Muammar Gadhafi is on TV, Hafez Al-Assad is on billboards, and, in every chapter, high politics enter daily life.
Paging through the first volume of Sattouf’s memoirs, the reader encounters vignettes of Sattouf’s turbulent childhood. His weekly series, “The Secret Life of the Young,” captures conversations overheard between youths on subway trains and other public spaces across the French capital. Sattouf’s work, however, has mostly dealt with social and cultural issues, not the bellicose gags for which the comic publication is notorious. The pretext for the assaults on Charlie Hebdo was the caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, deemed a grave insult in Islam and among the troublemaking publication’s stock-in-state. Sattouf, 37, has contributed to the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which was firebombed in November 2011 and stormed by Islamic terrorists in a January 2015 massacre that left eleven cartoonists and others dead. “Everybody in his comics that is Arab is violent.” It is noteworthy that a graphic memoir has spurred such debate, but perhaps the approachability of the literary medium lends itself to self-reflection and new inquiry. “I’m angered to read this comic,” said Lena Merhej of the Lebanese comic collective Samandal. For that very reason, some Arab comic artists have criticized the volume for being anti-Arab. In the New Yorker, Adam Shatz called him “the Arab of the present,” noting that the book resonates for anyone weaned under an authoritarian regime where the banality of state control, from censorship to food rations, shapes daily life. (Angoulême nominated Sattouf’s second volume for the 2016 prize, but he withdrew citing the jury’s sexism: of the thirty nominees, not a single woman made the list.)īy portraying the dark moments of his upbringing, Sattouf has started new conversations about Arab identity in France as well as across the Arab region. The book has sold two hundred thousand copies in France and and won the 2015 Le Fauve d’or du meilleur album at the Festival d’Angoulême, France’s preeminent comic jamboree. A morose treatment of a multicultural childhood in Libya, Syria, and France, The Arab of the Future is the first of a projected four-volume series, which has just been translated into English as well as fourteen other languages. The graphic memoir by the Franco-Syrian artist Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future, raises difficult questions about the future of the Middle East and Europe at a time of heightened conflict between nation states and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
In comics, the child represents an important figure for their capacity to tell truth, unfettered by taboos, uninhibited by societal rules. In Fun Home in 2006, Alison Bechdel rendered a childhood of discomfort and her undertaker father’s closeted homosexuality. In Persepolis, published in 2000, Marjane Satrapi shared her bildungsroman of Iran amid the Islamic Revolution. This is a global trend, and a preponderance of comic memoirs written for adult audiences grapple with fraught childhoods. Yet, even as illustrated narratives break away from their childish roots, the child still figures prominently in graphic literature. The Paris Review recognized the turn with its introduction of The Art of Comics, using its signature interview platform to feature comic innovators R. The journey from low art to legitimate literature has been underway for decades, with milestones such as Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, the budding of comics journalism as exemplified by Joe Sacco, and an emerging body of scholarship about comic art. Once considered fodder for children, comics have officially arrived. By Riad Sattouf (translation by Sam Taylor). The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984.
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