THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE 4

The fourth and penultimate volume in Sattouf’s epic graphic memoir.

With this installment, which follows The Arab of the Future: The Circumcision Years: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987 (2018), the impressive scope and scale of the series becomes clearer. It has taken three volumes for the author to get to his 10th birthday, and the opening pages of this book find him living with his mother and siblings in her native France while his father pursues his fantasies of wealth, financial independence, and early retirement as a professor in Saudi Arabia. Here, Sattouf’s father seems more determinedly Muslim than ever, convinced that the family’s future lies in the Middle East, where he finds both the morals and the prospects for a future higher. “We’ll live like lords,” he insists. However, the author’s mother remained resistant, seeing a better life for herself and a better education for her children in the West, and specifically in France. Meanwhile, the young Sattouf shuttled between the cultures; he found his father’s religion strange and forgot how to speak his native tongue while immersed in the French school system. On one visit to his father, he was told, “You’re a French kid with an Arab name. You’re not a real Arab.” He also endured homosexual epithets, partly because others found the way he spoke effeminate and partly because of his predilection for drawing—the art that may well provide the key to his identity across cultures. It’s clear this was an awkward time, as early adolescence is for most. During the five years of this narrative, Sattouf will reach his midteens, experience some sexual confusion and awakening, see his hair turn from blond to brown, develop an ungainly body with an oversized head, and go from being “pretty cute” to “the ugliest boy in the class.” Nor can he find any stability outside himself, as the center of his parents’ marriage cannot hold, and international relations find the West and Middle East in mortal combat.

Stay tuned for the finale.