The streets smelled of human excrement. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons of the Prophet that had run in a right-wing Danish newspaper. According to Todd, those who refused to abide by this formula—particularly if they were Muslim—were susceptible to accusations that they excused or even condoned the killings. The Quai Branly is at once a voluptuous tribute to the riches of French ethnography (several of the pieces came from the collections of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others) and a reminder of a history of overseas plunder. Riad Sattouf photographed in Paris for the Observer last week. “The Secret Life” established Sattouf as a distinctively sour comedian of manners—and, more controversially, as the only Arab cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo, whose mockery of religion took aim at symbols of Islamic piety, notably the image of the Prophet. “Those experiences gave me an immense affection for Jews and gays,” he said. According to Sattouf, it was Bravo who gave him the confidence to begin writing his own stories. Sattouf and his father exchanged letters, but he says that “the rupture was total.” Clémentine eventually found work as a medical secretary, but for several years she was unemployed, and the family lived on welfare in public housing. This was a widespread conviction among French citizens of Muslim origin, but it found little echo in the French press during the weeks after the massacre, when the slogan “Je Suis Charlie,” which began as an expression of solidarity, became something of a test of loyalty—a “ritual formula,” as the sociologist Emmanuel Todd has argued. Abdel-Razak, effusive and irrepressible, is a Syrian emigre, a brilliant student awarded a scholarship to study for a doctorate in modern history at the Sorbonne. In November, 2011, it published a special issue, Charia Hebdo, guest-edited by the Prophet; the offices were fire-bombed just as it hit the newsstands. It was instinctive.” He wrote the book in “a kind of trance,” he told me, drawing almost exclusively on memory. Do you like being with your family?” He responded to follow-up questions by e-mail with a GIF of Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” smiling mischievously and saying, “It’s classified.”. Abdel-Razak tried to ingratiate himself with more powerful men, like his cousin, a general in the Syrian Army. Almost all of Sattouf’s work is drawn from firsthand observation. He implies his father is a fool for turning down a Western university and taking a posting in Libya, positions Abdel-Razak’s long-term goal of building a palatial family home on his Syrian land as a pipe dream. When I rescheduled a meeting with a wealthy Algerian businessman, Sattouf said, “Don’t go back to Algeria for the next forty years! In Arabic, the names Riad and Sattouf had what he described as “an impressive solemnity.” In French, they sounded like rire de sa touffe, which means “laugh at her pussy.” When teachers took attendance, “people would burst out laughing. Kate’s Cuisine, as regulars like Sattouf call it, is a quiet, rustic place with wood tables and turquoise placemats, decorated with North African bric-a-brac and photographs. Son père, Abdel-Razak Sattouf, est détenteur d'un doctorat d'histoire Issu d'une famille très pauvre, le père de Riad Sattouf élève brillant a obtenu une bourse pour étudier à la Sorbonne. Riad Sattouf is the son of a Syrian man, Abdel-Razak Sattouf and of a French woman, Clémentine. Designed by Jean Nouvel, it is a museum of so-called “first art,” or what used to be called primitive art. But this analysis has entered a very public arena, in a totally explosive context that’s much larger than he is.”, But plenty of French Arabists take Sattouf’s side. Tell me about you, Adam. We and our partners will store and/or access information on your device through the use of cookies and similar technologies, to display personalised ads and content, for ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Né d’un père syrien et d’une mère bretonne, Riad Sattouf grandit d’abord en France puis à Tripoli, en Libye, où son père vient d’être nommé professeur après des études en France. But wherever you turn in Sattouf’s Syria, you see the father’s values magnified and put into action. On the first day that we met, Sattouf took me to lunch at Les Comptoirs de Carthage, a canteen in the Marais owned by Kate Daoud, an Englishwoman in her sixties who married a Tunisian and lived in Tunisia for many years before settling in Paris. A portrait of the children of France’s ruling class, “Retour au Collège” is at once affectionate and sneering, gross and touching: a Sattouf signature. That will teach you never to insult an Algerian businessman!”, Sattouf shares another trait with his father: a sense of destiny. By moving back to the Arab world, he hoped to take part in this project, and to rear his son as “the Arab of the future.”, In Libya, the family was given a house but no keys, because the Great Leader had abolished private property; they returned home one day to find it occupied by another family. En 1984, la famille déménage en Syrie et rejoint le berceau des Sattouf, un petit village près de Homs. He was completely fascinated by power.”. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. He spends all his days eating in expensive restaurants.”, This was one of the few times I’d heard Sattouf refer to himself as an Arab. Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. . They met in Paris when Abdel was working on his thesis at La Sorbonne. His first works were variations on the theme of male sexual frustration, often his own. She replied, “I want to be a giraffe so that I can observe everyone below.” That would have been an unusually gentle “Secret Life,” however. Explorateur inlassable des mondes de l’enfance, le dessinateur à succès Riad Sattouf se penche sur la sienne – sans faux-semblants. And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. “I was certain everything was going to collapse,” he told me. “People will be surprised,” he said. Clementine, reserved and level-headed, is a student from Brittany; she takes pity on Abdel-Razak after a friend sets him up on a nonexistent date, and ends up falling for his charms. the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . Riad was born in 1978. The author of four comics series in France and a former contributor to the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf is now a weekly columnist for l’Obs. Riad Sattouf is the son of a Syrian man, Abdel-Razak Sattouf and of a French woman, Clémentine. But, when I asked him about this episode, he would say only that one of his relatives succeeded in getting to France, while the others found refuge in an Arab country that he refused to name. Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! In interviews, he has said that he wrote “The Arab of the Future” out of a desire for “revenge” when France declined to provide him with visas for relatives who were trapped in Homs, under siege by the Syrian Army. Sattouf had long considered writing a book about the Arab world, but the idea for the memoir occurred to him only after the Syrian uprising broke out, in 2011. * France 24 * Sattouf's account of his childhood is a deeply personal recollection of a peripatetic youth that can resonate with audiences across the world. This is something a lot of illustrators have in common.”. His caustic, often brutal vision of how boys are groomed to become men has brought him acclaim far beyond the underground-comics scene where he first made his name. They were both students: Clémentine from Brittany, and Abdel-Razak, on scholarship, from a village in Syria. “The Arab of the Future,” he said, gives the reader “the raw facts,” untainted by any “political discourse.” But Sattouf’s choice of facts is selective, and it would be hard to read “The Arab of the Future” as anything other than a bitter indictment of the pan-Arabist project that his father espoused. He showed me his method one day while we were riding the Métro. He went on, “Because he’s part Arab, everything he says becomes acceptable, including the most atrociously racist things. The principal boasted that in his school you didn’t hear students saying “Go fuck your mother,” but Sattouf heard much worse, and spared none of the details. “I knew Syria would never be like the other Arab countries. That way, he could match and even overtake France and the West by building a … “When I started to remember this period, I realized that many of my memories were of sounds and smells,” Sattouf told me. He is embarrassed by his son’s vulnerability, which reminds him of his own; he proclaims himself the master of the household but usually defers to his more practical wife. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Riad Sattouf est né en 1978, d’une mère bretonne et d’un père syrien. The day was hot, and the smoky fragrance of ham wafted up from a restaurant downstairs. It was utterly confusing.” Sattouf marched in the January 11th demonstration, when four million French people gathered across the country with “Je Suis Charlie” banners, but the spectacle of patriotic unity—something with which he was all too familiar, from his childhood in Syria—left him feeling uncomfortable. For our first meeting, Sattouf proposed that I come to a café near his apartment, not far from the Place de la République, where he lives with his partner—a comic-book editor—and their son. What he’s written is very personal, a kind of self-analysis, really. The book is, in part, a settling of accounts with the man who stole his childhood, a man he once worshipped but came to despise. Mathieu Sapin, one of Sattouf’s studio mates, told me, “In a very short time, Riad imposed himself as a figure with a set of themes all his own—youth, education, sexual frustration, the things we see in Daniel Clowes, but in a French style.” When readers told Sattouf to “stop with your stories of losers,” he invented a buff, bisexual superhero named Pascal Brutal. No French Presidency is complete without a legacy-defining monument; the Quai Branly, which opened in 2006, was Jacques Chirac’s. Sattouf has achieved prominence as a cartoonist of Muslim heritage at a time when French anxieties about Islam have never been higher and when cartooning has become an increasingly dangerous trade. After the January, 2015, massacre, Sapin told me, “I was very afraid for Riad.”, Yet Sattouf’s relationship with Charlie was never close: it was a professional alliance, not a political one. The youngest child of a poor peasant family, Abdel-Razak Sattouf was the only one to receive an education, eventually earning a doctorate in history at La Sorbonne … Urban life, for Sattouf, is a deeply unsentimental education, an al-fresco hazing. I asked him if he had a background in ethnography. Fighting the Israeli Army was the most popular schoolyard game. Sattouf, whose teens were spent in a housing project in Brittany, often jokes self-consciously about his success. . Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. It had nothing to do with the journal or the people I knew there, who detested nationalism.”. I can’t believe it, I am speaking English!” Sattouf immediately shifted to French; he reserves English—to be precise, a caricature of American-accented English—for jokes and impersonations, as if it were intrinsically humorous. France is gray-blue; Libya is yellow; Syria, where he spent a decade, is a pinkish red. His blond hair turned black and curly, and, he recalled, “I went from being an elf to a troll. “Ah, putain, it stinks!” Sattouf screamed, running to shut the window. And then you will have great success. He told me that because he did not have stereotypically Arab features he was rarely seen as such. Ce dernier, Abdel-Razak Sattouf, alors qu’il venait d’une famille très pauvre, bénéficia d’une bourse pour poursuivre ses études à la Sorbonne. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. In a striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervour of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi's Libya, and Assad's Syria - but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation. “I can already see the first lines in The New Yorker,” he replied. Clémentine took her sons to live in Brittany. He turned out to be the source for at least some of them. It is not a sumptuous visual style, but it is an effective one, particularly in its evocation of the way in which a child sees the world. Many of his Charlie strips involved scenes of humiliation, often of a sexual nature, and of religious hypocrisy. Sattouf loathes nationalism and is fond of the saying, paraphrased from Salman Rushdie, “A man does not have roots, he has feet.” He says that he feels “closer to a comic-book artist from Japan than I do to a Syrian or a French person.” Yet he has become famous for a book set largely in two countries where some of the most violent convulsions since the Arab Spring have unfolded. We were met in the lobby by Stéphane Martin, the museum’s president, who is a long-standing admirer of Sattouf’s work and has commissioned him to produce a graphic novel about the museum for its tenth anniversary, next year. often disquieting, but always honest. By filling them with sperm, Martin explained, the elders were inducting the next generation into leadership. But only a few months later the couple pass one of them on the street. He had told various people I interviewed that his father kidnapped his brother and took him back to Syria, where the brother later joined the uprising against Assad; that his father had a mystical epiphany while making the hajj to Mecca; and that he later committed a terrible crime against the family. The first Arabic word he learned from them was yehudi, “Jew.” It was hurled at him at a family gathering by two of his cousins, who proceeded to pounce on him. Riad was born in 1978 and The Arab of the Future is a BD about the author’s childhood in different places in the Middle East. Wide-eyed, yet perceptive, the book documents the wanderings of his mismatched parents – his bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf. He said that his younger brother works as an engineer in Boulogne but that “you will never know anything else about him! Coming from a poor background, passionately interested in politics, and obsessed with pan-Arabism, Abdel-Razak Sattouf raises his son Riad in the cult of the great Arab dictators, symbols of modernity and viril power. “There’s nothing positive in the book—no nostalgia or love,” he said. Birds too small to eat are shot to smithereens. “If I had written a book about a village in southern Italy or Norway, would I be asked about my vision of the European world?” he said. (The first volume is now being published here; in France, a second volume appeared in May.). During these years, Sattouf would return to France each summer, spending it with his mother’s family in Brittany. * France 24 * Very funny and very sad. “It left me uneasy,” he said. Soon after he was born, his father, Abdel-Razak, a devout Pan-Arab nationalist, took his family to Libya and then Syria. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. It was impossible for a girl to date a guy whose name meant ‘I laughed at your pussy.’ ” As a result, he said, “I lived a very violent solitude. A little girl began talking to her mother, and a look of intense concentration came over Sattouf’s face. When I spoke to Guillaume Allary, Sattouf’s editor, he described the book as a work of almost pure testimony. Martin has been involved in the museum since its conception, in 1998. Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. Whenever he felt cornered by my questions, which was often, he would cross his arms and glare at me, in a parody of machismo. In “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf represents the three countries in which he grew up with washes of color: gray-blue for France, yellow for Libya, a pinkish red for Syria. Al-hamdu lillah! In 1990, Abdel-Razak and Clémentine separated. By the window stood a pot with three cacti: two short, one long, in the shape of a penis and testicles, a gift from his friend the actor Vincent Lacoste, the star of “Les Beaux Gosses.” Sattouf said he had been reading Chateaubriand but that he mostly reads comic books. Sattouf’s emphasis of his father’s personal racism, sexism, and xenophobia become almost hyperbolic in their presentation. He’s a rich Arab. Although he was fond of Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), Jean Cabut (Cabu), and Georges Wolinski*—legendary figures in the world of French cartooning, all of whom were murdered on January 7th—he did not attend editorial meetings, because he didn’t feel that he could contribute to the often rancorous arguments about French politics. Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. “The Arab of the Future” provides an unflinching portrait of the frustrations and the brutality that sparked the revolts against the regimes in both Libya and Syria—and of the internal conflicts that have darkened their revolutionary horizons. Sattouf’s parents met at the Sorbonne in Paris when they were students. And Sattouf didn’t call the book “The Boy from Ter Maaleh”; he called it “The Arab of the Future.”. subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. Though false, the kidnapping story was curiously apt. “I think Riad believes the world around him is really scary on a daily basis,” Berjeaut said. “I remembered that every woman I knew in the village had a very different odor. “The Arab of the Future” has become that rare thing in France’s polarized intellectual climate: an object of consensual rapture, hailed as a masterpiece in the leading journals of both the left and the right. I’d seen teachers beating their children in school. Sattouf listened quietly to Martin as we strolled along the long nave where most of the museum’s artifacts are exhibited. I knew how things worked there. Clémentine is aghast at the murder, while Abdel-Razak tries to have it both ways: Yes, he says, honor crimes are “terrible,” but in rural Syria becoming pregnant outside marriage “is the worst dishonor that a girl can bring upon her family.” Clémentine pressures Abdel-Razak to report the crime, and the men are imprisoned. Let’s enter! “Netanyahu, Abbas, all the heads of state, French people singing the ‘Marseillaise’: I think Cabu and the others would have been traumatized if they’d seen the demonstration—horrified, really. The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. “I’m a little paranoid,” Sattouf admitted at one point. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. In the living room, there were framed drawings by his favorite cartoonists—Chris Ware, Richard Corben, and Robert Crumb, among others—and a collection of electric guitars. Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. Sexual segregation was rigorously observed. Sattouf’s cartoon was a quiet reminder that there were French citizens—many of them Muslim—who were outraged by the massacre, without being sympathetic to Charlie. She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. Sattouf's recollection of the Arab world might have been vastly different if his feelings for his father weren't so divided. I’ve never drawn Jesus, Buddha, or Moses, either.”, In the first issue of Charlie published after the massacre, Sattouf revived his “Secret Life” strip. If Abdel-Razak were seen by Sattouf as nothing more than a damaged father in Syria, The Arab of the Future would not be nearly so bleak. Nor was he attracted to Charlie’s style of deliberately confrontational satire. Sattouf was born in 1978, in Paris. subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. Mis à jour le 2 février 2015, à 11h50. He has been living in Paris on and off since the sixties, and is a sharp observer of France’s relationship to the Arab world. When Sattouf was seven, a cousin of his, a thirty-five-year-old widow who taught him to draw, was suffocated to death by her father and her brother, who had discovered that she was pregnant. Sattouf has cited Hergé as one of his primary influences, but his sensibility is closer to “South Park” than to “Tintin.”, “The Arab of the Future” immerses the reader in the sensory impressions of childhood, particularly its smells. Riad Sattouf's shockingly blunt The Arab of the Future, which tells the story of the French cartoonist's itinerant childhood in the Middle East, is a must for anyone who wants to understand more about the failure of the pan-Arab dream, with all the consequences … The child of a passive Breton mother, Clémentine, and a goofy, boorish Syrian father, Abdel-Razak, Sattouf shrewdly restricts himself to the point of view of his age throughout. “The Arab of the Future” has, in effect, made him the Arab of the present in France. . With Clémentine transcribing his words and "rendering them intelligible," Abdul-Razak obtains a Ph.D. in history from the Sorbonne. . People in the village, he says, were “beginning to say the Sattoufs were weak” because they had sent to prison “a man who had done nothing but preserve the honor of his family.” We see him turning away from his wife, his hands clasped behind his back. One of Riad Sattouf’s favorite places in Paris is the Musée du Quai Branly, a temple of ethnographic treasures from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, not far from the Eiffel Tower. At family gatherings, the women cooked for the men, and waited to eat whatever morsels were left.

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