Aya is a beautiful graphic novel about three best friends, their families, and community in Yop City, a working class neighbourhood of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. Aya, Bintou, and Adjoua are 19 year old girls setting out in life after finishing high school in 1979. The novel, split into two volumes, tells many universal stories of how people young and old maneuver romance, careers, and family obligations. As author Marguerite Abouet says in an interview printed at the back of book one, “Aya is therefore an urban story which could have taken place anywhere in the world.” Its themes and stories are recognizable and incredibly real.
But really, Abouet’s story comes alive in the colourful artwork of Clément Ourberie, which creates the immersive, situated world of Yop City. Because it is a story steeped in the look and language of the place/time setting. Of course the themes are universal, but this is truly an Ivorian story.
In particular, the narrative style of the novel takes on the community lifestyle of the Ivory Coast (described in another fun extra essay, along with recipes and instructions for tying your baby onto your back, found at the back of the book). It is as though Yop City lives on the page and all the many narratives that make up a living community grow out of it. It’s a wonderful technique that plays with this notion of a neighbourhood existing and all the little (or big) stories that happen in this place – and how they interconnect – are what a community is made of.
But the result of this is that the story was spread out to the whole community, and with this kind of community storytelling, I did find myself wanting more depth in places. I wanted more to the story of Adjoua’s pregnancy. I wanted to hear how she actually felt about the guys she slept with, not just how her parents managed the situation. I also wanted more Aya, which seems silly, since she’s the title character. For basically all of volume one, Aya is merely a presence in and narrator of other people’s stories. Not until volume two does she feature as an active lead in one of the many narrative threads. It made it a little difficult to identify with this main character who so often took herself out of the action.
The community-style storytelling also had the wonderfully immersive effect of creating a three dimensional world, making me almost want to jump through the pages and hang out in a lovely maquis in Yop City. Of course, along with this sensually detailed setting came some of the harsher realities of the time. In particular, holding me back from utterly romanticizing the world in Aya was the sexism of the 1970s lingering in the traditionalism of Ivorian society.
It’s a setting where women are politically emancipated, but socially, men have not yet caught up, and don’t necessarily recognize that they are no longer boss and owner of wife and daughter. There are several scenes throughout that really made me uncomfortable by just how openly patriarchal the world is in the novel – and how it serves as a reminder that in many ways the world is still, just less openly. But it did help to have Aya as a vocal advocate for women’s rights, even when her friends shrugged off men’s behaviour as normal.
Of course despite these uncomfortable moments, the novel pulled me in, as all good literature does, into a world far from my own. It made me long for colourful dresses, warm climates, open-air restaurants, and perhaps most of all, the loving human relations of friends who can yell at each other one day and care for another’s baby as their own, the next.
It is really a fantastic book, and one that I’m tempted to re-read in the original French, if possible. It was hard to put down, since despite the way the narrative jumps around between characters, picking up and setting aside threads of the story along the way, life moved along and there never seemed to be a natural stoping point.
