"Drawing Blood" from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood
One thing that struck me about the critical discussion surrounding The Arab of the Future was a common praise of Sattouf ‘telling it like it is,’ which largely gets its license from choices in form and narration: we’re offered a memoir that hangs tightly to a child narrator’s experience. This profile might not dig deeply into global politics, comic history, or even Sattouf’s trajectory as an artist, but it does provide an interesting context and insights into process.
I was drawn to think about the way that point of view both implicates and exonerates an artist as their work enters a broader conversation. The article explains that Sattouf “read no histories of Syria, barely looked at family photographs, and imposed a rule on himself: never to stray from his childhood perspective, and to write only about what he knew at the time.” His production focuses on personal memory and experience; Sattouf doesn’t want to let his adult self swoop in and shape the narrative.
Yet it would be a kind of authorial wink to suggest that a book doesn’t make the case for a way to perceive the world-- not just for a child in trauma, but for the adults learning about global politics through it. For better or worse, these authorial choices (I’ve focused on POV, but we could also discuss color, dialogue, and the temporal structure) have the potential to remove the author from certain kinds of culpability. As we see in this New Yorker article, this framing can be interpreted as a pure gesture: “Subhi Hadidi, a leftist member of the opposition who fled Syria in the late eighties told me, ‘Sattouf is faithful to what he sees, and he doesn’t beautify reality.’” I’d be curious to hear how others interpret the stance of the author, the statement of this book’s narration, and how its meaning changes as it’s read by diverse audiences.
This is a very interesting question, Andrew. I don't know that I have an answer, but I think Marguerite Dabaie's The Hookah Girl and Hummus Wars (mentioned in "The Role of Comics in Palestinian Narrative" blog) might speak to this question a bit more broadly.
ReplyDeleteIn the excerpts that the blog presents, we see first the stereotypical "identities" Dabaie sees that are pushed on Middle Easterners. The second set of images shows the author writing about life in the Middle East. But she is unable to get anyone to publish her work because she is either too political or not political enough.
What I see in Dabaie's comics is the impossibility of writing about life in the Middle East. The individual's body is politicized/eroticized because the Middle East is so closely tied to US politics. Thus, anything that is said will be subsumed into this sort of political narrative that has been created. Considering this has led me to rethink how I read Arab of the Future. Can we simply read it as the truthful narration of a child? It seems to be very biased. Why else include a scene in which a puppy is tortured and murdered. There is no surer way to piss off a Western audience than to depict the murder of an animal--and a baby animal at that. I guess ultimately, I don't really feel as if it is possible to read (if not to create) a comic of this kind that doesn't seem to have some political agenda.
I am also interested in looking at Sattouf's narration from a child's perspective--particularly a child that is a kind of Western/Eastern hybrid, an outsider both in his father's family, and, by association with his father, with his mother's family (which obviously embodies a very different kind of perspective of what "family" means, when compared with the very traditional and religious exploration of family in Syria). Riad is obviously a child split between two worlds, and finding both of them alienating in different ways--in some ways, he is safer in France; he is able to speak the language there, and, while his associations with the little French children result in his repression of his artistic talent, he can blend in more easily there. His blonde hair, like his mother's marks him as Western. In the Middle East, he is put under all kinds of pressure to embody what his father thinks is the right way to be, even though his father's family (all of his young cousins) see him as Other, a "Jew," and terrorize him for his difference. The Middle East, funneled through the eyes of Riad and his mother, is a very alien space--I'm thinking, as the person above me commented, of the puppy being murdered for fun--a very frightening, threatening space, where what's valued and what's devalued seem very strange. Nothing is safe, here, not even an innocent puppy, an idea that is horrifying to Riad and to his mother, a Frechwoman; additionally, though there isn't as much emphasis on it, as Riad's father becomes more and more involved/interested in politics, his relationship with his wife changes, and she becomes more and more "tired" looking, worn down by being put into these situations wherein she can never function to her potential, where she is relegated to childcare and more or less locked in the home for the safety not only of her children, but, in the beginning of the book, to maintain the safe space of the home. All of this, filtered through Riad's child perspective, is still very political: both France and the Middle East have their nice aspects, but, at the same time, both societies are problematic and alienating to a child wo cannot really belong wholly in one space or the other.
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