Riad Sattouf as an autobiographer of others

Such an announcement deserved three “i”s and capital letters: “SURPRIIISE: NEW SERIES! »wrote Riad Sattouf, on 1^is September, on his Instagram account. Thus he informed his approximately 315,000 subscribers, and the world, of the arrival, on October 8, of the first volume of Me, Fadi, the stolen brothercontinuation or rather counterpoint to The Arab of the futurethis phenomenally successful autobiographical comic book saga (Allary, 2014-2022). The fourth of the six volumes had revealed the secret which constituted the heart of it: while the author’s mother, French, and her three sons lived in France, the father, Syrian, had kidnapped Fadi, the youngest of the boys, and took him to Ter Maaleh, his village, near Homs. Fadi’s mother and brothers were only able to see him again twenty years later, in 2011, after bringing him to France at the start of the Syrian civil war. The final part ended with this reunion.

These were followed by long interviews between Riad and Fadi Sattouf, which provide the material for Me, Fadi, the stolen brotherwhere the youngest tells his version, the tearing away from his mother, the discovery of Syria, the learning of Arabic. Me, Fadi… is, after The Young Actorvolume 1 (2021), the second work published by Livres du futur, a house created by the author. And an opportunity to return with him to his work, rewarded in 2023 by the Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival.

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At the Center Pompidou, the exhibition “Comic strips, 1964-2024” (until November 4) hosts plates of The Arab of the future in the section on “self-writing”. This shows if Riad Sattouf will have marked the way of telling stories. But he also shines in what we could call, following Pierre Pachet (1937-2016), autobiographies of others. After telling in the first person, in Esther’s Notebooksthe stories of a young girl between the ages of 10 and 18 (Allary, 2016-2024) and, in The Young Actorthose of Vincent Lacoste, he blends here into the voice and thoughts of his brother. “In what Esther and Fadi told mehe explains to “World of Books”, there are things very different from what I would see in their place, or from what I would think. I don’t see how I could tell this in the third person. Esther is much more positive than me on many subjects. Fadi offered me a different vision of life in Syria than the one I had as a child. My comment on what he experienced was not very interesting, and it seemed more relevant to me to write it in “I”. » Not experiencing “misplaced guilt” with regard to his neighbor, he feels free to report these stories as he sees fit.

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