How does Riad Sattouf use his cartoons to draw a window on the Middle East?

Early in the evening of the evening of December, the Syrian dictator Bashar al -Assad left to flee His country is with the progress of the rebel forces towards Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the most watched TV news channels resorted to a cartoonist to obtain an expert opinion.

“Do you think this can happen so quickly?” The news broadcaster on BFMTV asked the cartoonist, Riyad Satouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.

Over the past decade, Mr. Satouf, 46, has become one of the largest literature stars in France, thanks to his great work, “Arab future” series of Photographer. The series, consisting of six volumes, tells the story of Mr. Satouf’s childhood, which was divided into a mobilized way between the Middle East and France, and the disintegration of marriage between his French mother and his Syrian father.

It was sold from these books, which belong to the type known as “Bandes Dessinées” in France, more than three million copies and translated into about 23 languages. Although it is narrated from the point of view of a child and drawn in a simple deceptive style, it addresses some thorny questions about the extent of compatibility between the Western and Arab worlds. It is also full of accurate but miserable social mockery.

For Mr. Satouf, this position is not only limited to his art, but also the way the world explains. On his television appearance in December, he told the viewers that the fall of Assad was a moment of “tremendous hope” of Syria. But when he was asked to predict what may happen after that, he warned that he tends to see things with “extreme pessimism.”

He said: “I confirm that a terrible dictatorship will not be replaced by another dictatorship.”

Mr. Sattouf, who was born in France, grew up with the work of the sincere and sometimes humiliating American cartoonist. Robert Kromb. His work also follows the imitation of the storytelling story “Mouse” for art Spegelman and Persepolis.

For years, Mr. Satouf wrote a caricature of Charlie Hebl, a satirical French magazine. He stopped contributing a few months before January 2015, when the magazine offices were targeted in a fatal terrorist attack because of its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Shatou did not draw the cartoons of Muhammad; His tape was focused on the scenes of the fun and sometimes frustrated daily life he faced in the streets and the subway in Paris.

In “Arab Arabs”, Mr. Shatou draws a complex picture of his father, who made his way from a small rural village in Syria to the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he obtained a doctorate in history and met with the woman who became the mother of Mr. Satouf. The cartoonist also depicts his father, as he slips, over the years, to a state of permanent bitterness towards the West and the embrace of powerful Arab men against democracy.

Some of the most interesting pages in the series depicts Mr. Satouf’s experience when he was a child in Ter Mahala, his father’s village. He moved there in the 1980s, when he was at the primary school, and lived there during the dictatorial rule of Mr. Assad’s father. Hafez al -Assad.

Memories of Mr. Satouf about Ter Ter Live and sparkling. Recently, French journalist Stefan Yarno described the city’s photography as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a small community steeped in blind piety and conflicts of power, with little love, but a lot of violence.”

This preparation for not interfering in his experience in Syria puts Mr. Shatou in a loose category, but an important French public figure with roots in the Arab world that is not afraid to criticize. It can be a risk fraught.

Algerian writer Kamel David, who is currently living in France, recently won the Goncourt Award, the prestigious literary award in France, for a novel that dealt with the complex history of the Algerian civil war. In the past, Mr. David, who discussed publicly sensitive religious issues, was the subject of discussion Threat From an Algerian imam. Recently, Mr. David did so Complain And that he was criticized by the elements of the French left because it is “not the good Arab, who lives in a permanent state of the colonial victim.”

In one way or another, Mr. Satouf has greatly avoided this fate. He was loved by critics to the French media since the middle of the first decade of the twenty -first century, when he was, when he was a young man, publishes what he called the stories “sexual and funny in a provocative”. At the same time, he said in an interview with him recently, that he had never faced any violent reaction from Islamic groups.

“Never” said smiling. “Because my comic drawings are very good.”

The line was delivered with a kind of joke, not a banter.

Mr. Satouf met to conduct the interview in Rin, the capital of Brittany, late last month. It appears to be evil and serious, thinking in a calm voice that changed the interview between French and the practical English, which he said he learned from excessive handling of the series “Sinfield”.

He insisted, as he did in the numerous interviews he had since the escape of Mr. Assad, that he is not an expert in the Middle East. He said, “It is very complicated for me.” “My books revolve around Syria, but in my books I tell stories about my family. I tell my memory and my point of view when I was a child.”

Books describe a childhood full of painful change, with a love of drawing and cartoons as a shelter and stability.

When he was twelve years old, Ter left Mualla, and he returned to Bretani with his younger brother and mother, as his parents’ marriage began to deteriorate. He has not returned to Syria since then.

He said in France that freedom of expression is necessary for his profession. He also watched with anxiety some French leaders hugging Assad. In particular, he referred to the decision taken by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president at the time, in 2008 Mr. Assad’s invitation to Paris For pastel day celebrations.

With the appearance of the detection of the atrocities committed by the Syrian regime, Mr. Shatou said that he felt a sense of justification.

He said: “We see that the story I was telling in my books was closer to reality than you could see in the media.”

Mohamed Nour Hayed, 22, a Syrian French activist and writer who has the right to asylum in France, is center The civil war in SyriaHe remembers his first reading of the book “Arab Al -Mustaqbal” when he was fifteen years old. He said he was concerned that Mr. Satouf’s negative depiction of Syria could enhance stereotypes among readers who only see “Syria with a very closed mentality.”

But Mr. Hyde also praised the series and said that he affected him when he wrote his first novel, which took place during the war. As Mr. Hyde said, the novel “Arab Future” is written from a child’s point of view.

In addition to writing “Arab Al -Mustaqbal”, Mr. Shatoua directed two feature films. “Beautiful children“The French Kissers”, a comedy movie about reaching the age of adulthood, won the Cesar Award for Best First Film. At late last year, the first volume of the series “I am Fadi, the Mustarak Brother”, which is a sub -series for “Arab Future” Based on his younger brother, who was taken from France.

When he was asked to determine what happened to his brother after that, Mr. Satouf refused, saying that he did not want to reveal the rest of the story, to be published in later volumes.

The first four volumes of the “Arabic” series were translated into the English language; Fantagraphics, a US -based video publishing company, plans to publish copies of the final folders, as well as the new series. Several French libraries are currently displaying large offers of cardboard, showing the books of Mr. Satouf, as well as a picture of his face. Outside the Renh Train Station, a middle -aged man got acquainted with Mr. Satouf and ran to shake hands.

The French media is still resorting to information about the fall of the Assad regime.

Mr. Sattouf told the regional newspaper, west of France, that the organization of democratic elections “in a 13 -year -old country of civil war requires a tremendous political will, but it also requires international support.”

He told the conservative newspaper to Lovigaru that living under Assad’s rule in Syria has stated it “with the madness of greatness, let’s say, the lack of confidence that has become part of my personality.”

He also spoke to the Lacroix newspaper about returning to Syria one day.

He added: “But this can only happen in peaceful and democratic Syria.” “At the present time, this is still a distant and fictional possibility.”