On Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir The Arab of the Future.

By Binita Mehta 

 In an interview on the French TV channel BFMTV on 11th December 2024, a few days after the rebels overthrew the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship following 13 years of civil war in Syria, the FrenchSyrian graphic artist Riad Sattouf was hopeful but still unsure about that country’s path to democracy. His six-volume French graphic memoir, L’Arabe du Futur or The Arab of the Future (2014-2022; translated into English by Sam Taylor), the subject of this essay, covers the years between 1978 and 2011, and tells the story of his childhood and adolescence divided between Syria and France. Volume one of the series won the prize for best album at the 2015 Festival International de la Bande Déssinée d’Angoulême (International Comic Book Festival) held annually in the city of Angoulême in southwest France. Sattouf has written single-album comic books as well as comic book series. His series, Les Cahiers d’Esther (first published in 2021), translated into English as Esther’s Notebooks, is popular and he recently released volume one of Moi, Fadi: Le frère vole (2024) (I, Fadi: The Stolen Brother), about his baby brother who was kidnapped by his father and taken to Syria.

Known as the ninth art, the Franco-Belgian comic book, or bande dessinée, popularly known as BD, traces its beginnings to the 19th century. Comics books are a cultural institution in France and some artists have been exhibited at the Louvre. Unlike the US where usually only specialty bookstores sell comic books, in France, there is a large section devoted to these in most bookstores. Well-known works in the genre include the Tintin series created in 1929 by the Belgian cartoonist George Prosper Remi who wrote under the pseudonym Hergé and Les Schtroumpfs (The Smurfs), created in 1958 by Pierre Culliford, also known as Peyo. Other classics include Bécassine (1905) by Émile-Joseph-Porphyre Pinchon and Jacqueline Rivière,  Lucky Luke  (1946) by Morris and the 1959 Astérix series by French cartoonist René Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo. More recently, comic books such as Aya de Yopougon (Aya of Yop City) by French-Ivorian writer Marguerite Abouet and illustrator Clément Oubrerie, and French-Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, among others, have garnered attention by giving voice to the “other”. Sattouf’s bicultural heritage too plays a crucial role in The Arab of the Future: how he views the world, his family, his friends and how he is perceived by others.

In The Arab of the Future, Sattouf follows his father Abdel-Razak, a university professor in Syria, as he moves his family—which includes his French-Breton wife Clémentine and his two sons Riad and Yahya—first to Libya and then to the family village of Ter Maaleh in Syria. The author/narrator’s story is closely linked to his father’s, not dissimilar to other graphic memoirs such as Art Speigelman’s Maus (1986) and Maus II (1992) and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2007).

In the earlier volumes of his series, Sattouf critically analyses patriarchy in family and state systems in Libya and Syria in addition to the customs and mores in his father’s extended family. In the later volumes, his narrative deals with his life in France and his own growth as a graphic artist. The child narrator converses with his family and friends through speech bubbles, while the adult narrator expresses his thoughts and feelings in the captions of the panels.

Sattouf’s figures are drawn in black and white, taking on the colour he uses for the countries in which the family has lived—yellow for Libya, grey/blue for France and pinkish/red for Syria. He also finds other intriguing uses of colour as a plot device, using bright red when recounting a story within a story, a dream sequence or a story that serves as an allegory of sorts. The memoir unfolds against the backdrop of France’s complex relationship with Syria. While France did not colonise Syria, the French mandate of Syria and Lebanon, imposed by the League of Nations after World War I, gave France some control over the region.

In volume one, Sattouf uses striking visuals to recreate Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Hafez alAssad’s Syria, with large posters of the two dictators visible in the airports in Tripoli and Damascus respectively. According to Gaddafi’s Libyan brand of socialism, described in The Green Book from which Sattouf’s father often reads aloud, there is no private property and houses have no locks on their doors. This creates some poignant yet amusing scenes. As Sattouf’s family return to their home in Tripoli after exploring the city, they find that other occupants have moved in. Sattouf also shows dilapidated homes, littered streets and empty supermarket shelves in both countries. He observes the impact of a struggling economy on his long-suffering mother and how food shortages and lack of material comforts under autocratic regimes drive his parents apart.

Sattouf parallels the paternalism of his father with the politics of the Middle East dictators he so admires. Abdel-Razak, as described and drawn by Sattouf, is a complex man full of contradictions. He is torn between the Syrian customs and Islamic rituals that he grew up with and the personal freedoms the West offers him. Early on, we learn that Abdel-Razak, a staunch pan-Arabist who admired Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, once strongly believed that the educated Arab would bring the region out of religious obscurantism. Addressing the young Sattouf, he states emphatically, echoing the memoir’s title: L’Arabe du Futur Va à L’école” [The Arab of the Future Goes to School] However, we notice a shift in Sattouf’s once secular father. When teaching in Saudi Arabia, Abdel-Razak takes a transformative pilgrimage to Mecca which intensifies his Islamic beliefs. He allows his devout mother to persuade him to have his children circumcised. The circumcision scene is extremely graphic. Young Sattouf suffers the pain, while his father hides in fear, unable to be at his son’s side. Sattouf illustrates him as a cowardly figure who does not have the courage of his own convictions.

Sattouf himself attracts attention in Libya and Syria because of his blond hair. His Syrian cousins and classmates pejoratively call him a Jew, highlighting the fraught relationship between the Arab world and the Jews. His teachers practise corporal punishment and political propaganda is part of the school curriculum. As the family unit falls apart, Clémentine returns to France with the children. Although Abdel-Razak visits them in Brittany where Clémentine finds work, their relationship deteriorates further. As his parents’ marriage ends, so does Sattouf’s connection to his father and, by extension, to Syria.

For Sattouf, his time in France is a period of respite from his life in the Middle East. As he grows older, France is also the place where Sattouf faces discrimination because of his Franco-Syrian heritage. His middle school classmates mock him and as do the Maghrebi French residents of the housing project in which he lives in Rennes. His French teachers and family admire his talent though his Syrian elementary school teacher paid no attention to his artistic endeavours; his father would rather his son study something more ‘serious’ like medicine. He too has little faith in his own skills as a graphic artist. This changes as he matures as an artist, influenced by his reading of Tintin in the original French.

Encouraged in high school to study art, Sattouf is disappointed in the school’s focus on conceptual art and not on the art of drawing comics. During this time, his knowledge of comic books expands thanks to a classmate whose father is an illustrator. She introduces him to the work of French graphic artists and soon, Moebius’s Arzach, Philippe Druillet’s La Nuit, Enki Bilal’s La Foire aux Immortels begin to influence his work. In The Arab of the Future, Sattouf has collaborated with other comic book artists— Joann Sfar, Mathieu Sapin and Christophe Blain.

Although The Arab of the Future has had commercial success in France and around the world—it has been translated into 23 languages—several critics have condemned Sattouf’s negative portrayal of the Middle East suggesting that it feeds into anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe. Others have defended Sattouf’s memoir suggesting that it offers merely one non-activist view of the Middle East and that he accurately describes life in Libya and Syria of the 1970s and 1980s. Both critiques and counter-critiques make valid points. Sattouf’s graphic memoir can be read as a coming-of-age narrative that includes a complex relationship between father and son in difficult surroundings. It can also be read as a condemnation of dictatorial regimes in Libya and Syria. By not explicitly providing the causality between the social breakdown and the political and economic situation in Libya and Syria during this period, Sattouf forces the reader to fill in the gaps, urging them to learn and read more widely about the Middle East. The narrative content of The Arab of the Future is timely and relevant, even more so today, after the fall of the Alawite minority regime that had ruled Syria since 1970. In a January 2025 interview for The New York Times, Sattouf insists that his view of Syria as expressed in The Arab of the Future is a personal one. His approach to Syria is not that of an expert, but a way to tell his own story through text and image from the vantage point of a child. 

Binita Mehta is professor emerita of French language, literature and culture at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, USA. She has published widely, most recently on French-language graphic novels. Mehta is often invited to panel discussions and juries for Francophone and South Asian film festivals.

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of ON Stage.