One evening in December, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country as rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the country’s most-watched television news channels asked a cartoonist for his expert opinion on the news.
“Didn’t you think this would happen so quickly?” a news anchor from the BFMTV channel asked cartoonist Riyad Satuf. Her smile was reflected 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 masterpiece “The Arabs of the Future,” a series of graphic memoirs. Spanning six volumes, the series tells the story of Sattouf’s childhood, which was uncomfortably divided between the Middle East and France, and the breakdown of his marriage to his French mother and Syrian father.
More than 3 million copies of his books, in a genre known as “bande dessinée” in France, have been sold and translated into about 23 languages. Told from a child’s perspective and drawn in a deceptively simple style, it touches on some of the most vexing issues regarding the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They are also full of subtle but chilling social satire.
For Satuf, this attitude not only influences his art, but also the way he interprets the world. In a television appearance in December, he told viewers that al-Assad’s fall was a moment of “immense hope” for Syria. But when asked to predict what will happen next, he warned that he tends to view things “very pessimistically”.
“I am trying to make sure that one horrible dictatorship is not replaced by another,” he said.
Born in France, Mr. Sattouf grew up obsessed with the brutally honest and sometimes offensive work of American cartoonist Robert Crumb. His work also follows in the tradition of comics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which offer readers an intimate view of characters living at key moments in history.
Sattouf has been writing cartoons for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for many years. He stopped contributing in January 2015, months before the magazine’s offices were targeted in a deadly terrorist attack over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf did not create caricatures of Muhammad. His strips focused on funny and sometimes depressing scenes of everyday life encountered on the streets and subways of Paris.
In “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf paints a complex portrait of a father who goes from a small rural village in Syria to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he earns a doctorate in history and meets the woman who will become his future. is drawing. Becomes the mother of Mr. Satuf. The cartoonist also depicts the father’s descent into a state of enduring resentment towards the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen over the years.
The most striking pages in the series depict Satuf’s childhood experiences in Tel Mare, his father’s village. He moved there in the 1980s as a primary school student and lived there during the dictatorship of al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.
Satuf’s memories of Tel Mare are vivid and painful. French journalist Stéphane Jarnot recently described the town as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a micro-society steeped in blind piety and power struggles, clearly less love and more violence.” He praised it.
This refusal to pull punches about his experience in Syria places Sattouf in a loose but important category of French public figures with roots in the Arab world who are unafraid of criticism. It will be. It can be a difficult position.
Kamel Daoud, an Algerian writer currently living in France, recently won France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for his novel that deals with the complex history of Algeria’s civil war. Daoud, who has openly discussed sensitive religious issues, has received death threats from Algerian imams in the past. More recently, Mr. Daoud complained that he was being criticized by the French left for not being “a good Arab with a permanent sense of colonial victimhood.”
Somehow, Satuf has largely avoided that fate. He has been a critical darling of French news media since at least the mid-2000s, and in his youth he published what he called “sexual, provocative and funny” comics. At the same time, he said in a recent interview that he had never faced any backlash from Islamist groups.
“Never,” he said with a laugh. “Because my comics are very good.”
This line was delivered with such grandeur that it didn’t seem like a joke.
Mr Sattouf met at a press conference in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, late last month. In the interview, he gave the impression of a cocky yet serious personality, with a quiet voice that fluctuated between French and the practical English he learned by binge-watching “Seinfeld.”
As he has said in numerous interviews since al-Assad fled, he insisted that he was not an expert on the Middle East. “It’s very complicated for me,” he said. “My book is about Syria, but I also tell my family’s story in the book. I tell my memories and my childhood perspective.”
The book describes a harrowing and transformative childhood in which a love of drawing and cartooning is a refuge and a constant.
At the age of 12, as his parents’ marriage began to fail, he left Tel Mare and returned to Brittany with his two younger brothers and mother. He has not returned to Syria since then.
He said he felt that freedom of expression was crucial to his art in France. He also watched with concern as some French leaders appeared to support Mr al-Assad. He specifically mentioned the 2008 decision by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy to invite al-Assad to Paris for Bastille Day celebrations.
Sattouf said the exposure of the Syrian regime’s atrocities has given him a sense of vindication.
“You can see that the story I was telling in the book was closer to reality than what you see in the media,” he said.
Mohamed Nour Heid, 22, a Franco-Syrian activist and writer who was granted asylum in France during the Syrian civil war, first read The Arab of the Future when he was 15 years old. Reminds me of. He said he was concerned about Satuf’s claims. Negative depictions of Syria may reinforce stereotypes among readers who only see depictions of a “very closed Syria.”
But Mr. Heid also praised the series, saying it influenced him when writing his first novel set during the war. Like “Future Arab,” this work is written from a child’s perspective, Heid said.
In addition to writing “Future Arab,” Mr. Sattouf directed two feature films. The youth comedy “Les Beaux Gosses,” or “The French Kissers,” won the César Award for Best First Film. Late last year, Mr Sattouf published the first volume of his “Future Arab” spin-off series “I, Fadi, Stolen Brother,” based on interviews with his youngest brother, who was brought over from France. When my brother was a child, his father took him to Syria. Satuf called it a kidnapping in an interview.
Later, when asked to fill in exactly what happened to his brother, Mr. Satuf declined, saying he did not want to publish the rest of the story to be published in a later volume.
The first four volumes of the “Arab” series have been translated into English. US-based manga publisher Fantagraphics is planning to publish not only a new series but also the final volume. Many bookstores in France now have large cardboard displays displaying Sattouf’s books along with his portrait. Recently, a middle-aged man noticed Sattouf outside Rennes train station and ran up to shake his hand.
And French media continues to turn to him for insight into the fall of Assad.
“Organizing democratic elections in a country divided by 13 years of civil war required not only immense political will but also international support,” Satouf told local newspaper Ouest France. spoke.
He told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that living under Syria’s Assad regime had instilled in him “a kind of paranoia, a kind of mistrust” that became part of my personality.
He also spoke to La Croix newspaper about returning to Syria someday.
“But this can only happen in a peaceful and democratic Syria,” he said. “For now, that’s still a far-fetched prospect.”
