One day you will be an Arab

Popular French cartoonist Riad Sattouf depicts childhood in the Middle East, in a Syrian-French family, between socialist experiments and Arab tradition, between France, Libya and Syria, but above all with an unusual blond hair. In the first part of the autobiographical pentalogy, he describes the atmosphere in the region at the beginning of the eighties of the 20th century through the eyes of little Riyad. With a childlike innocence and a significant amount of humor and sarcasm, he describes the wretchedness and absurdity of the "ideal" Libyan society built by the revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi, the Syrian countryside - a clannish and essentially still medieval society, as well as his entire Syrian-French family. The environment of the Middle East is also reflected in the reactions of his parents: a skeptical and ironic mother, French, and an idealistic father, who believes in the revival of the Arab world and the ideal Arab of the future. Thanks to the author's ability to retrieve long-forgotten details from the memory, the bleak reality of Riyad's childhood becomes a captivating funny story full of small details, episodes and memories, straddling between boyish sarcastic storytelling in the spirit of Little Nicholas and authentic autobiographical comics by David B. or Marjane Satrapiová.

In the comic autobiography One Day You Will Be Arab, popular comic artist Riad Sattouf takes us through his childhood spent in the early 1980s in the Middle East. The hero and narrator of the story, little blond Riyad, is the son of a French woman and a Syrian, who graduated from the Sorbonne. A young, ambitious academic is tempted by favorable financial conditions at universities in Arab countries and moves with his family to Libya and later to Syria. The reader can observe the reality of developing states in which recklessly implemented socialist experiments collide with deeply rooted Arab tradition through the eyes of a child who has no reason to embellish or conceal anything. With a child's innocence, he first observes the wretchedness and absurdity of the "ideal" Libyan society built by the revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi, and later the Syrian countryside - a clannish and essentially still medieval society. Material backwardness, the hypocrisy of family patriarchs, disrespect for women, cruelty to animals, and primitive anti-Semitism—the result of the Arab world's recent conflict with Israel—do not escape Riyadh's inquisitive gaze. At the same time, he senses the good of old Arab traditions – respect for old age, warm family relationships or the captivating charm of ancient Islamic rituals. The tragicomic character of the comic is Riyad's father, who struggles between the established tradition and the temptations of revolutionary innovation. He tries to tell himself and his whole family that the West is in decline and that the future belongs only to the Arab world. However, it alludes to the matter-of-fact and ironic attitudes of Riyad's mother, who in critical moments never forgets to remind of the advantages of the Western free and secularized society. Thanks to the author's ability to retrieve long-forgotten details from memory and express them in a concise graphic and textual abbreviation, the adventures of little Riyad seem authentic and transport the reader to a time that would otherwise remain an inaccessible past.