The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984

by Riad Sattouf

The Arab of the Future, Riad Sattouf's memoir of growing up a mixed-race French-Syrian child in late 70s and early 80s Lebanon and Syria, with interludes in France, has been a huge sensation in the French comics world.  This English translation is engaging and insightful, but I'm not all that sure I understand the extent of the hype surrounding it.

Sattouf's father, Abdul-Razak, was a Syrian studying in France when he met Sattouf's mother, Clementine.  He pursued and married her, and then Riad came along.  He was a beautiful child, with long blonde hair.  His father secured a professorship in Khadafi's Libya, and so the family moved there at a point when the government had outlawed personal property, and so families couldn't leave their home for fear that someone else would move in.

After a while, the family moved back to France, and then to Syria, where Abdul-Rezak got another professorship that allowed him to live in his family's village.  Sattouf either has incredible recall of his early childhood or has done a great job of reconstructing things, as this book shows a lot of detail, although many of them make sense as coming through a child's understanding of the world, hence his focus on how much everyone smelled of sweat.

Sattouf's father is a huge presence in this book.  He's portrayed as naive, vindictive, and loving, although quick to anger.  He's not an abusive character, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't give a lot of thought to how his career choices put his family in bad situations.  Clementine bothers me in this book.  She seems to just drift along in her husband's wake, appearing okay to be relegated to a secondary role, and being left in rooms with women she can't communicate with.

Sattouf shows us both the dysfunction of life under these dictatorships, and the realities of growing up under-supervised in rural villages where his appearance and lack of Arabic make him a target for bullying cousins.

In the final analysis, I enjoyed this book, and see it working alongside most of Guy Delisle's memoirs, but still don't see why this book, and its subsequent volumes, are such a sensation.