BD: Riad Sattouf relaunches the saga of “The Arab of the Future”

Riad Sattouf has more than one trick up his sleeve. Two years ago, it was believed that the author of “The Arab of the Future” had put the point final to his cult saga – 3.5 million copies translated into 23 languages ​​– with a sixth part brilliantly concluding a story started in 2014. Divine surprise: here he is relaunching his autobiographical series with “Me Fadi, the stolen brother”.

Fadi is Riad’s second brother. The youngest. A kid taken by force by their father to Syria when he was 5 years old. Readers saw him disappear in volume IV of “The Arab of the Future”, then find his elder in volume VI. With great finesse, perfectly balancing emotion and humor, the winner of the Angoulême Grand Prix 2023 retraces the turbulent journey of a child who is the victim of family conflicts that overwhelm him.

“I grew up with Fadi for a few years. Then I didn’t see him again for twenty years. Somewhere, it was a kind of ghost who accompanied me,” says Riad Sattouf in the show “C à vous” on France 5. When they met again in 2011, the two brothers spoke to each other in English. The youngest has completely forgotten his mother tongue, but his memory remains extremely vivid and precise, far from the syndrome of infantile amnesia.

Chouchou de sa maman

His eldest multiplies the questions, and Fadi tells. Touching memories of games in his grandmother’s garden, at Cap Fréhel, in Brittany; tenderness of a mother who cannot help but consider him her darling; surprised to discover a father jabbering French, falsely laughing, who constantly quarrels with his wife.

At the age of five, the kid does not realize that his father is kidnapping him when he takes him to the airport to take a plane leaving for Syria. There, he discovers a world that disconcerts him, but quickly adapts, integrating with childlike resilience into a culture very far from the one he knew in France.

Black hole

“In what he confided to me, there was a story that needed to be put into images. » His brother’s story arouses in Riad Sattouf the desire to start “The Arab of the Future”. He knows that one day he will focus his remarks on Fadi, but does not let anything show. “His story is a bit like a black hole around which the six volumes of “The Arab of the Future” revolve.

Sattouf, who refused a Hollywood offer based on his successful saga, continues it without wavering. Fadi will continue his story, at least in two future new graphic novels. At the same time, Riad recounts the disappearance of his brother from the point of view of their mother. Every month, in the French magazine “Notre temps”, he publishes a few plates from a set which should be entitled “The Arab of the future, the mother’s book”. We have not yet finished discovering the incredible story of the Sattouf family.

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