One early night in December, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled his nation as insurgent forces superior on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of many nation’s most-watched TV information channels turned to a cartoonist for professional opinion on the information.
“Did you suppose that this might have occurred so quickly?” a information anchor for the channel, BFMTV, requested the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a large video wall.
Over the previous decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has change into one among France’s greatest literary stars, thanks largely to his masterwork, “The Arab of the Future,” a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the collection tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was jarringly divided between the Center East and France, and the disintegration of the wedding between his French mom and his Syrian father.
The books — in a style generally known as “bandes dessinées” in France — have bought greater than three million copies and have been translated into some 23 languages. Although informed from a baby’s perspective and drawn in a deceptively easy fashion, they contact on a number of the thorniest questions concerning the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They’re additionally suffused with a delicate however withering social satire.
For Mr. Sattouf, this posture informs not solely his artwork, however the way in which he interprets the world. In his TV look in December, he informed viewers that the autumn of Mr. al-Assad was a second of “immense hope” for Syria. However when requested to foretell what would possibly occur subsequent, he warned that he tended to see issues “extraordinarily pessimistically.”
“I maintain my fingers crossed,” he stated, “{that a} horrible dictatorship received’t get replaced by one other dictatorship.”
Mr. Sattouf, who was born in France, grew up enamored with the brutally trustworthy and infrequently offensive work of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. His work additionally follows within the custom of comics that provide readers an intimate view of characters dwelling by way of pivotal historic moments, together with Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.”
For years, Mr. Sattouf wrote a cartoon strip for Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical journal. He stopped contributing a number of months earlier than January 2015, when the journal’s places of work have been focused in a lethal terrorist assault over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf didn’t draw the cartoons of Muhammad; his strip had been centered on amusing, and typically miserable, scenes of each day life he encountered on the streets and metro in Paris.
In “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf paints a fancy portrait of his father, who made his approach from a small rural village in Syria to Sorbonne College in Paris, the place he acquired a doctorate in historical past and met the girl who would change into Mr. Sattouf’s mom. The cartoonist additionally portrays his father as sliding, over time, right into a state of everlasting bitterness towards the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen.
Among the most arresting pages within the collection depict Mr. Sattouf’s expertise as a baby in Ter Maaleh, his father’s village. He moved there within the Eighties, whereas he was in grade faculty, and lived there through the dictatorial reign of Mr. al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.
Mr. Sattouf’s reminiscences of Ter Maaleh are vivid and coruscating. The French journalist Stéphane Jarno just lately described the depictions of the city as “a number of buildings surrounded by vacancy, a micro-society steeped in blind piety and energy struggles, with apparently little love however a number of violence.”
This willingness to tug no punches about his expertise in Syria places Mr. Sattouf in a unfastened however necessary class of French public figures with roots within the Arab world who’re unafraid to criticize it. It may be a fraught place.
The Algerian creator Kamel Daoud, who at the moment lives in France, just lately received the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for a novel that addressed the advanced historical past of the Algerian civil struggle. Previously, Mr. Daoud, who has brazenly mentioned delicate non secular points, was the topic of a death threat from an Algerian imam. Extra just lately, Mr. Daoud has complained that he has been castigated by parts of the French left for “not being the great Arab, who’s within the everlasting state of de-colonial victimhood.”
Someway, Mr. Sattouf has largely prevented that destiny. He has been a essential darling of the French information media since at the least the mid 2000s, when, as a younger man, he was publishing what he known as “sexual and provocatively humorous” comics. On the identical time, he stated in a current interview, he had by no means confronted a backlash from Islamist teams.
“By no means,” he stated, smiling. “As a result of my comics are so good.”
The road was delivered with a joking-not-joking kind of flourish.
Mr. Sattouf met for the interview in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, late final month. He comes throughout as each impish and serious-minded, with a quiet voice that toggled within the interview between French and a workable English that he stated he had realized from bingeing “Seinfeld.”
He insisted, as he has within the many interviews he has given for the reason that flight of Mr. al-Assad, that he’s not a Center East professional. “It’s very difficult to me,” he stated. “My books are about Syria, however in my books I inform tales of my household. I inform my reminiscence, my viewpoint as a baby.”
The books describe a childhood of wrenching change, with a love of drawing and cartooning as a refuge and a relentless.
When he was 12, he left Ter Maaleh, shifting again to Brittany together with his two youthful brothers and his mom as his dad and mom’ marriage had begun to fray. He has not been again to Syria since.
In France, he stated, he discovered a freedom of expression essential to his craft. He additionally watched with concern as some French leaders appeared to embrace Mr. al-Assad. He made particular notice of the 2008 choice of Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president, to invite Mr. al-Assad to Paris for Bastille Day festivities.
As revelations of the Syrian regime’s atrocities have come to mild, Mr. Sattouf stated that he felt a way of vindication.
“We see that the story I used to be telling in my books was nearer to the truth than what you would see within the media,” he stated.
Mohamed-Nour Hayed, 22, a Franco-Syrian activist and author who was granted asylum in France amid the civil war in Syria, recollects first studying “The Arab of the Future” at age 15. He stated he was involved that Mr. Sattouf’s adverse depiction of Syria may reinforce stereotypes amongst readers who see solely an outline of “a really closed-minded Syria.”
However Mr. Hayed additionally praised the collection and stated that it had influenced him as he wrote his personal first novel, which is about through the struggle. Like “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Hayed stated, it’s written from the attitude of a kid.
Along with writing “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf has directed two characteristic movies. “Les Beaux Gosses,” or “The French Kissers,” a coming-of-age comedy, received a César award for greatest first movie. Late final 12 months, he launched the primary quantity of “I, Fadi, the Stolen Brother” a by-product collection to “The Arab of the Future,” based mostly on interviews together with his youngest brother, who, Mr. Sattouf stated, was taken from France to Syria by his father when his brother was a baby. Mr. Sattouf, within the interview, described it as kidnapping.
When requested to fill in precisely what occurred to his brother afterward, Mr. Sattouf declined, saying he didn’t wish to give away the remainder of the story, to be printed in later volumes.
The primary 4 volumes of the “Arab” collection have been translated into English; Fantagraphics, a U.S.-based comics writer, is planning to publish variations of the ultimate volumes, in addition to the brand new collection. Many French bookstores at the moment characteristic huge cardboard shows displaying off Mr. Sattouf’s books, together with {a photograph} of his face. Exterior the Rennes prepare station just lately, a middle-aged man acknowledged Mr. Sattouf and ran as much as shake his hand.
And the French media proceed to show to him for perception into the autumn of the Assad regime.
Mr. Sattouf informed the regional newspaper Ouest-France that organizing democratic elections “in a rustic fractured by 13 years of civil struggle required immense political will, but additionally worldwide assist.”
He informed the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that dwelling beneath Assad rule in Syria had imbued him with “a sure paranoia, let’s say, a mistrust which has change into a part of my persona.”
He additionally spoke to the newspaper La Croix about going again to Syria someday.
“However this may solely occur in a peaceable and democratic Syria,” he stated. “For now, it’s nonetheless a distant and fanciful prospect.”
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