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WORK TITLE: Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/18/1971
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: French
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 18, 1971, in Paris, France.
EDUCATION:Attended Université de Paris-Sud.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, artist, and publisher. Cofounder of the French periodical L’oeil carnivore and the magazine Le chéval sans tête; also cofounded the publishing house Amok.
WRITINGS
Author and illustrator of French comics.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in France, Yvan Alagbé spent three years in West Africa as a youth. He studied mathematics and physics in college. With Olivier Marboeuf, Alagbé cofounded a contemporary visual arts review, L’oeil carnivore (“The carnivorous eye”) and the magazine Le chéval sans tête (“The Headless Horse”), which published graphic art and comics. Alagbé and Marboeuf would go on to establish their own publishing house, Amok, which would subsequently partner with the Fréon publishing group to establish the Franco-Belgian publishing house Frémok, a graphic novels publisher.
Known for his innovative and provocative comics, Alagbé created a number of comic stories between 1994 and 2011 that revolved around the lives of undocumented migrant workers in Paris, France. These stories are collected in Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. Translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, the stories are illustrated by Alagbé in stark black and white. “Few comics capture the politics of the body and race as poignantly as … Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures,” wrote World Literature Today contributor Claire Burrows.
In the title story “Yellow Negroes,” Alain is a black Burmese immigrant who wants to get his papers in order to work legally. Mario is a white, retired Algerian policeman who is filled with guilt for what he did during the African colonial wars. Nevertheless, Mario tries to force Alain to love him via a type of blackmail involving the official papers that Mario needs. In the story titled “Dyaa,” which was previously released as a stand-alone comic, Alagbé focuses on Alain’s sister, Martine. Martine lives with her brother and a budding artist named Sam, whose sketchbook drawings record some of the story. According to Comics Journal website contributor Matthias Wivel: “Sam is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Alagbé himself, adding a dash of mercifully unobtrusive metafiction to the proceedings.” The story follows Martine’s past on through her arrival to and life in France. Much of the story revolves around her thoughts about a former lover whom she left behind in Africa. “The story is told elliptically, with Alagbé shifting perspective, setting, and time period without warning or explicit notation,” noted A.V. Club website contributor Shea Hennum.
Most of the stories focus on the interactions between whites and blacks. A major running theme is the relationship between Alain and Claire, who is his white French girlfriend. Claire’s father disapproves of her love for Alain, which leads to the two becoming alienated from one other. In the story titled “Le Deuil,” or “Mourning,” readers learn more about Claire. Her grandparents, who once ran a brothel serving immigrants, have committed suicide, leading Claire to return to the family’s home in the country. The trip home concerns the relationship between Claire and her estranged father, as well as her brother and uncle. Readers learn that Claire’s grandfather also disapproved of her former teenage desire to marry a black man. Moreover, Claire learns that her grandfather spent his youth in Cameroon working for the colonialists. She discovers a photo album that reveals his desire for black women, a feeling he kept repressed.
Other stories include a story about Malian laborers occupying an employment agency. Yet another compares the modern-day migrant crisis in France with the Paris massacre of 1961, which occurred during the Algerian War. The massacre took place when the French National Police attacked a demonstration made up of an estimated 30,000 Algerians. Initially, the French government denied responsibility for any deaths and even practiced censorship of the press. In 1998 the government finally admitted that forty deaths occurred during the demonstration. Some estimates place the death toll at least double that number and likely far more.
“Alagbé’s unstructured storytelling makes as strong an impression as his artwork’s contrast between dramatic black slashes and negative space,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. In the Comics Journal website review, Wivel remarked: “In the end, the macro-story Alagbé has been telling over the past twenty years is about the cages we inhabit as social beings in a determined historical flux, cages that are doomed ever to reproduce themselves.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, review of Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, p. 69.
World Literature Today, May-June, 2018, Claire Burrows, review of Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, p. 72.
Xpress Reviews, February 9, 2018, E.W. Genovese, review of Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, https://www.avclub.com/ (March 27, 2018), Shea Hennum, “The Striking, Uncomfortable, Poetic Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures Is a Must-Read Comic.”
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (September 4, 2014), Matthias Wivel, “The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé.”
Cultural Services French Embassy in the United States Website, http://frenchculture.org/ (July 6, 2018), author profile.
Yvan Alagbé was born in Paris and spent three years of his youth in West Africa. He returned to study mathematics and physics at the Université de Paris-Sud, where he met Olivier Marboeuf. Alagbé and Marboeuf founded a contemporary visual arts review called L’oeil carnivore and the magazine Le Chéval sans tête (“The Headless Horse”), which gained a cult following for its publication of innovative graphic art and comics. Labeling these artistic collaborations as “Dissidence Art Work,” Alagbé and Marboeuf soon founded their own publishing house, Amok, drawing from the material serialized in Le Chéval, including the first version of Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. In 2001, Amok partnered with the publishing group Fréon to establish the Franco-Belgian collaboration Frémok, now a major European graphic novels publisher. Alagbé lives in Paris.
About Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures (forthcoming New York Review Comics)
Yvan Alagbé is one of the most innovative and provocative artists in the world of comics. In the stories gathered in Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures—drawn between 1994 and 2011, and never before available in English—he uses stark, endlessly inventive black-and-white brushwork to explore love and race, oppression and escape. It is both an extraordinary experiment in visual storytelling and an essential, deeply personal political statement.
With unsettling power, the title story depicts the lives of undocumented migrant workers in Paris. Alain, a Beninese immigrant, struggles to protect his family and his white girlfriend, Claire, while engaged in a strange, tragic dance of obsession and repulsion with Mario, a retired French Algerian policeman. It is already a classic of alternative comics, and, like the other stories in this collection, becomes more urgent every day.
Yvan Alagbé was born in Paris and spent three years of his youth in West Africa. He returned to study mathematics and physics at the Université de Paris-Sud, where he met Olivier Marboeuf. Alagbé and Marboeuf founded a contemporary visual arts review called L’oeil carnivore and the magazine Le Chéval sans tête (“The Headless Horse”), which gained a cult following for its publication of innovative graphic art and comics. Labeling these artistic collaborations as “Dissidence Art Work,” Alagbé and Marboeuf soon founded their own publishing house, Amok, drawing from the material serialized in Le Chéval, including the first version of Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. In 2001, Amok partnered with the publishing group Fréon to establish the Franco-Belgian collaboration Frémok, now a major European graphic novels publisher. Alagbé lives in Paris.
Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
Publishers Weekly. 265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p69+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
Yvan Alagbe, trans. from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York Review Comics, $22.95 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-1-68137176-4
France's colonial history and current racial tensions underpin this dynamically drawn collection. Expanding on the characters in The School of Misery (2013), Alagbe explores themes of disconnection among Africans living in France and the uneasiness the native French feel in their presence. Some pieces provide sharp commentary on the enduring existence of colonial attitudes. "Postcard from Montreuil" is a straightforward depiction of the occupation of an employment agency by Malian laborers. "Sand Niggers" ties the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians to the current migrant crisis, then ties it off with a mystical flourish. The more sprawling, Flaubert-inspired title story weaves together the experiences of a white French woman whose father hates her seeing "a black" with her boyfriend's trouble finding work and security ("pain and pride are two needles under his skin") and his family's harassment by a lonely old white man who fought in the African colonial wars. Alagbe's unstructured storytelling makes as strong an impression as his artwork's contrast between dramatic black slashes and negative space. His imagery and text together create haunting narratives in which a past of racism and guilt keeps overwhelming the present, and also the reader. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 69+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839804/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b132c69e. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839804
Yvan Alagbe: Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
Claire Burrows
World Literature Today. 92.3 (May-June 2018): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Yvan Alagbé
Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York. New York Review Comics. 2018. 112 pages.
Comics have the unique capacity to create meaning between the verbal and visual as illustrations challenge and surprise the reader, but few comics capture the politics of the body and race as poignantly as Yvan Alagbé's Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures .
A collection of Alagbé's comics from 2004 to 2011, this is his first publication in English, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Rendered in all black-and-white brushwork, the dynamic narrative is emphasized and complicated through the illustrations, starting with the cover depicting a black man being choked by disembodied white hands. Many of the illustrations resemble deep woodcuts. Others are highly detailed historic scenes and cityscapes. All are hypnotically beautiful while often upsetting.
In the titular "Yellow Negroes," an older white Algerian man, Mario, grows desperately attached to a younger black African man, Alain. Alain works to secure papers so he can work legally in France, and Mario holds this over his head in a perverse attempt to force his love. Mario's behavior is inappropriate and unethical, but Alagbé allows for pity for Mario as he is consumed by guilt and loneliness borne of his nefarious role in the African colonial wars. Alain, in spite of everything, is also conflicted in his feelings, saying, "I sleep alongside him. My breath the breath of the victims.
Loving or hating him, what does it matter? Pity tortures horror. Goodwill is attached to disgust like a rose climbing up my leg." Alagbé deftly and articulately intertwines the body with the narrative, as colonialism continues to choke those trying to escape.
Alagbé captures the discomforting reality of the body, as it is simultaneously comforting and painful, familiar and alienating. As immigrants, black men and women, and refugees are persecuted and killed, Alagbé assumes the personal responsibility of not only remembering them but giving them a voice to accompany the body that allows them to live but evokes such hate. Alagbé concludes his work by saying, "Telling tales is the business of survivors. ... Removed from myself, I remain alone on my lips. The lightness I once had I have no more. Can the world hold all of the woes of the world? Can my love?"
Claire Burrows
Austin, Texas
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burrows, Claire. "Yvan Alagbe: Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 3, 2018, p. 72. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536987291/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1673294f. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536987291
Alagbe, Yvan. Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
E.W. Genovese
Xpress Reviews. (Feb. 9, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Alagbe, Yvan. Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. New York Review Comics. Apr. 2018. 120p. tr. from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. ISBN 9781681371764. pap. $22.95. GRAPHIC NOVELS
Featuring stories drawn between 1994 and 2011, this collection revolves around the lives of Beninese siblings Martine and Alain, living in Paris as undocumented workers. The title piece recounts their intense involvement with a French Algerian policeman who uses their fragile status to satisfy his increasingly emotional needs. Alagbe (L 'oeil carnivore) returns to his characters again in "Dyaa," which takes a haunting dive into Martine's mind and explores her fraught relationship with a man she left behind. Other stories are meditations on Alain's relationship with white Frenchwoman Claire and unflinching examinations of the refugee crisis and the legacy of colonialism in France. The stark, painterly black-and-white illustrations highlight both the racial tensions and the underlying themes of the narratives. Their raw, uneven quality suits the political nature of the work.
Verdict Alagbe's storytelling is often surreal and reads like poetry, so readers should be prepared to put some energy into interpreting this book. But fans of alternative and European comics will relish the effort. [Previewed in Douglas Rednour's "Comics Cross Over," LJ 6/15/17.]--E.W. Genovese, Andrew Bayne Memorial Lib., Pittsburgh
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Genovese, E.W. "Alagbe, Yvan. Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures." Xpress Reviews, 9 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528197475/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9f07d461. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528197475
The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé
BY Matthias Wivel Sep 4, 2014
With the publication of the book École de la misère last year, the elusive French-Beninese comics artist Yvan Alagbé returns to expand upon a classic, his 1994 masterwork Les Nègres jaunes. The result, although not without false notes, is an ambitious and moving enrichment of a grand family narrative he has been telling for the past twenty years, and one of the most intricate, challenging, and moving of its kind in comics.
I
Back in the early 1990s, when comics needed a change, the French anthology Le Chéval sans tête ("The Headless Horse") was a glove thrown in the face of habitual thinking. Unabashedly high art in sensibility, it seemed willing to leave behind all the trappings of traditional comics, including those that other innovators on both sides of the Atlantic—from Chris Ware to David B.—were finding such exhilarating new use for at the time.
The anthology was edited and published by two young Parisian artists, Yvan Alagbé and Olivier Marbeouf, under the name Dissidence Art Work. They had previously put out an arts fanzine, L’Oeil carnivore, that informed Chéval, which mixed comics with poetry, photography, and other visual art. The roster of artists they included—people like Andrea Bruno, Martin tom Dieck, Anke Feuchtenberger, Vincent Fortemps, Eric Lambé, Stefano Ricci, Raúl, and Anna Sommer—may not all have become household names since, exactly, but remain significant voices on the edges of the comics medium.
They gradually started producing books too, under the name Amok. Several of these were drawn from material serialized in Chéval, and some of them are overlooked classics: Aristophane Boulon’s Faune (1995), Raúl and Cava’s Fenêtres sur l’Occident (1995), Lorenzo Mattotti’s L’Arbre du penseur (1997, later reissued as Chimera by Coconino/Fantagraphics in their Ignatz series), Muñoz and Sampayo’s Le Poète (1999) and, not least, Alagbé’s own Les Nègres jaunes ("The Yellow Negroes").
It was first published in Chéval in 1994 and then almost entirely redrawn for publication in book form in 1995. In 2012 it was re-released along with a selection of Alagbé’s short stories as Les Nègres jaunes et autres créatures imaginaires ("The Yellow Negroes and other Imaginary Creatures"), preparing the way for École de la misère in 2013.
Mario obliviously reproduces his past as he "bonds" with Martine and Alain
II
Nègres is one of those works that becomes emblematic not just of its publisher, but of a particular moment in comics. Where the individual parts just click, where every creative decision feels right and supports the author’s intent, while retaining the spark of youthful ambition. Its focus on how issues of race and France’s colonialist legacy shape a set of human relations makes it almost programmatic of Amok’s line of books, much of which strove for a kind of realism engaged in greater sociopolitical context.
It is the story of a young white French woman, Claire, who is in love with a young Beninese man, Alain. An illegal immigrant, he lives with his sister Martine, who makes a living doing housework for well-to-do families, and Sam, a young artist who records key moments of the story in his sketchbook. Sam is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Alagbé himself, adding a dash of mercifully unobtrusive metafiction to the proceedings.
The three of them are hounded by Mario, an Algerian former officer the a paralegal police force tasked with rooting out revolutionary sympathizers in France during Algeria’s bloody war of independence. The reader learns through a third-person narrator, who might just be Mario talking to himself, that he was among those responsible for the notorious massacre of around 200 pro-Algerian demonstrators in Paris on October 17 and 18, 1961.
As a harki, i.e. Algerian loyalist, he is persona non grata in his homeland where sympathizers of the former government were rounded up and killed en masse following the war of independence. But he is also a political outcast in France, where the authorities he served did their best to wash their hands of their former allies, offering them no help as the new, independent Algerian government exerted their gruesome revenge. Many of those who remained in France were imprisoned in camps as illegal immigrants and only slowly accorded basic rights.
Although Mario was clearly too well-connected to have suffered this fate, he is cast as a pariah, his loss of national identity directly reflected in his state of profound loneliness. His successful doctor daughter avoids him, and he seeks human closeness among people in positions of weakness, like the Beninese siblings. As sans-papiers, they are receptive to his offers of help, offers that draw upon his past as a police officer. Given his state of disgrace, these are entirely illusory, but there is also some self-delusion mixed in with his dishonesty. He so strongly identifies with his former job that part of him believes his own deception, giving him purpose.
That Mario is Alagbé’s most fascinating character is telling, in that he personifies more strongly than any of the others the wages of colonial sin that the author is examining and criticizing in this book. Unacknowledged sexual anxiety feeds Mario’s effusive but blinkered approach to the objects of his attention, leaving him to reproduce the repressive, exploitative behavior he internalized on the job. He is an emasculated, lost agent of a history that is still very much alive.
Alain's blackness stands out when he visits Claire's family
Initially more of a blank slate, Claire would appear to be his opposite number. Her name itself indicates her seemingly unfiltered approach to the social context entangling the people around her. She is the least prejudiced character in the book, in love with Alain. It is clear, however, that this attitude has come at a cost. She is alienated from her divorced father, who strongly disapproves of her choice, and we sense a troubled family background.
As for Alain and Martine, they are the most obviously vulnerable in this system of mutual oppression, and indeed suffer for it. To Alagbé’s credit, they are not uniquely described as victims—Alain, especially, has an exploitative side to his personality, which clashes with his vanity and his pride. He takes advantage of Mario, but resents his increasing dependence on his money and promises, and it becomes his undoing.
It’s a tragic tale. In part it is an impassioned indictment of French institutional racism and an inhumane immigration system, but more profoundly it is an analysis of an oppressive social world determined by colonial history—to be combated, sure, but primarily to be reckoned with.
Mario regales Alain and Martine with tales from Africa.
Alagbé’s brush-and-ink cartooning is alternately lush and sparse, scruffy and exacting, black and white, with echoes of Muñoz and Aristophane Boulon. He selectively lends texture to areas of focus, while leaving others defined only by contour. Although he makes selective use of symbolic passages, he is a realist at heart, attentive to facial and bodily expression. At times he errs on the side of the obvious, but he also occasionally catches real moments of ambiguity as well as emotional clarity—the combination of apprehension, skepticism, boredom, and impotence drawn on the faces of the siblings listening to Mario’s tales of African adventure; the genuine expression of affection shown by Mario as he speaks to his daughter on the phone; and so on, moment after moment.
Alagbé modulates his rendering skillfully. Everybody, whatever the color of their skin, alternately appears lighter or darker, and specific physiognomic traits, particularly those of the black Africans, are occasionally emphasized to contrast strongly with their white surroundings, reflecting the social context. The point, however, seems to be that in a graphic world consisting uniquely of black marks on white paper, everybody is black.
III
Alagbé’s comics production has been modest. He has been involved in various collective projects of politicized autobiography, including a couple with his sister Hélène, which are not strictly comics. In 2001, Marboeuf had left Amok to pursue a career in other media, while Alagbé joined forces with the Belgian avant-garde publishing house Fréon to form Frémok, or FRMK.
Until recently, his most substantial publication at this structure was the book Qui a connu le feu (Who has known fire, 2004), written in collaboration with artist Olivier Bramanti (read my 2004 review here). It stages a hypothetical conversation between a colonialist and an anti-colonialist: the sixteenth-century king of Portugal, Sebastian I, and Béhanzin, the late nineteenth-century King of Dahomey—the land that was to become Benin. It mixes the political speeches of the latter with excerpts from the poetry of Luis vaz de Camoes and Fernando Pessoa, as well as other texts, to form a symbolic mediation on colonialism and its legacy visualized as a portentous suite of black faces and bodies interspersed with symbols of imperialism. An ambitious, intense, and thoughtful, but also somewhat haughty work.
Over the years, however, Les Nègres jaunes has remained the touchstone of Alagbé’s career as a comics artist. A breakthrough so authoritative that it has continued to reverberate in his work over the years, it is his Maus, so to speak. In 1997, he returned to the cast of Nègres with two short stories. One, Dyaa, was released as a stand-alone book (and is included in Les Nègres jaunes et autres créatures imaginaires). It explores Martine’s past, her arrival in France and her tragic romantic involvement with another immigrant.
The other, written in collaboration with Éleonore Stein, is called “Le Deuil” (‘Mourning’) and was published in Chéval no. 4. It fleshes out the story of Claire. At the sudden death—by suicide, we understand—of her paternal grandparents, she returns to the family’s countryside house to be reunited with her brother, uncle, and estranged father. Her relations with all of them are explored, and we understand that she spent part of her childhood in her grandparents’ city residence, part of which they ran as a whorehouse serving a diverse immigrant community. Another revelation is an album of photographs taken by her grandfather in Cameroon in his youth, some of them sexually suggestive pictures of young girls. An extended, but inconclusive reckoning between Claire and her father also occurs.
Alagbé's stream of consciousness narration
IV
It is this rather unresolved story that Alagbé now has picked up and developed further in École de la misère ("School of Misery"), a book on which he has been working since the publication of “Le Deuil". It greatly expands upon the original, adding layers both to it and to Nègres, though it has to be said that Alagbé is at his most suggestive here. So much remains unsaid that even for those familiar with the preceding stories, many of the particulars of the present narrative remain ambiguous, not to say nebulous. Without knowledge of the earlier material, the reader may feel lost.
So the price of admission is high, but the book nevertheless deserves attention. It is a bold and nakedly intense effort to represent the way bereavement may trigger memories, dreams, and rationalization, as well as to describe how, like it or not, family dictates our lives.
Where the previous stories were rendered in starkly brushed black and white, École is painted in lush, dark ink wash, offering many shades of grey. The printing by photogravure—always done so beautifully by FRMK—and heavy paper stock add meaningfully to the sense that this is a precious object, perhaps (appropriately) like a family heirloom.
Alagbé occasionally merges realism with the symbolic
The storytelling is decompressed, as they used to say in American mainstream comics a decade or so ago, with two large rectangular panels per page. Alagbé weaves together rather punctiliously various strands of his narrative to suggest, in a kind of mosaic, Claire’s flow of consciousness—a family album of the mind. One strand is the expanded version of “Le Deuil”, which prompts a range of flashbacks—we learn that Claire spent part of her childhood at her grandparents’ city home/bordello, and that her grandfather strongly disapproved of her naively stated desire as a tween to marry a black man. Connections are made to his youth in Cameroon, where we understand that he worked as part of the colonialist apparatus, and to his own repressed desire for black women revealed by the photos taken there that Claire and her family discover.
This complicates Claire’s character, suggesting that she is reproducing prejudices and desires that run in her family and implicating her emotional reactions in a wider social context haunted by the specter of colonialism and racism. Suddenly, we realize that she and Mario, the apparent polar opposites of Nègres, are united at a profound level. While clearly genuine, her love for Alain—whom she lost at the end of Nègres—is tainted by factors utterly beyond her control.
Alagbé further compounds this by interweaving his narrative with an extended scene of passionate, graphic sex between Claire and Alain—a memory that clearly haunts her and defines her feeling of emptiness. Again, there is no reason to doubt that her love for Alain was genuine, nor that their physical connection was real, but by thus emphasizing the latter, Alagbé suggests that there is a fetishistic side to her desire—as indeed there may have been to his—inextricably tied to inherited racial prejudice.
Other important tesserae in Alagbé’s mosaic include an extended and, we sense, recurring daydream about what might have happened between Claire and Alain, had what actually occurred not taken place. This is juxtaposed by an extended replay of the tragic ending of Nègres. The reasons for the confrontation between Alain and Martine, which precipitated that particular chain of events, are also expanded upon and a repressed history of abuse is implied, with connections also being drawn to the events previously sketched out in Dyaa.
Claire and her father.
This unites Martine and Claire, whom we come to understand was also the victim of abuse at the hands of her father. This is the least satisfying part of the book, in that it feels slightly too predictable—like Alagbé overplaying his otherwise strong hand. His attempts to also tell the sad story of the father’s later life consequently fall a little flat.
In the end, the macro-story Alagbé has been telling over the past twenty years is about the cages we inhabit as social beings in a determined historical flux, cages that are doomed to ever to reproduce themselves. The pessimism is palpable, but where Nègres and its follow-ups in the nineties withheld any promise of redemption, École—colored by the ambiguities of age—offers it in the very quintessence of reproduction, ending as it does with an innocent smile.
The striking, uncomfortable, poetic Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures is a must-read comic
Shea Hennum
3/27/18 1:00pmFiled to: Comics Panel
5
2
The first story in Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures (New York Review Comics) is titled “Love,” and in a few brief pages establishes the modus operandi of the collection’s author, Yvan Alagbé. What begins as an assortment of seemingly inchoate lines slowly, over one image and then the next, reveals itself to be the body of a woman, the lines of her body folding over one another. The perspective of the reader shifts over these images as well, and Alagbé rotates us around the sleeping woman. As he does, another figure comes into view—first as a cacophonous mass of thick, heavy, inky brushstrokes. Just as soon as Alagbé reveals the figure for what it is—a sleeping baby—the interlude abruptly ends: the final image a naked woman, figured as a white woman specifically, sleeping peacefully beside a baby, figured as a black baby.
Comics
Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures
A
Author
Yvan Alagbé
Translator
Donald Nicholson-Smith
Publisher
New York Review Comics
In this expressive vignette—what might be analogized to something like an amuse bouche, that first bit of food that prepares you to eat and orients you toward a certain culinary mode—Alagbé offers readers a cypher by which the rest of the stories in the collection may be understood. In “Love,” Alagbé plays with expressive lines, with race, with the hint of love and sex, and the way that love and sex and race intersect in France.
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The cartoonist’s interest in these themes and an opaque aesthetic mode can most readily be seen in the collection’s title story, “Yellow Negroes.” What appears on its face to be a story about the experience of African migrants trying to subsist in ’90s Paris quickly becomes about the mores surrounding interracial romance in France, race and class in France, France’s colonial history in Algeria, and the tensions that these forces exert on the individual. Illustrated in a style that oscillates between intensely worked-over figuration, where the hairs and skin textures of characters is visible, and simple, expressive sketches of urban life, Alagbé offers readers something poetic and moving. The story is messy and uncomfortable, but it is striking and moving in equal measure.
The collection’s third story, “Dyaa,” sits uneasily next to “Yellow Negroes,” because it deviates from the ethos of the collection’s other stories. At least it appears to. Whereas the other stories feature a clear interaction of white people and black people, rendering a vision of black life that is—for better or worse—inextricably woven throughout white life and vice versa, “Dyaa” features a total absence of white figures. The story concerns Martinah, one of the principal characters of “Yellow Negroes,” thinking about her lover who has remained in Africa (possibly Algeria, though it is unspecified).
The story is told elliptically, with Alagbé shifting perspective, setting, and time period without warning or explicit notation. Dialogue and exposition are collapsed into one rhetorical space, and all the text is set off from the images. The effect is a distancing, and the eye is able to focus on and fall in love with Alagbé’s images, rich black smears of ink converging and diverging from one another in passionate plays of sex, sorrow, and salvation. But while there are no white figures in the story, there are allusions to white characters, demonstrating the inescapable gravitational well that is whiteness. “Dyaa” serves as the most aesthetically pure distillation of Alagbé’s ethos, because he makes literal what was merely figurative in “Yellow Negroes”: the idea that blackness is constituted by whiteness and vice versa—infinitely complicating the questions he introduced in that first vignette, “Love.”