“The education system was like that,” Sattouf says. 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 80s; 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. 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”. At the start of the first volume, his bouffant blond, eager self is aged two. “No, I was really like that. This was just my experience when I was young ... I’m recounting what I have seen in the most honest way I can. Sattouf’s parents met at the Sorbonne in Paris when they were students.
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. He shrugs off the term “graphic novel”, and prefers to call The Arab of the Future simply “a book”. And I don’t like it when people express their pride in coming from the place where they were born. I wanted to explain that no, it’s not easy. “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’ll tell the rest of the story of how my hair changed.
Seeing things from two points of view is always enriching,” he says, while warning: “I don’t want to be representative of something. 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. Sattouf is best known for his award-winning graphic memoir pentalogy L'Arabe du futur (The Arab of the Future) and for his award-winning film Les Beaux Gosses (The French Kissers). He says he never suffered racism. He is fiercely protective over other parts of his story, which will appear in later volumes. It generates conflict in the mind, I think.”, School, and all its terribleness, is in the foreground of the second book. He left the magazine six months before the 2015 attack in which 12 people were killed.
Riad Sattouf (Arabic: رياض سطوف; born 5 May 1978) is a French cartoonist, comic artist, and film director of Franco-Syrian origin. Teachers administer violence that – in comic book style – makes the children’s eyes pop out. He prefers to describe his nationality as “cartoonist” than be dragged into the identity debate. 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. He’s a seemingly modern man who went back to live in his tradition-steeped village. He won’t say what happened to the relatives he tried to help leave Syria during the violence of 2011. 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. “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. “I think sad things are easier to accept and are even sadder when they’re told with humour. I’m not at ease during the football World Cup, for example. Riad Sattouf nait à Paris d'un père syrien, docteur en histoire, et d'une mère française. “I was retelling my youth in Syria and I had this impression of being 10, being stuck in my memories. 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. “A child’s point of view renders things even harsher, I think.”. But in the second volume he’s happy to stand by and do little to challenge the harsh injustices there. 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. 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. 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. So I made a lot of comics in France which weren’t related to this part of me. Sattouf’s father, who died before the book came out, is an awful authoritarian, macho and racist, yet also somehow touching. “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. "Toi t'es un dessinateur, point": l'auteur de bande dessinée Riad Sattouf raconte dans "L'Arabe du futur 5" la naissance de sa vocation, et rend hommage aux enseignants qui ont cru en … It’s very difficult, in fact.”. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. It proved so maddeningly difficult that he felt he had to write about it. It is a very common and human paradox. He had … Did he deliberately draw himself fairer and cuter? Yet, in a flash she’s whacking them with a stick. French comic book art, or bande dessinée, is a vast and highly respected literary genre, but it is rarely exported or widely translated abroad. To order a copy for £15.57 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. “Because I think sometimes in France, people think there are too many foreigners here and that it’s too easy to come. I don’t have the knowledge for that. I prefer to make something funny out of a drama,” he says. 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. But he is also making a universal comment on schooling. 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 also worked for the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo for ten years, from 2004 to mid-2014, publishing drawing boards of one of his major works La vie secrète des jeunes. 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. In it he chronicles the life of a 10-year-old girl in Paris, based on interviews with a friend’s young daughter. It’s very easy to make a drama. The Arab of the Future 2 – terrifying school days in Syria, Riad Sattouf interview: ‘I didn’t want to be the guy of Arab origin who makes comics about Arab people’, Riad Sattouf: ‘I wanted to try to describe the dark side and the positive side – if there was a positive side – all together.’, democracy protests in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. In her own way, Esther is as much an outsider as Sattouf himself. “I didn’t want to be the official Arab comics artist. In 2004, he produced a comic art book about his circumcision – but recently withdrew it, buying up every copy from the publishers, because he wanted to tell the story properly now as part of the Arab of the Future series. How can you be modern and progressive and still respect ancestral tradition? (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. 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. And it’s awkward.”. 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. It was like military methods applied to school.”. 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 Métro and around Paris, spying on and chronicling the city. Par sa grand-mère maternelle, il est issu d'une famille de Terre-neuvas et descendrait du corsaire et capitaine au long-cours Vincent François Tranchant (1769-1854) [source insuffisante].
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. Three years later, when he released the first volume of his comic art autobiography, The Arab of the Future, it immediately become one of France’s biggest-selling graphic novels, translated into 16 languages and hailed as a work of genius. He’s saving it for the next volumes. 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. I wanted to express the paradox that was in my father between modernity and tradition.