The Arab of the Future 3 & 4 by Riad Sattouf

I had vague hopes that I was going to cover the end of the Arab of the Future story in this post, but I'm wrong: there is at least one more volume. (The end of Vol. 4 would be a horrible cliffhanger to end on, anyway, even given that this is a memoir.)

Riad Sattouf is a Syrian/French comics creator, associated with the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, who has published several series of graphic novels in France, most of which seem to have semi-autobiographical elements. But his Arab of the Future series, the most explicitly autobiographical, was the first to be translated into English and published in the US, starting with the first volume in 2015, only a year after its French publication. There have been five volumes to date, with the fifth Arab of the Future book published in France earlier this year -- that one brings Riad up to the age of sixteen, so it may be the end. (But maybe not.)

I saw Volume One back in early 2016 and Volume Two later that year; Three was published in France in 2016 and the US in 2018, and then Four had its first French edition in 2018 and American in 2019. So my guess is that we'll see Five on this side of the pond in mid-to-late 2021, and will know for ourselves then if Sattouf has finished up the story of his younger days.

These two books see young Riad finally getting to an age where he's not just a witness -- Three covers about two years, starting at age 7, and the more episodic Four covers five more years after that, getting Riad up to his early teens. Three is split almost in half: Riad and his family start out still living in the village of Ter Maaleh, Syria, but his father is increasingly distant, working as a professor first in a nearby city and eventually in Saudi Arabia. Riad's mother takes him and his younger brother back to France with her after about another year, for the birth of her third son there...and does not return to Syria, since she's fighting more and more with her husband and he's in Saudi Arabia almost all the time, anyway.

And then Four is mostly set in France, with two long trips back to Syria to punctuate it.

Sattouf presents all this cleanly, mostly from the point of view of the kid he was then, and seems to be honest about his parents. His mother comes off better, since she's Western to begin with and wants the life for her family that the vast majority of readers would want. Ter Maaleh is dirty, full of horrible people, and Syria is corrupt to its core in a way that seems to taint nearly everyone -- plus the local strain of Islam is cruel and punitive, focused entirely on evil and obligation.

Both books see Riad struggling: he's in between these two cultures, but not entirely part of either one. Ter Maaleh is full of cruelty and superstition, and Riad will never fit in there unless he becomes a "good Muslim" -- which even his father, a relatively modern, educated Arab man with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, struggled with into middle age. But Riad is an academic star there, in his elementary years, which pleases his father and gives him a certain position -- even if the other students hate and scorn him at the time, and even more so on his returns, where they take him for an Israeli Jew (likely because they have no other concept of foreigners: they live in a world of good Arabs and evil Jews, and nothing else).

France is more complex and sophisticated, but Riad doesn't fit in well there, either. His voice is soft and high, so he's teased for being "a girl." His work is not as advanced in France, particularly with the disruptions of years back and forth between France and Syria. He turns to drawing as a way to make friends, and that works...for a while, at least. But he's odd and different, and Four in particular covers the tween years, where being different is the worst possible thing in the world.

Sattouf avoids making explicit value judgements: he's telling the story of his life, not specifically making points against people. But the tone and angle is pretty clear: Syria was a horrible place, in ways most Syrians wouldn't even realize. And some part of the horribleness is down to their particular strain of Islam: cruel, medieval, authoritarian, inflexible, punishing. France, on the other hand, was mostly a nice place where young Riad didn't fit in -- cleaner, prettier, with more opportunities...but just as many horrible, cruel people who took just as much joy in tormenting people weaker than themselves. Religion was not a factor as Sattouf describes France, nor was it even really racism against Riad: his schoolmates didn't shun him because he was an Arab, they didn't think he was an Arab and shunned him because he was weird for a French kid. (They were racist against Arabs, to be clear: Sattouf shows this. But they were mean to him for entirely different reasons.)

Not that makes any of it better, obviously. But in France, the torments were mostly psychological. In Syria, Riad had rocks thrown at his head. If you have to choose one, pick the one where you're less likely to be killed.

Again, Sattouf is not giving explicit value judgements: just telling his story, cleanly and clearly. He also makes it clear that he was a pretty self-centered kid without a whole lot of emotional intelligence at that age: he didn't even know what he could do differently to make people like him. Everyone comes across warts and all in Arab of the Future: Riad is a little pill a lot of the time, his mother spends much of her time complaining, and his father is a mix of distracted academic and would-be sharpie political expert, with a sideline in loudmouth horrible opinions. It's a compelling view of a world full of a lot of nastiness and cruelty: you can easily see why someone coming from there would end up creating satire.