At this point in Satouff’s Arab of the Future saga, I’ve reached the conclusion that his
mother has joined a cult. She allows her seven-year-old son to be circumcised,
without anesthetic, by a man with no medical knowledge, and with a dirty razor
to boot. Worse, she allows this travesty at the father’s insistence, despite
his dislike of the practice (?!?) and the fact that he cries in the other room
during the operation. Keep in mind that this is the husband who drags her to a desolate
dump of a country, lets her go hungry, and provides nothing. She spends the
whole book yelling at him for giving her a cold house, bad food, intermittent
electricity, and a relative who’s a murderer. But she won’t insist on going
back to her native France.
Now, a little
about the preceding events. In the first book, Abdel-Rask Satouff is a delusional
Pan-Arabist and Ba’athist, with a degree in political study from the Sorbonne, and
the family travels with him to Libya and Syria (his home) and occasionally to
his wife’s hometown in Brittany. He insists on taking a job in Syria because
the French and British don’t respect the Arabs (he’s partially right about that
one) but finds nothing better in Syria. You’d think a PhD from the Sorbonne
would make him top dog in Syria? On the contrary, everything in Syria is gained
through nepotism, and Satouff comes from a poor family, so all he gets to be is
an assistant professor. Even the army officers get their jobs through nepotism,
which is why they lost every war with Israel (and with ISIS, btw.) He holds
onto the delusion that he’ll somehow save the country, even though his beloved
Assad couldn’t care any less.
With the third
installment of his saga, Satouff once again proves himself to be Europe’s
greatest cartoonist since Herge. More than an autobiography, it’s a tragic thesis
on the bleak outlook of the Middle East. His artwork represents the bleakness
perfectly, with his limited palette of colors and simple line drawings; hot,
dusty Libya is yellow; bad-tempered Syria is red; and cool, somber France is
blue. The colors represent the extremes of the moods in these countries, as the
behavior varies wherever they go. In Syria, the teachers hit the kids and the
kids hit each other, but in France the teacher uses her voice. The Syrians
neglect their huge broods of children, but the French, with their small
families, care for an cherish their children. Riad Satouff captures the
surprise at the French classroom; it’s old and musty, but it’s well-kept and
there’s no whipping. The teacher’s authoritative voice suffices.
The events of the
book change little from the last one. Dr. Abdel-Rasuk Satouff is still
incompetent and spineless, and their hometown is still filthy. His nephews
destroy his fruit trees, and with that, his hope of any extra money. He starts
getting promoted socially, thanks to an army officer in his classroom, who
appreciates the professor’s help (marking him present when he never actually
attends class.) As for Riad, he watches imported VHS movies (mostly Italian
apocalyptic action films) and in the funniest chapter, he and his friends watch
Conan the Barbarian (definitely NOT for the kids) and declare themselves “Cimmerians.”
They prance through the filthy streets and fields with mean faces, waving
sticks, and chasing any kid who looks meek enough. As for the movie, the father
is assured that there are no women, just lots of killing and war. Well it turns
out there are naked women in the film, and the film is off-limits to them from
then on. I had to laugh at this one, because when I was that age, violent
movies were a definite no-no. The Syrians are more afraid of seeing
scantily-clad babes than they are about their kids emulating violence.
As far as politics
are concerned, his father reveals his dislike of the Saudis. They encounter a
limousine belonging to the Saudi ambassador, his Filipino chauffeur fetching
his (expensive) whiskey from a liquor store, and the disparity of life in the
cities. He says, “the car belongs to the ambassador, but that man was his
Filipino, because he’s too big a hypocrite to buy alcohol himself.” The
infamous 1981 siege of Mecca is his father’s biggest example of the dangers of Islam,
a practice he despises as backward. He warns against radical Islam, as a
nuisance that holds back Arab progress, and as a platform for insincere piety
(symbolized by the rich Saudi who does his drinking where his countrymen won’t
see.) The liquor store, by the way, is owned by a Christian, and the bright,
beautiful interior is shocking to seven-year-old Riad. It appears the
second-class Christian minority is better off economically than the Muslim
majority.
You might wonder
why I like this series so much when I can’t stand the characters. It’s true, I
find the characters loathsome, but the storytelling is hilarious. Satouff
recounts his observation like a slapstick comedy, both in the text and the
illustration. Like Marjane Satrapi, he uses very simple ink line drawing, but
gives each character a more distinctive face. I regard Satouff’s story as a
tragedy, with elements of black comedy, the way I’d view a story about someone
in a crazy, hopeless situation. Lastly, the biggest tragedy here may be
Ba’athism. My research shows that it was no delusion, but a worthy effort to
modernize Arab life. In the hands of dictators, however, it always failed, and
dictatorship seems to be the only possible stability in the Middle East.
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