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 in all France’s greatest literary stars, thanks largely to his masterwork, “The Arab of the Future,” a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the sequence 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 often called “bandes dessinées” in France — have bought greater than three million copies and have been translated into some 23 languages. Although instructed from a toddler’s perspective and drawn in a deceptively easy type, they contact on a few of the thorniest questions concerning the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They’re additionally suffused with a refined however withering social satire.
For Mr. Sattouf, this posture informs not solely his artwork, however the best way he interprets the world. In his TV look in December, he instructed viewers that the autumn of Mr. al-Assad was a second of “immense hope” for Syria. However when requested to foretell what may occur subsequent, he warned that he tended to see issues “extraordinarily pessimistically.”
“I hold 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 sometimes 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 residing by 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 just a few months earlier than January 2015, when the journal’s workplaces had 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 every 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 method 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, through the years, right into a state of everlasting bitterness towards the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen.
A few of the most arresting pages within the sequence depict Mr. Sattouf’s expertise as a toddler in Ter Maaleh, his father’s village. He moved there within the Eighties, whereas he was in grade faculty, and lived there throughout the dictatorial reign of Mr. al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.
Mr. Sattouf’s recollections of Ter Maaleh are vivid and coruscating. The French journalist Stéphane Jarno lately described the depictions of the city as “just a few buildings surrounded by vacancy, a micro-society steeped in blind piety and energy struggles, with apparently little love however loads of violence.”
This willingness to tug no punches about his expertise in Syria places Mr. Sattouf in a unfastened however vital 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 writer Kamel Daoud, who at the moment lives in France, lately received the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for a novel that addressed the advanced historical past of the Algerian civil warfare. Prior to now, Mr. Daoud, who has brazenly mentioned delicate spiritual points, was the topic of a death threat from an Algerian imam. Extra lately, Mr. Daoud has complained that he has been castigated by components of the French left for “not being the nice Arab, who’s within the everlasting state of de-colonial victimhood.”
Someway, Mr. Sattouf has largely prevented that destiny. He has been a important darling of the French information media since at the least the mid 2000s, when, as a younger man, he was publishing what he referred to as “sexual and provocatively humorous” comics. On the similar 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 discovered from bingeing “Seinfeld.”
He insisted, as he has within the many interviews he has given because the flight of Mr. al-Assad, that he’s not a Center East professional. “It’s very sophisticated 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 toddler.”
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, transferring 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 be aware 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 could possibly 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, remembers first studying “The Arab of the Future” at age 15. He stated he was involved that Mr. Sattouf’s unfavorable depiction of Syria might reinforce stereotypes amongst readers who see solely an outline of “a really closed-minded Syria.”
However Mr. Hayed additionally praised the sequence and stated that it had influenced him as he wrote his personal first novel, which is about throughout the warfare. Like “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Hayed stated, it’s written from the angle 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 sequence to “The Arab of the Future,” primarily based 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 toddler. 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” sequence 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 sequence. Many French bookstores at the moment characteristic huge cardboard shows exhibiting off Mr. Sattouf’s books, together with {a photograph} of his face. Exterior the Rennes practice station 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 instructed the regional newspaper Ouest-France that organizing democratic elections “in a rustic fractured by 13 years of civil warfare required immense political will, but in addition worldwide assist.”
He instructed the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that residing below 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 at some point.
“However this will solely occur in a peaceable and democratic Syria,” he stated. “For now, it’s nonetheless a distant and fanciful prospect.”
