Yvan Alagbé

The first image you see is the cover: a drawing of an African man's head with someone's white hands around his throat, choking him. The style of the drawing is rough and disturbing.

Next, open the French flap on the inside front cover: you're confronted with a crude but unmistakable drawing of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy who drowned while fleeing Syria with his family and his body washed up on a Turkish beach. You didn't even know how deeply his small shape has become part of your memory, and then here it is, and the image confronts you at once with the subject of this book: the dehumanizing and desperate outcomes that humans suffer, because of racial and economic inequality.

What follows in this book are seven stories of people trying to survive in a post-colonial, inter-racial, economically unfair world.

The first story, "Love," has no words at all. Only bodies in relation to one another in a powerful series of inter-related poses. I'm not even sure whether "Love" signals hope, or if it is a graphic representation of racial oppression. There is a jittering uneasiness in these drawings. Even though the images in "Love" resolve themselves, panel by panel, into a scene that, in a non-racist world, would be peaceful and loving, we don't live in such a world. Even the most peaceful of images in this graphic novel pulse with more sinister meanings.

I hate to call this work a "graphic novel" because it works on a less linear and more visual plane than any graphic novel I've read. I see that there are many "I didn't get it" comments in the reviews here on Goodreads, and that's fair if you're judging this book as a graphic novel that follows storytelling conventions, which it decidedly does not do. But this book isn't really about the language or story. This book works the way fine art works. The text provides a guide to the images, not the other way around.

Like the best contemporary art, Alagbé's illustrations invite interpretation, rather than telling you what to think. They evoke great meaning and feeling, even at their least representational. The drawings in some panels are nothing more than dark, rough scribbles, and yet they project a loss of order and a sense of human helplessness. They frequently reflect the feelings that his characters feel when confronted with situations beyond their control.… (altro)