforce stereotypes among readers who see only a depiction of a “very closed Syria”.

But Mr Hayed also praised the series and said it influenced him as he wrote his first novel, which was set during the war. Like “Future Arab,” Mr. Hayed said, it was written from a child’s perspective.

In addition to writing “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf directed two feature films. “Les Beaux Gosses“Or” French kisses “, a comedy that comes from the old, won the César award for the best first film. At the end of last year, he published the first volume of “I, Fadi, the stolen brother” Spinoff series “Arabs of the future”, based on interviews with his youngest brother, who, Mr. Sattouf said, was taken from France to Syria by his father when his brother was a child.Mr. Sattouf described it in an interview as a kidnapping.

When asked afterwards to fill in exactly what happened to his brother, Mr. Sattouf refused, saying that he did not want to give the rest of the story, to be published in later volumes.

The first four volumes of the “Arab” series have been translated into English; Fantagraphics, the American comic book publisher, plans to publish versions of the final volumes as well as new series. Many French bookstores currently feature large cardboard displays displaying Mr. Sattouf’s books, along with a photograph of his face. Outside the Rennes train station recently, a middle-aged man recognized Mr. Sattouf and ran to shake his hand.

And the French media continue to turn to him for insight into the fall of the Assad regime.

Mr. Sattouf told the Ouest-France regional newspaper that organizing democratic elections “in a country torn by 13 years of civil war required enormous political will, but also international support.”

He told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that living under the rule of Assad in Syria left him with “a certain paranoia, let’s say, mistrust that became part of my personality.”

He also spoke to La Croix newspaper about returning to Syria one day.

“But that can only happen in a peaceful and democratic Syria,” he said. “For now, it’s still a distant and fantastic prospect.”



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