Samuel Paty was not able to experience the second confinement, nor to be vaccinated or not against the Covid, nor to advise or not to his students the fifth volume of Arab of the future. This new episode of the novel autobiographical of our ex-traveling companion Riad Sattouf came out at the beginning of November, two weeks later… how to put it? The assassination of the teacher of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine? His murder? His beheading? Everyone will choose the term that suits them, depending on their point of view, their sensitivity or their ideology. I stick to a simpler word: his death. Some will find it too vague, but it seems to me to sum up all the others. To the reader, if and as he wishes, to specify it.
–
I love Riad Sattouf, like almost everyone, since I discovered his work, the year when my little column began to rub shoulders, in Charlie, his “Secret life of young people”. It was in 2004, in other words, for me anyway, in another world – to which hardly any more connect me than a few friends and the uncertain act of writing. His strip was the first thing I read after the front page, before the columns of Wolinski, Bernar and Willem. I found that his way of restoring, in a few scenes, the language and attitudes of a youth which looked more and more like a new lumpenproletariat was worth the treatises on sociology (few, it is true) that I had been able to read. or browse. Unlike them, it was brief and funny. At the time, Riad was not so famous. Her gentleness was blunt. I never saw him again.
The fifth volume of Arab of the future takes place in Brittany, at the beginning of the 1990s. The young Riad listens to Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is already depressed, but he hasn’t killed himself yet. The kid discovers Lovecraft and the comics of Druillet, of Bilal: of this one in particular, The Immortal Fair. The album, released in 1980, had been my delight when it was released (as were Lovecraft’s lyrics a few years earlier). I had just graduated from high school and felt like I was finally emerging from the gray years. In high school, a suburban high school surrounded by housing estates, there were hardly any Arabs in the general section. First, they were few. Then they were in vocational high school, LEP. We didn’t like the LEP guys: they robbed mobs, they robbed us. Sometimes they would burst into our buildings, alone or in small groups, and terrorize those they passed, including guards. There is a scene like this in The Arab of the Future 5, but worse: in ten years, the situation must have deteriorated.
In this album, Riad’s father fled to Syria, his country, with one of his two brothers, whom he kidnapped. The mother oscillates between anger and depression. Riad lives his friendly, sentimental and artistic upbringing in this relatively sinister atmosphere. Everything is reinvented with enough grace that failure and loneliness are always comical and judgment dissolved in the forms of the narrative. Observation, clarity, tenderness, self-mockery: this is the square of aces. One of the most successful processes is that by which the kid, confronted with the French desires and way of life, imagines in red bubbles the furious, contemptuous, archaic reactions of his father, his kidnapped and Islamized brother, the inhabitants from the Syrian village where he lived; and it is by discovering the story of Lilith, the woman who wanted to live and enjoy freely and whom the Church made a satanic creature, that he comes to this conclusion: “I understood that the founding myths of religions had as points in common the hatred of sexual freedom and the domination of man over woman, patriarchy. “ Conclusion that Charlie has long been drawn, but which current comedy troopers of intersectionality, when it comes to Islam, seem to avoid. This is one of the rare generalities of the album. For the rest, Riad has enough talent and intelligence to never submit his story to any discourse: he is a storyteller and an artist. This is what makes Arab of the future universal. It is also, undoubtedly, what allows its author to be popular without attracting the fatal attention of imbeciles, bigots and, as a bonus, Islamists. I wonder if the teacher of the future should, to develop a critical mind and an intelligent sense of freedom of expression, benefit from such rare qualities. •
–
