Building a Hero’s Identity: Visions of Childhood in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the elements through which the identity of the hero is built in the figure of the child in the comic The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf. By exploring his own itinerant and multicultural childhood, Sattouf creates an image of his child-self from different perspectives. To begin with, the journeys, which will mark this period of his life and that of his family, constitute the guiding thread of a story traversed both by the father’s decisions, as well as the history of different countries in the Middle East from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. Furthermore, the authority and impositions of the father will be decisive for the character of Riad as a child, who admires and venerates him, but, as time passes and as the narrative progresses, he realizes that the image he had built around his father was distorted or at least incomplete. In this way, Sattouf offers us an autobiographical story that throughout the comic uses aspects such as color to distinguish the geographical spaces through which he transits and, at the same time, to establish relationships of affection and closeness with those places that he inhabited during his childhood. Throughout six volumes, The Arab of the Future values the figure of the child as a hero of the everyday, of curiosity and imagination without limits, of small feats and great discoveries.