Before writing the success story of The Arab of the futureRiad Sattouf already knew that he would tell the story of his brother’s kidnapping in a comic strip. In the early 1990s, when he was just a child, he loses his younger brother kidnapped by their father in Syria.
He tells this story in Me, Fadi, the stolen brother by taking the point of view of his brother whose testimony he collected in 2011 and 2012. Guest of RTL this Saturday January 18, the comic strip author recounts that “this dramatic event which happened in [s]his family was the narrative black hole of the first six volumes of The Arab of the Future” in which he already mentions the kidnapping of his brother but “through [s]one’s own point of view and life without him for twenty years.”
It is in 2011 that the two brothers reconnected“at the time of the start of the civil war in Syria”. “I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. During our reunion, I was eager for questions,” says Riad Sattouf. Faced with his testimony and his responses, the author immediately knows that his story “would make a great comic strip”. His brother, for his part, did not “see very well what that could mean”, but “it made him laugh” and thus gave his agreement.
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