Skip to main content

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

By Anonymous
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junji Ito and the Art of the Uncanny

By Anonymous
As discussed in Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics , the Japanese style of comic book art holds several notable quirks. While early manga artists tended to favor simplistic, yet distinct styles that paved the way for a number of internationally renowned characters, contemporary manga artists have since favored a hybrid style that juxtaposes the cutesy, rounded characters of yesteryear with the realistic and richly shaded settings that have since become popular. Building on this, McCloud describes a phenomenon in which Japanese comic artists have used realism to objectify--that is, to emphasize the "otherness" of certain characters, objects, or places--elements of their work and further separate these elements from the reader. I have chosen the work of one of my favorite comic artists, Japanese horror icon Junji Ito, to further illustrate McCloud's point. Though McCloud describes this phenomenon in the context of Japanese comic book art, he is usi...
1 comment
Read more

Analysis of Aya: Life in Yop City

By Anonymous
To begin this week's post, I'd like to first address a few things about the author's duty to his/her readers. When we think of reading material from other countries or cultures, what factors are important to us? What information do we need in order to recognize the significance of the author's work? For me, it's important for the author to find some way to connect to me as a reader. Do we share a common experience? Can I relate your story to mine? This is not to say that a writer's work is rendered unimpressive if they choose not to do this. But I do think it goes without saying that most impressionable works hit us emotionally. I also think that an author should be conscious of the world that they are painting for the reader. Is it true what you're writing? Does it provide some sort of insight into the world as you see it? Are you confirming outside opinions of your culture, or are you breaking the stereotypes that have been placed upon you? That being sai...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

By Anonymous
As someone who has only seen the movie version of V for Vendetta once many years ago and have never read the graphic novel, I wasn’t exactly sure how similar or different the movie version would be to the graphic novel. I was in for a surprise when I discovered just how vastly different, they are from each other. With that being said, they do have some similarities when strictly looking at the motives of the characters. Let’s dive into those motives and how the author and illustrator of V for Vendetta achieved getting these motives across to their readers. In Scott McCloud’s chapter of Understanding Comics “ Blood in the Gutter ” we are presented with different panel – to – panel transitions, and an introduction to the term “gutter” as being the white space between the panels which is where the audience of reader “takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud, 66). After finishing reading V for Vendetta , several themes or ideas that were most prevalent...
Post a Comment
Read more