end point for The Arab of the future. Riad Sattouf’s great autobiographical saga ends this Thursday with the publication of a particularly moving sixth and final volume. The cartoonist devotes himself to it like never before, setting aside for once his ironic gaze and detached from the world to invite his readers to immerse themselves in his intimacy, from his psychiatric sessions to his complex relationship with his father.
This sixth volume concludes a series of globally successful albums, which have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into 23 languages. “I did not think that the success of this series would take such proportions,” said the cartoonist in Inter de France.
“I tried to direct this story to people who don’t read comics and, first of all, to my Breton grandmother.”
This new album, which takes place between 1994 and 2011, brings a peaceful ending to the painful family history of Riad Sattouf. At the end of volume 4, she revealed the kidnapping of her younger brother by his father, who returned to Syria leaving his French family behind. In volume 5, she evoked the efforts made by her mother to find her missing brother, who had remained a dead letter.
haunting sequences
Riad Sattouf tells this story very delicately thanks to its deceptively naïve style, inspired by Hergé’s clear line in tintin. But the designer is increasingly critical of his father, a doctor of history fascinated by the pan-Arabism of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. In volume 6, he shows how this absent father continues to poison his life after his departure.
“He was the driving force behind the writing of The Arab of the future: telling the story of my father and how his disappearance continues to irrigate reality. How, when I haven’t seen him since 1992, I still think about him, and how, when he died in 2007, I talk to you about him!” Riad Sattouf explained in She.
Converted into a comics author, Riad Sattouf begins a therapy, the sessions of which he details in this volume 6. Disturbing sequences where the designer, usually modest about his private life, reveals himself completely. Usually so meticulous in his work, Riad Sattouf for this final volume skipped the sketch stage to draw “directly in ink, in automatic writing,” he said. She.
Riad Sattouf also covers in moving pages the end of his maternal grandparents’ lives. Pages that are interspersed with the announcement of her reunion with her kidnapped brother in Syria. The end of volume 6, where she evoked the “Arab spring” and the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, brings some cold sweats to the reader. Riad Sattouf then delivers some of the most beautiful pages in the series.
“Another Identity”
Riad Sattouf also evokes his beginnings as a cartoonist. Like in the young actorhis previous comic strip on Vincent Lacoste shows to what extent, for an artist, access to fame is at stake “narrowly”.
“Sometimes it is not much, because you can tell yourself at the moment that you are afraid, that you do not feel very well, you let it go, when it can change your whole life. That is what I wanted to say”.
The story of a torn family then becomes the story of a teenager whose life will be saved by drawing. “I had a father who was on the borders of Islamism and a Breton grandfather who was a naturist! So it was very difficult to combine these two identities,” Riad Sattouf laughs at France Inter.
“Quite quickly, I found another identity for myself, which is that of authors and designers.”
“At some point in my life, I decided that I would not be a Syrian, or a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Frenchman, or a Breton, but that I would be an author,” he continues in the columns of.She. “I was convinced that he had the caliber of Mœbius, my idol, when he was not a genius at all.”
If Riad Sattouf completed his analysis with his psychotherapist a few years ago, The Arab of the future 6 had therapeutic virtues in his life, he entrusts to She“I think the only really paranormal thing I’ve ever seen is the success of The Arab of the future, and the fact that by becoming an author I resolved my family situation. It’s crazy, but it’s true…”
The Arab of the future 6. Youth in the Middle East (1994-2011), by Riad Sattouf, Allary editions, 176 pages, 24.90 euros.
Source: BFM TV
