The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor. He is a short and compact man, with wire-rimmed glasses, a closely trimmed beard, and somewhat stubby arms that make him look like a cartoon character. Do you like being with your family?” He responded to follow-up questions by e-mail with a GIF of Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” smiling mischievously and saying, “It’s classified.”. Ad Choices. In “The Arab of the Future,” the visual marker of that destiny is his blond hair, the color of his mother’s. No French Presidency is complete without a legacy-defining monument; the Quai Branly, which opened in 2006, was Jacques Chirac’s. Although he is a wry observer of human folly, he said that he could not bring himself to “draw something openly mocking.” He told me that he wasn’t sure whether it was responsible to reprint the Danish cartoons but that he “found them very badly done as drawings.” Drawing the Prophet, he said, “is a personal taboo. Not since “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. Soon after he was born, his father, Abdel-Razak, a devout Pan-Arab nationalist, took his family to Libya and then Syria. That way, he could match and even overtake France and the West by building a … At the same time, you felt a little guilty, as if you’d started a war. Abdel-Razak who moves to Paris to complete a Doctorate in History at the Sorbonne, falls in love with a Frenchwoman named Clémentine. We and our partners will store and/or access information on your device through the use of cookies and similar technologies, to display personalised ads and content, for ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. I was voted the ugliest person in class.” Accused of being a Jew in Syria, he was now gay-baited because of his high voice. What he’s written is very personal, a kind of self-analysis, really. The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Sattouf’s cartoon was a quiet reminder that there were French citizens—many of them Muslim—who were outraged by the massacre, without being sympathetic to Charlie. In the first book, we see how Sattouf’s recently Sorbonne-educated father Abdel-Razak, mainly out of idealism, accepts a lectureship at the university in Tripoli, turning down an offer from Oxford University in the process. We can’t hear what the other person is saying, but he seems to be either belittling the atrocities or hinting that they were part of a larger conspiracy. 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.” (He had visited Sattouf’s village and found it “full of militants—Communists, Trotskyists, and Muslim Brothers.”) When I asked the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis, who has been more critical of the rebels than of the regime, what he thought of Sattouf, he said, “Sattouf describes things as they are.” I had dinner with a group of Algerian intellectuals who grew up in socialist Algeria, under the rule of Colonel Houari Boumédiène, and who told me that Sattouf might as well have been writing about their childhood. Sattouf has achieved prominence as a cartoonist of Muslim heritage at a time when French anxieties about Islam have never been higher and when cartooning has become an increasingly dangerous trade. He has been living in Paris on and off since the sixties, and is a sharp observer of France’s relationship to the Arab world. --Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review ... [Sattouf's] mismatched parents--his bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. I spoke to a number of Syrian intellectuals in Paris; all of them vouched for the accuracy of Sattouf’s depiction of Baathist Syria, whatever their views about the current war. The youngest child of a poor peasant family, Abdel-Razak Sattouf was the only one to receive an education, eventually earning a doctorate in history at La Sorbonne in Paris. © 2021 Condé Nast. Tell me about you, Adam. Austere and piously Sunni, Ter Maaleh proved even more trying than Libya. One of Riad Sattouf’s favorite places in Paris is the Musée du Quai Branly, a temple of ethnographic treasures from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, not far from the Eiffel Tower. Proud and hypersensitive, Abdel-Razak is plainly seduced by France—“They even pay you to be a student!” he marvels—and by extension the West, … Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. My memory of Charlie was of Charb going to demonstrations in factories where people were on strike, and shouting, ‘Down with the bosses!,’ singing the ‘Internationale,’ and making free drawings for the workers. They met in Paris when Abdel was working on his thesis at La Sorbonne. A couple of years later, after the birth of Sattouf’s brother, Abdel-Razak got a job teaching in Damascus, and moved the family to Ter Maaleh, the village where he’d grown up. Then there was his name. Although he was fond of Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), Jean Cabut (Cabu), and Georges Wolinski*—legendary figures in the world of French cartooning, all of whom were murdered on January 7th—he did not attend editorial meetings, because he didn’t feel that he could contribute to the often rancorous arguments about French politics. Many note that his bleak and unflattering depiction of a traditional Muslim society comes at a time when the defense of laïcité, the French model of secularism, has increasingly assumed anti-Muslim undertones, and when the far-right National Front was able to beat all other parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections, with nearly twenty-five per cent of the vote. Riad Sattouf photographed in Paris for the Observer last week. “It left me uneasy,” he said. “The reality is much less sexy than you think,” he wrote. The day was hot, and the smoky fragrance of ham wafted up from a restaurant downstairs. A little girl began talking to her mother, and a look of intense concentration came over Sattouf’s face. I knew how things worked there. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. He was completely fascinated by power.”. violent, backwards, always stupid, vulgar, bigoted, and, of course, anti-Semitic.” The Bonnefoy thesis was widely discussed in Paris, and I heard echoes of it in a number of conversations. As a teen-ager in Brittany, Sattouf spent almost all of his time in his room, drawing and reading comic books. “The Secret Life” established Sattouf as a distinctively sour comedian of manners—and, more controversially, as the only Arab cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo, whose mockery of religion took aim at symbols of Islamic piety, notably the image of the Prophet. the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . “There’s nothing positive in the book—no nostalgia or love,” he said. It took hundreds of thousands of deaths, a human disaster, for the French to open their eyes. Coming from a poor background, passionately interested in politics, and obsessed with pan-Arabism, Abdel-Razak Sattouf raises his son Riad in the cult of the great Arab dictators, symbols of modernity and viril power. I can’t compete with that.”, “I don’t need to write it down, boss, I’m wearing a wire.”, “Yeah, but good luck getting it peer-reviewed.”. It was instinctive.” He wrote the book in “a kind of trance,” he told me, drawing almost exclusively on memory. The more he tried to minimize his interest in the Arab world, the more he talked about it, usually in the form of comic riffs. Abdel-Razak declares. The child of a passive Breton mother, Clémentine, and a goofy, boorish Syrian father, Abdel-Razak, Sattouf shrewdly restricts himself to the point of view of his age throughout. In interviews, he has said that he wrote “The Arab of the Future” out of a desire for “revenge” when France declined to provide him with visas for relatives who were trapped in Homs, under siege by the Syrian Army. He’s a rich Arab. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . And Sattouf didn’t call the book “The Boy from Ter Maaleh”; he called it “The Arab of the Future.”. In a striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervour of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi's Libya, and Assad's Syria - but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation. With a young child and a newly minted doctorate in history, Abdel-Razak — whose stated aspiration for his son, to become “the Arab of the future,” lends Sattouf’s autobiographical series its … Fighting the Israeli Army was the most popular schoolyard game. The streets smelled of human excrement. The Syrian boys Sattouf met were like “little men,” intimidatingly fluent in the rhetoric of warfare. Riad Sattouf’s parents met in the early 1970s in a cafeteria at the Sorbonne. Among French intellectuals, however, particularly those who study the Arab world, Sattouf is a more controversial figure. His journey from cheerful liberal to quiet authoritarian is the subject of "The Arab of the Future," a graphic memoir by his son, the comic artist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf. In the next volume of “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf told me, he’ll be writing about an experience no less harrowing than his childhood in Ter Maaleh: his adolescence in France. When I spoke to Guillaume Allary, Sattouf’s editor, he described the book as a work of almost pure testimony. Sattouf says he felt no less out of place in school in France—and scarcely less bullied—than he had in Syria. . The Arab of the Future (French: L'Arabe du futur) is a graphic memoir by award-winning French-Syrian cartoonist Riad Sattouf. Let’s enter! When I asked for the real names of his parents, he pretended to spot an attractive woman at another table: “Look at those titties!” He told me that his father died in Syria sometime in the first years of this century, but would not give a date. . . Are you a family guy? “The Arab of the Future” has become that rare thing in France’s polarized intellectual climate: an object of consensual rapture, hailed as a masterpiece in the leading journals of both the left and the right. In … Food was scarce; sometimes they subsisted on bananas. Yahoo is part of Verizon Media. Everywhere you looked, the eyes of the President stared down at you from billboards and posters. The question seemed to startle Sattouf. Ce dernier, Abdel-Razak Sattouf, alors qu’il venait d’une famille très pauvre, bénéficia d’une bourse pour poursuivre ses études à la Sorbonne. He told me that because he did not have stereotypically Arab features he was rarely seen as such. “The Arab of the Future” provides an unflinching portrait of the frustrations and the brutality that sparked the revolts against the regimes in both Libya and Syria—and of the internal conflicts that have darkened their revolutionary horizons. One of these young people was a Syrian scholarship student named Abdel-Razak Sattouf, a firm believer in Pan-Arabism and its promise of a unified, prosperous region. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood For our first meeting, Sattouf proposed that I come to a café near his apartment, not far from the Place de la République, where he lives with his partner—a comic-book editor—and their son. Clémentine is shocked, and her husband reveals that the sentence was commuted as part of a deal between the authorities and the family. (Sattouf writes, “I tried to be the most aggressive one toward the Jews, to prove that I wasn’t one of them.”) Another pastime was killing small animals: the first volume of “The Arab of the Future” concludes with the lynching of a puppy. He said, “What I love about this museum is that you see that in every society gender relations are structured to preserve the power of men, but it’s always achieved in a different way.”, Masculine power and its violent rituals are at the center of Sattouf’s work. And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. * France 24 * Very funny and very sad. By filling them with sperm, Martin explained, the elders were inducting the next generation into leadership. . He was dressed like a college student, with jeans, a black Lacoste T-shirt, white Stan Smith sneakers, and backpack. Sattouf’s emphasis of his father’s personal racism, sexism, and xenophobia become almost hyperbolic in their presentation. By the window stood a pot with three cacti: two short, one long, in the shape of a penis and testicles, a gift from his friend the actor Vincent Lacoste, the star of “Les Beaux Gosses.” Sattouf said he had been reading Chateaubriand but that he mostly reads comic books. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons of the Prophet that had run in a right-wing Danish newspaper. . All rights reserved. I ordered a vegetable couscous; he ordered a salad. Al-hamdu lillah! It was still in shrink-wrap. In the first book, we see how Sattouf’s recently Sorbonne-educated father Abdel-Razak, mainly out of idealism, accepts a lectureship at the university in Tripoli, turning down an offer from Oxford University in the process. In “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf represents the three countries in which he grew up with washes of color: gray-blue for France, yellow for Libya, a pinkish red for Syria. For all his rants against Jews, Africans, and, above all, the Shia, he remains strangely endearing, a kind of Arab Archie Bunker. A French-Lebanese friend of mine, the screenwriter Joëlle Touma, attributed this to his childhood in Syria. Sattouf loathes nationalism and is fond of the saying, paraphrased from Salman Rushdie, “A man does not have roots, he has feet.” He says that he feels “closer to a comic-book artist from Japan than I do to a Syrian or a French person.” Yet he has become famous for a book set largely in two countries where some of the most violent convulsions since the Arab Spring have unfolded. subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. The book, whose title pokes fun at Abdel-Razak's pan-Arabist obsessions, ... Abdel-Razak Sattouf . Switching to English, he added, “I’m weak, you know, I’m not virile! Birds too small to eat are shot to smithereens. “Sattouf is experiencing something that Marjane Satrapi experienced after ‘Persepolis’ came out,” he said. He had little affection for the regime, and even less for the Alawite minority that dominated it, but he was desperate to improve his fortunes. often disquieting, but always honest * France 24 * Sattouf's account of his childhood is a deeply personal recollection of a peripatetic youth that can resonate with audiences across the world. “Riad is a sponge,” the comic-book artist Jul Berjeaut told me. There was an old photograph of the Italian actress Valeria Golino, whom he cast in “Les Beaux Gosses,” a hit movie about a provincial high school that he made a few years ago. The first Arabic word he learned from them was yehudi, “Jew.” It was hurled at him at a family gathering by two of his cousins, who proceeded to pounce on him. The book is, in part, a settling of accounts with the man who stole his childhood, a man he once worshipped but came to despise. The Jew was “a kind of evil creature for us,” Sattouf told me, though no one had actually seen one. I find that’s still true today.”. Nor was he attracted to Charlie’s style of deliberately confrontational satire. “I’m fascinated by the desire that women have for stronger men—that’s where my sexual frustration came from,” Sattouf told me. If you do, someone at the airport is going to say to you, ‘Please come this way, sir.’ Ten years later, you will have a great article for The New Yorker about life in an Algerian prison. In Arabic, the names Riad and Sattouf had what he described as “an impressive solemnity.” In French, they sounded like rire de sa touffe, which means “laugh at her pussy.” When teachers took attendance, “people would burst out laughing. Issu d’un milieu pauvre, féru de politique et obsédé par le panarabisme, Abdel-Razak Sattouf élève son fils Riad dans le culte des grands dictateurs arabes, symboles de modernité et de puissance virile. En 1984, la famille déménage en Syrie et rejoint le berceau des Sattouf, un petit village près de Homs. Riad Sattouf, for a decade the only cartoonist of Arab heritage at Charlie Hebdo, has tapped into French anxieties about Islam. I can’t believe it, I am speaking English!” Sattouf immediately shifted to French; he reserves English—to be precise, a caricature of American-accented English—for jokes and impersonations, as if it were intrinsically humorous. These washes—“colors of emotion,” Sattouf calls them—create a powerfully claustrophobic effect, as if each country were its own sealed-off environment. “I can already see the first lines in The New Yorker,” he replied. “I’m a little paranoid,” Sattouf admitted at one point. Much of the pathos of the memoir comes from Sattouf’s depiction of his father, a dreamer full of bluster, driven by impotent fury at the West; a secularist who can’t quite free himself from superstition; a man who wants to give orders but whose lot is to follow them. Little Riad, its apparently guileless narrator, is a Candide figure, who can’t help noticing the rot around him, even as the adults invoke the glories of Arab socialism. The son of Abdel-Razak Sattouf was raised to become the Arab of the future; instead, he became a Frenchman with a “weird name.” That made him a misfit in France, but it also gave him the subject of a lifetime. In the second volume of The Arab of the Future, Sattouf introduces us to Abdel-Razak’s niece, Leila, a thirty-five-year-old widow, who takes an interest in little Riad’s art and teaches him one-point perspective and how to turn his sketch of Pompidou into a caricature of Assad. Riad was born in 1978. But only a few months later the couple pass one of them on the street. Martin has been involved in the museum since its conception, in 1998. In 1990, Abdel-Razak and Clémentine separated. One day, as we waited to be seated at a stylish little sushi restaurant decorated with Godzilla posters, I asked him if he often ate out. His bookish French mother and pan-Arabist father, Abdel-Razak Sattouf . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Your Privacy Controls. His first works were variations on the theme of male sexual frustration, often his own. “Ah, putain, it stinks!” Sattouf screamed, running to shut the window. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, a French scholar of the Arab world, told me that the book’s appeal in France “rests on an unconscious, or partly conscious, racism,” paraphrasing Emmanuel Todd’s thesis about Charlie. I’ve never drawn Jesus, Buddha, or Moses, either.”, In the first issue of Charlie published after the massacre, Sattouf revived his “Secret Life” strip. They were both students: Clémentine from Brittany, and Abdel-Razak, on scholarship, from a village in Syria. Sattouf has cited Hergé as one of his primary influences, but his sensibility is closer to “South Park” than to “Tintin.”, “The Arab of the Future” immerses the reader in the sensory impressions of childhood, particularly its smells. With Clémentine transcribing his words and "rendering them intelligible," Abdul-Razak obtains a Ph.D. in history from the Sorbonne. Many of his Charlie strips involved scenes of humiliation, often of a sexual nature, and of religious hypocrisy. An eternal optimist, he believed the Arab of the future must go to school, escape ignorance and achieve enlightenment. *An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Renald Luzier in a list of people killed in the attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. His caustic, often brutal vision of how boys are groomed to become men has brought him acclaim far beyond the underground-comics scene where he first made his name. often disquieting, but always honest. “My father was a collaborator,” Sattouf says. often disquieting, but always honest. It is not a sumptuous visual style, but it is an effective one, particularly in its evocation of the way in which a child sees the world. People in the village, he says, were “beginning to say the Sattoufs were weak” because they had sent to prison “a man who had done nothing but preserve the honor of his family.” We see him turning away from his wife, his hands clasped behind his back. Sattouf, 37, who grew up in Syria and Libya, ... Abdel-Razak, a Syrian pan-Arabist, the whole family is dragged along in the pursuit of his father’s epic dreams for the Arab nation to become a unified, prosperous region. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. A French graphic novelist’s shocking memoir of the Middle East. He claims to have forgotten the Arabic he learned in Syria, has no Arab friends, doesn’t follow the news from the Middle East, and knows no one in the Paris-based Syrian opposition. To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories. the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged . They met in Paris when Abdel was working on his thesis at La Sorbonne. Sattouf’s parents met at the Sorbonne in Paris when they were students. He stayed there until last year, when he set up a studio at home. Sattouf, whose teens were spent in a housing project in Brittany, often jokes self-consciously about his success. Poor children are beaten by their teachers for not having the right books or uniforms in school. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. To enable Verizon Media and our partners to process your personal data select 'I agree', or select 'Manage settings' for more information and to manage your choices. (Énarques are graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, a mandarin class who more or less run France.) “No, I’m an énarque,” he said, as if that explained everything. . The interior—hushed, ceremonial lighting, earth-tone colors, leather upholstery—suggests the study of a retired colonial administrator, and an aura of tribal kitsch pervades the place. Yet that mirage, which Sattouf’s father mistook for the future, is the subject of the memoir. When Sattouf was seven, a cousin of his, a thirty-five-year-old widow who taught him to draw, was suffocated to death by her father and her brother, who had discovered that she was pregnant. In France, where the … Abdel-Razak muses on the Ypm Kippur War. . One morning in mid-July, Sattouf, a French-Syrian comic-book artist who has recently emerged as France’s best-known graphic novelist, took me there, along with his year-old son, his son’s Ivorian nanny, and her three small daughters. When I asked him about these stories in an e-mail, he denied them, joking that his father had “obviously been kidnapped by extraterrestrials one day before meeting my mother but I prefer that you not talk about this in your article.” He went on to say that his brother never returned to Syria; his father barely went to the mosque, much less to Mecca; and there was never a crime against the family. One of those traditions was honor killing. Shortly after arriving in Paris to complete a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne, Abdel-Razak falls in love with a Frenchwoman, Clementine, and with the country itself. “Are you Tunisian?” she asked him. Riad was born in 1978 and The Arab of the Future is a BD about the author’s childhood in different places in the Middle East. “If I had written a book about a village in southern Italy or Norway, would I be asked about my vision of the European world?” he said. He 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. In the living room, there were framed drawings by his favorite cartoonists—Chris Ware, Richard Corben, and Robert Crumb, among others—and a collection of electric guitars. “People will be surprised,” he said. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. At family gatherings, the women cooked for the men, and waited to eat whatever morsels were left. Even Sattouf’s father is not exempt from his sharp-edged satire. Little Riad uses his nose to navigate his worlds, Arab and French, and to find his place in them. Sattouf listened quietly to Martin as we strolled along the long nave where most of the museum’s artifacts are exhibited. The man we actually hear, growing increasingly testy, replies, “I don’t give a fuck about Charlie Hebdau,” but “you don’t kill someone for that, that’s all.”. In a lacerating critique for the Web site Orient XXI, published two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Laurent Bonnefoy, a young Middle East scholar, argued that Sattouf’s book had seduced French readers by pandering to Orientalist prejudices: “The Arab is dirty . It struck me that there was perhaps a compensatory element to his penchant for adolescent sexual humor. “He can leave aside his own sensibility and absorb the sensibility of those around him.” For his first popular hit, “Retour au Collège” (“Back to School”), published in 2005, Sattouf spent two weeks embedded in an upper-class high school in Paris. (“I used to masturbate a lot thinking of her when I was a teen-ager,” he volunteered.) He hoped that the region would overcome the legacy of colonialism and recover its strength under the leadership of charismatic modernizers—secular autocrats like his hero Gamal Abdel Nasser. . Sattouf’s memoir uses different “colors of emotion” for the places where he grew up. Issu d'un milieu pauvre, féru de politique et obsédé par le panarabisme, Abdel-Razak Sattouf élève son fils Riad dans le culte des grands dictateurs arabes, symboles de modernité et de puissance virile. In November, 2011, it published a special issue, Charia Hebdo, guest-edited by the Prophet; the offices were fire-bombed just as it hit the newsstands. “I remembered that every woman I knew in the village had a very different odor. Sattouf was born in 1978, in Paris. One day, as we were walking across a bridge over the Seine, I asked Sattouf how he felt after the attacks. The attackers, brothers of Algerian ancestry who were born in Paris, said that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad for the magazine’s mockery of the Muslim faith. When he saw me waiting for him outside the café, he said, “What, you didn’t enter? France 24 Very funny and very sad. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. He implies his father is a fool for turning down a Western university and taking a posting in Libya, positions Abdel-Razak’s long-term goal of building a palatial family home on his Syrian land as a pipe dream. “I saw some pretty tough things here.” ♦. Photograph: Magali Delporte for the Observer New Review. “I knew Syria would never be like the other Arab countries. The great drama of the book lies less in Riad’s adventures than in his father’s gradual surrender to local traditions. But this analysis has entered a very public arena, in a totally explosive context that’s much larger than he is.”, But plenty of French Arabists take Sattouf’s side. Jean-Pierre Filiu, who has written extensively on Syria, believes that Sattouf’s success is a tribute to a French “empathy for the plight of real-life Arabs, rather than the ‘Arabs of the future’ envisioned by Qaddafi and Assad.” Olivier Roy, a French authority on Islam, told me that Sattouf can’t help being “enlisted” in local battles, simply because he’s one of the few artists of Muslim origin who have achieved fame in France. Sattouf writes in a fluid prose, beautifully translated by Sam Taylor." In Sattouf’s memoir, his father’s decision to move the family to Syria has the coercive force of a kidnapping. In the second volume of “The Arab of the Future,” little Riad learns of her death while eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents. It had nothing to do with the journal or the people I knew there, who detested nationalism.”. According to Sattouf, it was Bravo who gave him the confidence to begin writing his own stories.