No French Presidency is complete without a legacy-defining monument; the Quai Branly, which opened in 2006, was Jacques Chirac’s. 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. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. Although Sattouf’s work is confessional, in person he is guarded; even his closest friends describe him as secretive. subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. . He remembers Sattouf, he told me, as “very timid and introverted, but with a great sense of humor.” He went on, “Riad had a great analysis of people, a feeling for psychology. 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. . There was an old photograph of the Italian actress Valeria Golino, whom he cast in “Les Beaux Gosses,” a hit movie about a provincial high school that he made a few years ago. I’m not a family guy. He picked up a toy gun, a “Blade Runner” prop: “I’m gonna kill someone!”. A couple of years later, after the birth of Sattouf’s brother, Abdel-Razak got a job teaching in Damascus, and moved the family to Ter Maaleh, the village where he’d grown up. Assad had a destiny, and my father thought that he might, too. “If you were a cartoonist associated with Charlie, you were suddenly expected to be an expert on geopolitics. “Riad Sattouf has lots of money because his book is a best-seller. When the Sattouf family visits the ruins of Palmyra, there is no mention of its notorious prison, which was destroyed by the Islamic State last May, because Sattouf’s father never mentioned it, and Sattouf wanted to “convey the ignorance of childhood.” The events that reshaped Syria—the death of Hafez al-Assad, the rise of his son Bashar, the uprising and the civil war—are never even hinted at in the first two volumes, which cover the years 1978-85. The great drama of the book lies less in Riad’s adventures than in his father’s gradual surrender to local traditions. His first works were variations on the theme of male sexual frustration, often his own. Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. 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. My memory of Charlie was of Charb going to demonstrations in factories where people were on strike, and shouting, ‘Down with the bosses!,’ singing the ‘Internationale,’ and making free drawings for the workers. 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 first volume is now being published here; in France, a second volume appeared in May.). “I never took notes, and I always changed the looks of the people I drew,” he told me. By filling them with sperm, Martin explained, the elders were inducting the next generation into leadership. 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. Many note that his bleak and unflattering depiction of a traditional Muslim society comes at a time when the defense of laïcité, the French model of secularism, has increasingly assumed anti-Muslim undertones, and when the far-right National Front was able to beat all other parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections, with nearly twenty-five per cent of the vote. One of those traditions was honor killing. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. He had little affection for the regime, and even less for the Alawite minority that dominated it, but he was desperate to improve his fortunes. A rough draftsman, Sattouf relies on simplification, exaggeration, and other scrappy effects, in the way that a newspaper cartoonist might. “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. “There’s nothing positive in the book—no nostalgia or love,” he said. subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. In “The Arab of the Future,” the visual marker of that destiny is his blond hair, the color of his mother’s. “Ah, putain, it stinks!” Sattouf screamed, running to shut the window. That portrait has made “The Arab of the Future” a very popular book among Arab exiles and expatriates in France. 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. In the second volume of The Arab of the Future, Sattouf introduces us to Abdel-Razak’s niece, Leila, a thirty-five-year-old widow, who takes an interest in little Riad’s art and teaches him one-point perspective and how to turn his sketch of Pompidou into a caricature of Assad. (He is paid in US dollars, with the funds sent to an account in the Channel Islands.) “I’m fascinated by the desire that women have for stronger men—that’s where my sexual frustration came from,” Sattouf told me. I knew how things worked there. It struck me that there was perhaps a compensatory element to his penchant for adolescent sexual humor. “Even my Arab friends who eat the Arabs for breakfast have a certain nostalgia for the sun, the nights on the terrace, the countryside.” He characterized Sattouf as an “arabe de services”—a token Arab. “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. 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 looked riveted and took photographs. 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. Not since “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. He told me that because he did not have stereotypically Arab features he was rarely seen as such. 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. In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor 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. According to Sattouf, it was Bravo who gave him the confidence to begin writing his own stories. In the first book, we see how Sattouf’s recently Sorbonne-educated father Abdel-Razak, mainly out of idealism, accepts a lectureship at the university in Tripoli, turning down an offer from Oxford University in the process. 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. Photograph: Magali Delporte for the Observer New Review. I ordered a vegetable couscous; he ordered a salad. Among French intellectuals, however, particularly those who study the Arab world, Sattouf is a more controversial figure. The question seemed to startle Sattouf. “I had the feeling people were suffering from a lack of freedom, while Europeans were in bars eating tartare de dorade.”. Jean-Pierre Filiu, who has written extensively on Syria, believes that Sattouf’s success is a tribute to a French “empathy for the plight of real-life Arabs, rather than the ‘Arabs of the future’ envisioned by Qaddafi and Assad.” Olivier Roy, a French authority on Islam, told me that Sattouf can’t help being “enlisted” in local battles, simply because he’s one of the few artists of Muslim origin who have achieved fame in France. France is gray-blue; Libya is yellow; Syria, where he spent a decade, is a pinkish red. 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. “I remembered that every woman I knew in the village had a very different odor. Then there was his name. 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. In the second volume of “The Arab of the Future,” little Riad learns of her death while eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents. “I was certain everything was going to collapse,” he told me. 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. When I rescheduled a meeting with a wealthy Algerian businessman, Sattouf said, “Don’t go back to Algeria for the next forty years! Riad Sattouf. 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. . the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . It took hundreds of thousands of deaths, a human disaster, for the French to open their eyes. He’s a rich Arab. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons of the Prophet that had run in a right-wing Danish newspaper. 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. I can’t compete with that.”, “I don’t need to write it down, boss, I’m wearing a wire.”, “Yeah, but good luck getting it peer-reviewed.”. This is something a lot of illustrators have in common.”. A little girl began talking to her mother, and a look of intense concentration came over Sattouf’s face. 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. 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. To enable Verizon Media and our partners to process your personal data select 'I agree', or select 'Manage settings' for more information and to manage your choices. Clémentine and Abdel -Razak, pseudonyms for Riad Sattouf’s parents, meet for the first time, as students in the Paris of 1978. At the same time, you felt a little guilty, as if you’d started a war. For all his rants against Jews, Africans, and, above all, the Shia, he remains strangely endearing, a kind of Arab Archie Bunker. He seemed to have an enormous tableau of the characters in the human comedy.” The son of refugees from Franco’s Spain, Bravo was a kindred spirit; like Sattouf, he had spent his childhood shuttling between France and a rural village under dictatorship, and he knew what it was like to feel permanently out of place. Sattouf brought the same sensibility to his strip for Charlie Hebdo, “The Secret Life of Youth,” which appeared weekly from 2004 until late 2014. “He can leave aside his own sensibility and absorb the sensibility of those around him.” For his first popular hit, “Retour au Collège” (“Back to School”), published in 2005, Sattouf spent two weeks embedded in an upper-class high school in Paris. Usually, Sattouf speaks in a soft, rather delicate voice; he told me that when he makes a reservation at a restaurant he lowers his voice so that he’s not mistaken for a woman. In France, where the … A young, working-class man of North African background, with a shaved head and wearing a parka and sneakers, speaks in thick banlieue slang on his cell phone, often with his back to us. In 1990, Abdel-Razak and Clémentine separated. He said, “What I love about this museum is that you see that in every society gender relations are structured to preserve the power of men, but it’s always achieved in a different way.”, Masculine power and its violent rituals are at the center of Sattouf’s work. But only a few months later the couple pass one of them on the street. 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. When he saw me waiting for him outside the café, he said, “What, you didn’t enter? The only book about the Middle East that I could see was one on Islam by Bernard Lewis. The Jew was “a kind of evil creature for us,” Sattouf told me, though no one had actually seen one. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. His journey from cheerful liberal to quiet authoritarian is the subject of "The Arab of the Future," a graphic memoir by his son, the comic artist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf. Sattouf's recollection of the Arab world might have been vastly different if his feelings for his father weren't so divided. It was still in shrink-wrap. His appearance had insulated him from overt racism in France, his sole experience of which was when, after winning an important comics prize in 2010, he received letters calling him a “dirty Arab.” He said that the very word “Arab” had become highly charged in France; now that the pan-Arabist project is no more, it is purely a racial epithet: “ ‘Arab’ is a word you only hear from racists, as in ‘Ah, those Arabs!’ ” In that sense, the title “The Arab of the Future” has what the sociologist Eric Fassin characterized as “a nostalgic air”: “People in France don’t talk about Arabs; they talk about Muslims.”, In one of our early conversations, Sattouf described his father as having had a “complicated attraction-repulsion relationship to the West.” It often seemed that Sattouf’s relationship to his roots was just as conflicted. “The reality is much less sexy than you think,” he wrote. When Sattouf was two, his father accepted a university job in Libya, where Qaddafi was building his “state of the masses.” Like many Arabs of his generation, Abdel-Razak Sattouf was a fervent believer in the pan-Arab dream. He hoped that the region would overcome the legacy of colonialism and recover its strength under the leadership of charismatic modernizers—secular autocrats like his hero Gamal Abdel Nasser. Sattouf’s parents met at the Sorbonne in Paris when they were students. 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. Al-hamdu lillah! His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, a French scholar of the Arab world, told me that the book’s appeal in France “rests on an unconscious, or partly conscious, racism,” paraphrasing Emmanuel Todd’s thesis about Charlie. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . “Riad is a sponge,” the comic-book artist Jul Berjeaut told me. “This idea of the Arab world is a mirage, really.” Perhaps it is. He stayed there until last year, when he set up a studio at home. When I asked him about these stories in an e-mail, he denied them, joking that his father had “obviously been kidnapped by extraterrestrials one day before meeting my mother but I prefer that you not talk about this in your article.” He went on to say that his brother never returned to Syria; his father barely went to the mosque, much less to Mecca; and there was never a crime against the family. The attackers, brothers of Algerian ancestry who were born in Paris, said that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad for the magazine’s mockery of the Muslim faith. The interior—hushed, ceremonial lighting, earth-tone colors, leather upholstery—suggests the study of a retired colonial administrator, and an aura of tribal kitsch pervades the place. “I was totally disoriented,” he said. Everywhere you looked, the eyes of the President stared down at you from billboards and posters. Nor was he attracted to Charlie’s style of deliberately confrontational satire. 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. Soon after he was born, his father, Abdel-Razak, a devout Pan-Arab nationalist, took his family to Libya and then Syria. She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. He said that his younger brother works as an engineer in Boulogne but that “you will never know anything else about him! 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. © 2021 Condé Nast. . . In one strip, a woman complains that she can no longer wear her miniskirt to work because she’s being hit on by Islamists praying outside her office. He is a short and compact man, with wire-rimmed glasses, a closely trimmed beard, and somewhat stubby arms that make him look like a cartoon character. With a young child and a newly minted doctorate in history, Abdel-Razak — whose stated aspiration for his son, to become “the Arab of the future,” lends Sattouf’s autobiographical series its … It had nothing to do with the journal or the people I knew there, who detested nationalism.”. Its subtitle is A Youth in the Middle East. . 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. . Little Riad uses his nose to navigate his worlds, Arab and French, and to find his place in them. 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. After coffee, we walked over to Sattouf’s apartment so that I could see his studio. Clémentine was fired from her job reading the news in French on Libyan radio: she could not contain her laughter while quoting Qaddafi’s threat to invade the United States and assassinate President Reagan. These washes—“colors of emotion,” Sattouf calls them—create a powerfully claustrophobic effect, as if each country were its own sealed-off environment. “I’m not surprised they’re calling it an Orientalist book, but it’s a false debate,” he said. 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. Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! For a decade, Sattouf was the only cartoonist of Middle Eastern extraction at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where he drew an acid series on Parisian street life, “The Secret Life of Youth.” He left just a few months before two jihadists stormed the offices and shot dead twelve people, including nine of his former colleagues. But wherever you turn in Sattouf’s Syria, you see the father’s values magnified and put into action. Sattouf was born in 1978, in Paris. “She told a story of dictatorship and revolution, and suddenly she was expected to be an activist.”, I mentioned the controversy to Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian writer and diplomat, who is now Palestine’s ambassador to UNESCO. . In 1984, the family moves to Syria and joins the Sattouf family cradle, a … 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. . After getting his baccalauréat, he studied applied art in Nantes, and then made his way to Paris to study animation at the Gobelins School of the Image. When I asked for the real names of his parents, he pretended to spot an attractive woman at another table: “Look at those titties!” He told me that his father died in Syria sometime in the first years of this century, but would not give a date. They met in Paris when Abdel was working on his thesis at La Sorbonne. often disquieting, but always honest * 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. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. “I’m a little paranoid,” Sattouf admitted at one point. “If you grow up in a dictatorship like Syria, you want to control everything, because you’re afraid that if you don’t, and you say one wrong word, you could end up in jail.” But I sensed that there were other motives at work. 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. 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.”. As a teen-ager in Brittany, Sattouf spent almost all of his time in his room, drawing and reading comic books. “No, I’m an énarque,” he said, as if that explained everything. They met in Paris when Abdel was working on his thesis at La Sorbonne. . And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. He turned out to be the source for at least some of them. I hate muscular people. He was completely fascinated by power.”. A French-Lebanese friend of mine, the screenwriter Joëlle Touma, attributed this to his childhood in Syria. One of these young people was a Syrian scholarship student named Abdel-Razak Sattouf, a firm believer in Pan-Arabism and its promise of a unified, prosperous region. At family gatherings, the women cooked for the men, and waited to eat whatever morsels were left. When we paid the bill, I complimented Daoud on her harissa, and Sattouf asked her when she left Tunisia. He identifies his relatives by their smell: the sweat of his Syrian grandmother, which he prefers to the perfume of his French grandmother; the “sour smell” of his maternal grandfather. I should go to the gym, but I’m too lazy!”. Almost all of Sattouf’s work is drawn from firsthand observation. Even Sattouf’s father is not exempt from his sharp-edged satire. One of these young people was a Syrian scholarship student named Abdel-Razak Sattouf, a firm believer in Pan-Arabism and its promise of a unified, prosperous region. In the first book, we see how Sattouf’s recently Sorbonne-educated father Abdel-Razak, mainly out of idealism, accepts a lectureship at the university in Tripoli, turning down an offer from Oxford University in the process. “Those experiences gave me an immense affection for Jews and gays,” he said. Tell me about you, Adam. Though false, the kidnapping story was curiously apt. 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. One morning in mid-July, Sattouf, a French-Syrian comic-book artist who has recently emerged as France’s best-known graphic novelist, took me there, along with his year-old son, his son’s Ivorian nanny, and her three small daughters. Riad was born in 1978. 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. Through Bravo, Sattouf befriended other cartoonists, and joined a studio of young artists who aimed to write comic books for a more sophisticated literary readership. And then you will have great success. In a lacerating critique for the Web site Orient XXI, published two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Laurent Bonnefoy, a young Middle East scholar, argued that Sattouf’s book had seduced French readers by pandering to Orientalist prejudices: “The Arab is dirty . They were both students: Clémentine from Brittany, and Abdel-Razak, on scholarship, from a village in Syria. . Little Riad, its apparently guileless narrator, is a Candide figure, who can’t help noticing the rot around him, even as the adults invoke the glories of Arab socialism. Riad Sattouf photographed in Paris for the Observer last week. France 24 Very funny and very sad. Birds too small to eat are shot to smithereens. often disquieting, but always honest. 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. Whenever he felt cornered by my questions, which was often, he would cross his arms and glare at me, in a parody of machismo. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. “It left me uneasy,” he said. And as Abdel-Razak returns again to the same fantastical dreams he pursued in previous books, we see him become more and more unhinged, until ultimately he crosses the line from idealism to fanaticism, leading to a dramatic breaking point. 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. 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. 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. The effect of this omission is one of time travel, back to the vanished future of pan-Arabism. Explorateur inlassable des mondes de l’enfance, le dessinateur à succès Riad Sattouf se penche sur la sienne – sans faux-semblants.

Exemple De Dossier Bp Boulanger, Le Songe Du Bellay Analyse, Lieux Abandonnés Perpignan, Refaire Porte Intérieur, Me Me Me Streaming, Mosquée Du Prophète Ibrahim, Micro Onde 12v Pour Camping-car, Editions Du Seuil, Tf1 Replay Telefilm De L'apres Midi, San Andreas Netflix,