The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987

"Arab of the Future 3 is created by the cartoonist Riad Sattouf who is both French and Syrian. His mother is French and his father is Syrian. This is the third installment in an ongoing series he is doing about his childhood in the Middle East. His parents are at the Sorbonne; his family followed his father, who became an academic to various locations in the Middle East, including to Libya. (The section about his life in Libya is in an earlier volume.) Then his father moved the family back to the village he came from in Syria. “Comics are everywhere now—in bookshops, libraries and universities” This instalment of this ongoing story takes place from 1985 to 1987 in France a bit, but mainly in a village in Syria. One really gets a sense of Syrian politics and culture in the mid-1980s, told through the lens of his family. His parents aren’t getting along very well. There are a lot of clashes between his father’s more traditional views and family and his mother’s views, forged during her French upbringing. One of the things this book does so well is to show how political the personal is, if it makes any sense to invert that idiom. It balances attention to the world historical stage with attention to what is happening within this family—like whether or not Sattouf should be circumcised, and an honor killing in the extended family. Some really serious issues are refracted through the lens of family in a really interesting way. Riad Sattouf uses color as a narrative force in this book and throughout the series. It’s most effective in this volume. He uses a dual chromatic look for the world that he’s creating in his comics. Different countries are associated with different colors. The parts that take place in Syria tend to be pink and black. Pink is pretty pastel color that sometimes works at an angle to the violent content of the book. In France, the dominant colors are black and an icy blue, which actually lacks the warmth of the pink associated with Syria. Then, whenever there’s a scene representing anger or violence, it tends to be illustrated in red. I actually mentioned this in a review of this book that I published in my New York Times Book Review column: it’s almost like red is this free-floating country—that he visits more than he would like. It’s a really ingenious use of color to express an emotional landscape. When I was writing about diagrammatic capacity in Why Comics? I wasn’t thinking of color, but of course color can obviously be part of what one looks at when one looks at a diagram. In a way, yes, the color is functioning as a map or a diagram of Sattouf’s world."