Literacy Sponsors in Arab of the Future and Beyond

By Rich Shivener

For this post, I’ll spend some time working through the idea of “literacy sponsors” and how such an idea integrates well with this week’s readings. By literacy sponsors, I mean “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy––and gain advantage by it in some way” (166), as explained by Deborah Brandt in her 1998 article “Sponsors of Literacy”. Enable, support, regulate, suppress––I want to run with these terms because they illuminate passages in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future in addition to al-Saadi’s article on the Arab comics movement. I’ll give most of my attention to moments when enablement and suppression, regulation and support (if there are such lines, that is) converge.

In Arab of the Future, Sattouf draws critical scenes of his childhood from 1978-1984. Among those scenes, Riad’s father serves as a sponsor of literacy, largely because his literacies are sponsored––in varying ways––by a university and/or a government. In fact, I’m drawn to pages 14-15, a series of panels that depict Riad’s father reading Gaddafi’s widespread “Green Book”. Sattouf’s omniscient captions contextualize his father’s reading, suggesting that the the leader encourages reading but regulates it in a way that fits with his vision and beliefs; such a suggestion has weight when Sattouf’s depicts Gaddafi’s regulation of television as well as the national anthem (12, 17). In and outside the pages, views conflicting with Gaffadi are suppressed. That is, Sattouf’s panel don’t work against his father but form of portrait a man whose academic literacies were enabled by a dictatorship, who then expected reciprocity in terms of similar literacy sponsorship and political ideology. Allow me to connect the former point with a passage from Brandt’s article: “Sponsors enable and hinder literacy activity, often forcing the formation of new literacy requirements while decertifying older ones” (179). This is say: Literacies of capitalism would not be televised in Libya.

Thinking more literacy sponsorship, I’m also drawn to panels in which Riad and his father are discussing/practicing literacies.. The panels depicting the two drawing cars is key to showing that Riad’s father holds strong opinions, whether about drawing or language practices in the Syria. Illustrating his father often, Sattouf is effective in showing the tension between Riad’s French literacy sponsors and those expected of his father in the Middle East. In fact, I’ll hold the position that Arab of the Future's narrative arc is bound up by literacy scenes that shape little Riad. I like that Chapter 4 raises the stakes for Riad, insofar as his father is visibly irritated by Riad’s Arabic practices (148). It’s a scene that has me wondering when and how Riad will navigate his literacy worlds.

Speaking of world literacies, I had a chance to check out al-Saadi’s article on the Arab comics movement, and I have a few reactions. On the one hand, I admire that the administrators and contributors of arabcomics.net are committed to recovering historical comics from the Arab world, and I also admire their firm stance on translating new works (e.g., DC Comics). Comics literacy emerges from access (i.e., the web) and translators are supported by the community. On the other hand, it appears that the administrators aren’t interested in those who just want to visit the site. Take this passage from al-Saadi’s article: “‘If someone is a member and hasn’t written a post or commented on a topic, we remove them,’ he emphasized. ‘It’s not about having 5,000 users who aren’t active; we’d prefer a hundred active users.’”. The argument could be made that arabcomics.net is at once making a good-faith effort to promote Arab comics while at the same time suppressing it from the Arab world at large. Perhaps in class we can discuss the legal and ethical implications of such a site.