Another Africa: "Aya" and the Beauty of the (extra)Ordinary

Africa, as most books and movies will tell you, is not a terribly cheery place. With all the talk of famine, war, and corruption that has plagued the headlines for decades, I suppose I can't blame people for painting an entire continent in the same broad strokes. But Africa is just that, a continent. A collection of countries and histories as diverse as humanity itself--and just as prone to stereotypes. I'll admit that my knowledge of Africa is mostly limited to the horrors I see on TV, but every once in a while, I find another side of the continent so rarely seen in Western media, and I wonder why the rest of the world seems so keen to hide it.

Source: Abouet, Marguerite and Clement Oubrerie. Aya: Life in Yop City, Drawn & Quarterly, 2013.

Aya: Life in Yop City is one of those rare gems that manages to put the ordinary in extraordinary. Set in the economic boom of the 1970s Ivory Coast, the comic explores the day-to-day lives of its characters with little fanfare, following shopping trips and beauty pageants and little teenage crushes with the same cheerful abandon we expect to find elsewhere in the world. While Aya does not shy away from heavy topics such as sexism, forced marriage, and homophobia, it succeeds in showing a lighter side of Africa simply by discussing the little things Western readers regularly take for granted. Author Marguerite Abouet clearly loves her home country, and I could feel that love shining from every panel as I followed the life of the extraordinarily ordinary teenage Aya, the eponymous protagonist of this multi-chapter work. Characters come and go as Aya weaves through life, but the comic is far from uneventful. Rather, characters we expect to hail from a hellish, war-torn country are presented as perfectly average people with perfectly average dreams, and, by restraining her story to a colorful slice-of-life romp, Abouet manages to show how closely we can relate to these people despite coming from such distant parts of the world.

With the majority of Westerners so ready to see Africa as a mountain of depressing statistics, I have no doubts that Abouet created Aya in direct defiance of these stereotypes. She knows that life in Africa is not all tragedy because she's lived through the best the Ivory Coast has had to offer. She portrays her home country just as she remembers it, and though I'm sure her comic could just as easily be enjoyed by non-Westerners, the book serves as a simple reminder that we should be aware of our bias and how easily a limited perspective can color our perception of the world. While I wouldn't say Abouet has an obligation to send out such reminders, I would say that her readers have an obligation to explore a foreign culture with an open mind, and I hope to take this reading as a lesson to never paint a foreign culture as something alien and inaccessible, not even when the culture around me screams otherwise.