Aya (review)

The world of comic books and graphic novels in America has certainly gone international in the last few decades. First, there was the “British invasion” of the 1980s that witnessed writers such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman not only becoming increasingly popular with audiences in the United States but also taking the helm on such American icons as Batman and Superman. Then, Japanese manga flooded the market to the point where, in some bookstores at present, it comprises a larger share of the shelf space than do indigenous graphic novels, while, in “more cultured” circles, Marjane Satrapi’s Persolopis and similar works drew rave reviews from the mainstream American press. Just like Hollywood, the American comic book industry (still dominated by superheroes) has attracted talent from across the globe: e.g., Edvin Biukovic and Goran Sudzuka from Croatia and Eduardo Risso and Marcelo Frusin from Argentina. Meanwhile, the catalogues of independent publishers such as Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics are rife with various European and Asian works in translation.

Despite this increasingly cosmopolitan market, however, one part of the world has often gone unrepresented—Africa. One might have been forgiven for assuming that the graphic novel was simply not a popular form in Africa. Though now novels by the likes of Chinua Achebe, NgũgĩWa Thiong’o, and Ousmane Sembène are common sights on American bookshelves, and films such as Tsotsi draw an international audience and all the attendant acclaim, comic books by Africans and about Africa have not yet achieved a similar impact upon the western market. The reasons for this are multiform. For one, just as artists across the world have supported themselves drawing superheroes in tights for American publishers, so too have a number of Africans in the comic book field (Congolese artists Barly Baruti and Eric Salla, for example) worked with European publishers, often on European-themed comics. But political repression has also played a role in stunting the growth of a real African comic book industry. The aforementioned Salla had his work repeatedly destroyed by police and finally sought political asylum in the Netherlands, while Tayo Fantula of Nigeria had to move to London to escape censorship in his country. Of course, such expatriates have created works about their homelands, but often for boutique publishers and not widely distributed or translated.

Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie’s premier work, Aya, is one of the first African graphic novels to attract real international attention, winning the Best First Album award at the 2006 Angoulême International Comics Festival, and it is consumed with a vibrancy, a beauty, and an authenticity that marks it as one of the real treasures of the comic world in recent years. Aya tells the story of young Aya, a nineteen-year-old young woman, as well as her family and friends, all of whom live in Yopougon (affectionately called “Yop City”) in the Ivory Coast. The story opens in 1978, when the “Ivorian miracle” was at its apex: the thirty-year period, starting with its independence from France in 1960, when the country experienced unprecedented economic growth under the leadership of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Aya recounts to the reader that 1978 was the year that her country got to see its first television advertising campaign, this for the local beer Solibra. Her father, a manager for the company, gathers together all of his family and friends every night at 7:00 PM to watch the commercial, which features a bicyclist drinking a Solibra and suddenly becoming able to outrun a bus. Such a tender opening—with artist Oubrerie, a prolific illustrator of children’s books, drawing Aya’s family all wide-eyed and proud—sets the stage for the story to come.

Aya in many ways parallels some of the stories of America’s Roaring Twenties, when the world seemed full of promise and the young were moving out of the long traditional strictures upon their behavior, indulging themselves in the possibilities and distractions of the...