The bestselling graphic novelist endured a traumatic childhood in Libya, Syria and France. Then he lost 12 of his colleagues in the Charlie Hebdo slaughter. Now he’s telling his life story frame by frame…
Not so long ago, the French cartoonist Riad Sattouf was signing books at a Paris librairie. At this kind of event, his habit is always to ask those who come up to meet him what they do for a living, and so it was that on this day a young woman replied to his regular question with the words: “I’m a geopolitical analyst specialising in the Middle East at the Quai d’Orsay [the French ministry of foreign affairs].” Suddenly, Sattouf was all ears. Here was someone he could really use. “Everyone is always asking me what is going to happen in Syria,” he told her, mock plaintively. “So, please, tell me what people are saying in your high-class political circles.” The woman’s answer was brief, to the point. “We are looking at decades of chaos,” she said.
In the small wood-panelled restaurant where we’re having lunch, Sattouf hoots with laughter, as if to say: “If this is the best they can do at the Quai d’Orsay, what hope do I have?” But his guffawing is forced, deliberately tinny. As he well knows, the facts about Syria, such as they are, are neither here nor there; even had this woman been able to give him some clue as to the country’s future, he would still be reluctant to discuss it in public himself. Like most cartoonists in France, he remains “traumatised” by the events of January 2015, when two jihadists stormed the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people.
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