Early one evening in December, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled his country as rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the country’s most watched TV news channels turned to a cartoonist for expert opinion on the news.
“Did you think this could happen so quickly?” A news anchor for the channel, BFMTV, asked the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.
Over the past decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has become one of France’s biggest literary stars, thanks in large part to his masterpiece, “The Arab of the Future,” a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was painstakingly divided between the Middle East and France and the disintegration of the marriage between his French mother and his Syrian father.
The books – in a genre known as “Bandes Dessinées” in France – have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into some 23 languages. Although told from a child’s point of view and drawn in a deceptively simple style, they touch on some of the thorniest questions about the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They’re also smothered in subtle but withering social satire.
For Mr. Sattouf, this posture informs not only his art, but how he interprets the world. In his television appearance in December, he told viewers that the fall of Mr Al-Assad was a moment of “immense hope” for Syria. But when asked to predict what might happen next, he cautioned that he tended to view things “extremely pessimistically.”
“I keep my fingers crossed,” he said, “that one terrible dictatorship will not be replaced by another dictatorship.”
Mr. Sattouf, born in France, became enamored of the brutally honest and occasionally offensive work of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. His work also follows the tradition of comics offering readers an intimate view of characters living through pivotal historical moments, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.”
For years, Mr. Sattouf wrote a cartoon strip for Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. He stopped contributing a few months before January 2015, when the magazine’s offices were targeted in a deadly terrorist attack over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf did not draw the Muhammad cartoons; His strip had focused on funny and sometimes depressing scenes from the daily life he encountered on the streets and subway of Paris.
In “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf paints a complex portrait of his father, who made his way from a small rural village in Syria to Sorbonne University in Paris, where he received a doctorate in history and met the woman who would become Mr. Sattouf’s mother. The cartoonist also portrays his father as slipping, over the years, into a state of permanent bitterness towards the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen.
Some of the series’ most arresting pages describe Mr. Sattouf’s experience as a child in Ter Maaleh, his father’s village. He moved there in the 1980s, while in elementary school and living there during the dictatorial reign of Mr. Al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.
Mr Sattouf’s memories of Ter Maaleh are vivid and coruscating. French journalist Stéphane Jarno recently described depictions of the city as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a micro-society full of blind pity and power struggles, with seemingly little love but a lot of violence.”
This willingness to pull no punches about his experience in Syria puts Mr. Sattouf in a loose but important category of French public figures with roots in the Arab world who are not afraid to criticize him. It can be a fraught position.
Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who currently lives in France, recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for a novel that addressed the complex history of the Algerian civil war. In the past, Mr. Daoud, who has openly discussed sensitive religious issues, was the subject of a death threat from an Algerian imam. More recently, Daoud complained that he was chastised by elements of the French left for “not being the good Arab, who is in the permanent state of the de-colonial victim”.
Somehow, Mr. Sattouf has largely avoided that fate. He has been a critical lover of French media since the mid-2000s, when, as a young man, he was publishing what he called “sexual and provocatively funny” comics. At the same time, he said in a recent interview, he had never faced backlash from Islamic groups.
“Never,” he said, smiling. “Because my comics are so good.”
The line was delivered with a sort of flourish of jokes.
Sattouf met for the interview in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, late last month. He comes across as somewhat serious-minded, with a quiet voice that triggered the interview between French and a workable Englishman who said he learned from binging “Seinfeld.”
He insisted, as he has in numerous interviews he has held since Mr. Al-Assad’s flight, that he is not an expert on the Middle East. “It’s very complicated for me,” he said. “My books are about Syria, but in my books I tell stories about my family. I mean my memory, my point of view as a child. “
The books describe a childhood of wrenching change, with a love of drawing and cartooning as a refuge and constant.
When he was 12, he left Ter Maaleh, returning to Brittany with his two younger brothers and his mother as his parents’ marriage had begun to unravel. He has not returned to Syria since.
In France, he said, he found a freedom of expression crucial to his craft. He also watched with concern as some French leaders appeared to embrace Mr. Al-Assad. He took specific note of the 2008 decision by Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president, to invite Mr Al-Assad to Paris for the Bastille Day festivities.
As revelations of the Syrian regime’s atrocities came to light, Sattouf said he felt a sense of vindication.
“We see that the story I was telling in my books was closer to reality than what could be seen in the media,” he said.
Mohamed-Nour Hayed, 22, a French-Syrian activist and writer who was granted asylum in France amid Syria’s civil war, recalls first reading “The Arab of the Future” at age 15 . He said he was concerned that Mr. Sattouf’s negative portrayal of Syria might reinforce stereotypes among readers who only see a depiction of “a very closed Syria.”
But Mr Hayed also praised the series and said it had influenced him as he wrote his first novel, which is set during the war. Like “the Arabic of the future,” Hayed said, it is written from the point of view of a child.
In addition to writing “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf directed two films. “Les Beaux Gosses,” or “The French Kissoners,” a coming-of-age comedy, won a César Award for best first film. Late last year, he published the first volume of “I, Fadi, the stolen brother” a spin-off series to “The Arab of the Future”, based on interviews with his younger brother, who, called Sattouf, was taken from France to Syria by his father when his brother was a son. Mr. Sattouf, in the interview, described it as kidnapping.
When asked to fill in exactly what happened to his brother next, Mr. Sattouf demurred, saying he didn’t want to give away the rest of the story, to be published in later volumes.
The first four volumes of the “Arab” series have been translated into English; Fantagraphics, a US-based comics publisher, plans to publish versions of the final volumes, as well as the new series. Many French bookstores currently feature large cardboard displays showing Mr. Sattouf’s books, along with a photograph of his face. Outside the Rennes train station recently, a middle-aged man recognized Mr. Sattouf and ran to shake his hand.
And the French media continue to turn to him to delve deeper into the fall of the Assad regime.
Sattouf told regional newspaper Ouest-France that organizing democratic elections “in a country fractured by 13 years of civil war required immense political will, but also international support.”
He told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that living under Assad’s rule in Syria had imbued him with “a certain paranoia, let’s say, a distrust that has become part of my personality.”
He also spoke to La Croix newspaper about returning to Syria one day.
“But this can only happen in a peaceful and democratic Syria,” he said. “For now, it’s still a distant and imaginative prospect.”