Abouet is not merely dismissive of the traditional culture of the Ivory Coast, but she tends to relegate it to the aesthetic realm-e.g., this book concludes with pages of recipes and guides to Ivoirian traditional clothing and childcare. Aya largely celebrates this modernity, which it identifies with the emancipation of women and sexual minorities the graphic novel’s tone, while consistently light-hearted and comic, addresses serious social issues, such as divorce, bigamy, homophobia, and domestic violence, even as it portrays the difficulty of the older generation’s adjustment to their children’s new freedoms under an urban and bourgeois regime. While the bookish and ambitious nineteen-year-old Aya is our title character and narrator-and likely the bookish and ambitious Abouet’s surrogate-the story is an ensemble piece, wending its way deftly through a number of believably realized characters, from the alienated rich-kid Moussa and the sweet teen mother Adjoua to the men and women of the older generation.Ībouet, a French citizen since the age of 12, has stated her intention to display a side of African life the Western media rarely portrays: middle-class modernity.

This French series of graphic novels by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie is a nostalgic and pleasant reflection on the problems of youth and age during the middle-class boom of the 1970s in the writer’s native country, Côte d’Ivoire.

Aya: Life in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet

Aya abouet