The much-awaited second volume of “The Arab of the Future” by Riad Sattouf, a French cartoonist of Syrian origin, hit the newsstands across France last June and is now coming to the US.
Little Riad, his blond curls “blowing in the wind like a Californian actress,” is back on French bookshelves. These happen to be the winds that blew through the Arab world in the early 1980s, a disquieting portent of things to come, and French readers can’t seem to get enough of it – or anything, for that matter, that emerges from Sattouf’s drawing board.
A US edition, titled “The Arab of the Future,” will be published by Metropolitan Books in October.
Recounting his early, impossibly nomadic childhood spent in the shadow of three dictators – Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Syria’s Hafez Assad and his Syrian-born father — Sattouf’s 2014 graphic novel was an instant success in France, with more than 200,000 copies sold.
Now he’s back with a sequel, “L’Arabe du Futur 2,” a 150-page comic book that picks up where the first edition left the five-year-old: sobbing as his family boards a Syrian Air flight to his father’s homeland.
Part one of “The Arab of the Future” unfolds between 1978 and 1984 and is dominated by Gaddafi’s Libya, where Sattouf’s father took up a post as a university professor. In a May 2014 interview with FRANCE 24 (in French) Sattouf explained why he chose to unveil the narrative through the lens of a child. “I like the candid point-of-view of youth,” he explained. “When you’re young, you don’t judge, you admire your parents…I found it funny to show this through the eyes of a child…especially in Libya, where, everywhere, you see Gaddafi, who I found absolutely beautiful in his different uniforms, like a rock star.”
Where men wear burkhas and women wage war
Sattouf pushed his humor to new heights with “Jacky au Royaume des Filles” (Jacky in the Kingdom of Women). Set in the Popular Democratic Republic of Bubunne, the satire is an eerie foretaste of the Islamic State group’s so-called caliphate – except with the gender roles mockingly reversed. In Bubunne, the men wear burkhas, look after their homes and huddle through public spaces while women are in power, command society and wage wars.
Sattouf’s work has also regularly appeared in French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo. On January 7, the 37-year-old cartoonist was not present at the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting when two gunmen entered the weekly’s Paris offices, killing 12 people including some of France’s most respected cartoonists.
