I recently finished reading the sixth and last volume of Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir, “the Arab of the Future” (l’Arabe du Futur).
Unfortunately the books have only been translated into English up to the fourth volume, and my French is not good enough to read the originals, so I ended up reading Spanish translations of the last two volumes.
The series is a fascinating, and somewhat disturbing, recounting of the author’s life from his childhood until his early thirties. Riad Sattouf was born in France in 1978 to a Syrian father and a French mother. His parents met while his father, Abdel-Razak, was getting a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne. His mother, Clementine, fell for this charming young student from foreign shores and ended up following him back to the Middle East.
Like many Arabs of his generation, as a young man Riad’s father believed in Pan-Arabism’s promise to create a new, modern Arab world. Before Riad is born, we see him say to Clementine, with a touch of megalomania: “I would change everything in the Arab world. I’d make them stop being such bigots, get educated and join the modern world… I’d be a good president”. He wants to go back to the Middle East, where his son will go to school in this brave new world and become an “Arab of the future”.
After getting his doctorate in Paris, Abdel-Razak takes up a job in a university in Libya, and Clementine joins him. At this point, Riad is a very young child. His father is an admirer of Gaddafi, who he calls “a great Arab president”. When they arrive, he proudly says “look at this airport, built by Arabs!” But the reality of the People’s State of Libya turns out to be quite grim.
The family is assigned an apartment without a key or a lock on the door, because Gaddafi has abolished private property, and apparently banned locks on doors. One day they come back to find a local family has taken over their house. Riad’s father threatens to go to the police, but it turns out the man who took his house is himself a policeman, and all they can do is find themselves another apartment.
After a while Riad’s father finds a new job in Syria, in a university in the city of Homs. The family move to Syria and settle in his native village, Ter Maleh, which is next to Homs. Riad now has a younger brother, Yahyia. His mother quickly starts to feel things have gone from bad to worse.
Ter Maleh turns out to be a miserable place, impoverished and lacking in amenities, and the local people come across as poorly educated and superstitious. The conditions in their apartment are pretty dismal, and there are constant black outs. Clementine speaks no Arabic, and is completely isolated.
Riad spends years of his childhood in this village, albeit interspersed with frequent trips to his mother’s native Brittany. The first three books of the series mostly take place in Ter Maleh. Reading his description of life in rural Syria, seen from the point of view of a half-French child who will clearly never be quite at home there, is fascinating. It is also relentlessly grim and troubling.
The local primary school, which Riad attends, has no toilets. The children relieve themselves in the open outside the school. Lessons are filled with propaganda praising the ruling Baath Party and president Assad, and physical punishments and beatings are routine. Children who commit serious transgressions are tied to a chair and caned on the soles of their feet, in front of the entire school. Riad himself is condemned to suffer this treatment on one occasion, after he skips class because a teacher is late, but his father bribes the principal into dropping the punishment.
The population of Ter Maleh is mostly Sunni Muslim and very pious. Attitudes towards other religions are, let’s just say, not enlightened. Expectations of men and women are highly unequal. Local women wear veils and walk the streets behind their husbands, rather than at their side.
In one harrowing incident at the end of book 2, a local aunt of Riad’s is killed by her own relatives after getting pregnant outside of marriage, in one of the “honour killings” that are unfortunately still a reality in this part of the world. The two men who commit the murder are initially reported to the police by their family, and sent to jail.
Soon people in the village start muttering that the Sattouf family sent two men to prison just for maintaining their honour, “as tradition demands”. In the end the family feels forced to arrange for their crime to be commuted to a “crime of honour”, which is considered to be less serious, and the two murderers are released after just three months, and on top of that become highly respected in their community.
As for Riad’s father, after returning home he quickly falls back in line with the attitudes of his family and community. As a student in France he eats pork and claims to be secular, but back in Syria he becomes more and more religious, even starting to fast for Ramadan. He also turns out to be quite bigoted about other communities. At one point, after visiting the store of a Christian shopkeeper in Homs, he comments that “being Christian in a Muslim country is just a provocation”.
Syria as a whole, and not just the village where Riad lives, is portrayed in a pretty dismal light. The country is full of filth, corruption and repression. The family often goes on shopping trips to Homs, which is far bigger and more sophisticated than Ter Maleh, but fundamentally still unpleasant and backward. On a holiday to Lebanon they are delighted to find a modern supermarket, something that doesn’t exist in Syria.
In one scene from the first book, when Riad is still very young, he is walking through Homs with his parents when they come across the sight of two freshly executed men, their bodies still hanging from ropes in a public square. Abdel-Razak tries to cover his son’s head with a bucket so he won’t see the horrible scene, but at the same time he tries to justify it to his appalled wife: “It’s horrible, but it’s necessary. This way people stay peaceful and law-abiding. You have to frighten them."
This might be the only scene where we really witness anything akin to government brutality. We see everything through the young Riad’s childish eyes, and to him the political context means little. Even though he notices the billboards with Assad’s face all over the place, it is the local society and attitudes that he finds directly oppressive, not the government. The regime’s presence in Ter Maleh isn’t particularly overt.
And yet Sattouf’s memoir offers a fascinating glimpse into the tensions that continued to exist below the surface, and grabbed the world’s attention decades later during the horrible Syrian civil war. One day Riad’s father tells him that President Assad, while strong and clever, is not really a true Muslim because he is an Alawite. What’s more, he gives all the important jobs to Alawites like himself (see the panel below).
This the sort of thing people in Syria would only talk about in private, but everyone knew: the Assad family come from the Alawite community, one of Syria’s ethno-religious minorities. The Alawite religion originally arose out of Islam, but it is so far removed from orthodox Muslim practice that its followers were long considered disbelievers and sometimes persecuted for it.
The Baath Party, which has run Syria continuously since 1963, officially subscribes to a socialist Arab nationalism that is supposed to rise above religious differences. And yet, just like in Iraq and elsewhere, this ideology was never able to overcome religious and ethnic sectarianism. After Assad came to power, jobs in government, and particularly in the all-important security services, were filled with Alawites. Until today, the Assad family’s own community is seen as intrinsically loyal in a way that other communities are not.
During the civil war that broke out in 2011, the population divided along sectarian lines. Sunni Muslim areas were more likely to rise up against the regime, while religious minorities, like the Alawites, Druze and Christians, were more likely to support Assad, out of fear of a Muslim fundamentalist regime replacing him. Ter Maleh, where the Arab of the Future is set, was one of the many town in Syria to rise up against Assad in 2011, after which the Syrian army cut off access to the town and fired on it with tanks, wounding scores of people.
But Sattouf’s graphic novel is set decades before these events, and the broader political context means little to him as a child. The impression we get is that most people accept Baath Party rule as a fact of life, neither adoring nor despising the regime. Riad’s father, whatever he may think of Assad being an Alawite, is quite happy to suck up to anyone close to the regime, in the hope of improving his own social status.
Another thing about the political context that stands out in Sattouf’s memoir is the casual antisemitism engendered by Syria’s conflicts with Israel. No one has met a Jew in real life, but everyone knows the “Jews” are the enemy. When Riad first arrives in Ter Maleh he is bullied by local children who accuse him of being Jewish because he has blonde hair and his mother is a foreigner. Yahud (“Jew”) is the first Arabic word he learns.
There is no hint of the distinction between Jews and Zionists that is often made in propaganda for Western consumption. The antisemitism is visceral and unsubtle. One day, Riad asks his father what a Jew is, and Abdel-Razak replies “the Jews are our enemies. They’re occupying Palestine. They’re the worst race in the world. Well, them and the Americans, of course, who are their biggest pals”. Clementine overhears and asks him “why are you telling him that? It’s total crap”, to which he responds by mocking her for liking Enrico Macias (a French Jewish singer). Later on he rants about the Jews controlling France.
The regime’s propaganda teaches children to hate Israelis from a young age, probably also as a way to unite this disparate country against a common enemy. Riad and his local friends play with toy soldiers that either depict Syrians in bold, heroic postures, or Israelis with evil, reptilian features shown in treacherous poses, for instance holding a white flag of surrender in one hand, and a dagger behind their back in the other.
Throughout the series, Sattouf is relentless in portraying his father in an extremely poor light. Abdel-Razak is shown to be a man obsessed with achieving respect and wealth, which however always elude him. He is full of bluster and loud-mouthed, but also chronically insecure. In spite of being a university professor who has studied abroad, somehow he never gains the respect he craves. He panders to those with a bit more power and money, who however never really take him seriously.
Abdel-Razak is not only a bigot, but also a hypocrite. He talks admiringly of Syria’s militarism (and later of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait), but it turns out that as a young man he left Syria partly to avoid military service. This comes back to haunt him, as for years he is given trouble every time he enters the country, and at one point he even receives a visit from the police, until he finally finds someone well-connected enough to make the problem go away.
All in all, Riad’s father comes across as being so awful that you really wonder how he could have attracted Clementine to begin with, let alone convinced her to stay in his village in Syria for all those years. One suspects that the man was perhaps more charming than he is made out to be, especially in his younger years, which Riad cannot himself remember. This is, after all, the author’s point of view, and it is clear he does not have a fond memory of his father (who passed away well before these books were written).
Over the course of the series, Abdel-Razak’s attitudes and behaviour deteriorate further and further, from his wife’s perspective. At one point he gets a teaching job in Saudi Arabia, but Clementine flatly refuses to follow him. Instead she takes the children back to France, while he goes to work there alone, although they still spend their holidays together in Syria or in France.
While in Saudi Arabia, Abdel-Razak becomes more and more religious, especially after going on the Hadj pilgrimage to Mecca. Apparently, his religiosity manages to finally earn him some of the respect he craves; in one telling scene after he has returned to Ter Maleh from Saudi Arabia, Abdel-Razak goes for a walk through the village, with Riad in tow.
As he walks, he bumps into some local men he has know since childhood, sitting on a carpet and sipping tea in traditional dishdashas. They call him Hadji (an honorific for someone who has done the Hadj) and offer him tea. As Riad recalls, these men used to have a lukewarm attitude towards his father, but they now listen to him speak with admiration, look in awe at a photo of him doing the Hadj and then follow him in prayer, while Riad watches.
Clementine, on the other hand, has finally had enough of her husband’s behaviour. When Abdel-Razak goes to France to see his family, his overbearing manner and constant rants have become impossible to put up with. When they go back to Syria, he starts demanding her obedience and takes down a picture by Degas that she has hung up in their flat, because the women are “half-naked”.
The final straw comes when two of Riad’s local cousins, whose family are entangled in a financial dispute with his, throw a rock through their window which almost hits Clementine on the head. They have decided that Riad and his mother are Jews, and have gone telling everyone that Riad is Jewish and has returned from Israel, which earns him even more bullying.
Clementine decides she is through with both Syria and Abdel-Razak, a decision that seems long overdue to the reader. She goes back to France and wants nothing to do with him anymore. In return he goes to France and kidnaps their youngest child, Fadi, taking him back to Syria. Unable to go to Syria alone and find Fadi, she is forced to give up on him. Riad and Yahyia remain in France with their mother.
The last two books of the series take place entirely in France, during Riad’s adolescence and early adulthood. I found them less interesting than the earlier books, but still quite readable. Riad’s experience navigating two very different worlds have clearly turned this sensitive boy into a permanent outsider, and a wry observer of human folly. While he clearly likes France much better than Syria, he still tends to focus on what is dysfunctional and troubling. And France also doesn’t lack dysfunction.
For one thing, the streets of French cities seem to suffer from some frankly shocking amounts of violence and fighting, and the thin and nerdy Riad is often victimised by bullies. Some of the violence (though not all of it, by any means) is started by gangs of Arab youths from North African families. There is prejudice against Arabs in France, but Riad doesn’t have to suffer from it: quite simply, when he tells his classmates in high school that he is an Arab, no one believes him. He looks too white and generally doesn’t fit the stereotype. As a friend tells him quite confidently, “you’re a French kid with an Arab name, you’re not a real Arab”.
Unsurprisingly the Arab of the Future has been controversial in France, with many troubled by its terrible portrayal of Syria (and, in the first volume, Libya). Some have accused Sattouf of pandering to the worst Western misconceptions about Arabs.
It is true that Sattouf finds very little that’s redeeming about Syria. Even the local children in Ter Maleh are drawn with brutish and ugly features. The series does show a few of the Syrians he meets in a better light, including a nice teacher at his school, a kind female relative and an overworked but honest local doctor who refuses to take any payment from Riad’s father. Still, there is no doubt that the Syria of Sattouf’s memoir is not a place most of us would want to live in.
But these are clearly the genuine memories of a child, who went there when he was far too young to have any preconceptions. Quite simply, he is being brutally honest about what he recalls. The way the local children looked was probably the result of them growing up in an environment of illiteracy, poverty, and poor sanitation.
Of course Syria is more than just one village, and if he’d spent time in a Kurdish area, or in a major city like Damascus, his recollections would be quite different. It is also clear that his time in Ter Maleh was marked by the fact that, in spite of his local father and surname, he was basically an outsider and treated as such. His perspective on the place is an outsider’s one; this is not how an ordinary local would remember growing up there.
But then, it is the reader’s responsibility to not reach sweeping conclusions about Syria or the wider Arab world based on one graphic novel and one person’s memories alone. Riad Sattouf’s job as an author is to share his story and what it has to say. He has done a great job of it.
terura rakonto