French artist Yvan Alagbé spent seventeen years drawing the stories collected inside Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, which not only makes this an extraordinarily powerful comic book but also a fascinating opportunity to chart his graphic evolution. Although Alagbé’s signature style never really varies – it’s a kind of thickly drawn brutalism that, in some frames, resembles a ferocious explosion of pen on paper – there are some stories in this collection (Love) which begin like a Rorschach test and reveal themselves so slowly that the impact of the final image is a gut punch and other stories (Yellow Negroes) where the characters seem to be constantly changing, sometimes losing their humanity altogether to become deaths heads floating within the frame. And then there is Dyaa and The Suitcase, which have a ritual art-as-calligraphy quality to them, finally giving way to the grim street-view sketches of Postcard from Montreuil and the messy apocalyptic visions of Sand Niggers, which, with its inclusion of Donald Trump glowering back at us from the corner of a page, brings the volume disconcertingly up to date.
But although Alagbé’s artwork may fluctuate, the confrontation of his narrative never does. Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures is a rage against racism, an exploration of the migrant experience in Paris, a dissection of loneliness and social displacement. In the title story, a white French woman is in love with a Beninese man who is an illegal immigrant, living in a small apartment with his sister. When an old man called Mario arrives on their doorstep and attempts to ingratiate himself into their world, we slowly discover that he used to be an Algerian police officer involved in the massacre of pro-Algerian demonstrators. The relationship takes increasingly desperate turns, culminating in a violently kinetic wordless finale that descends into a disturbing inky smother, a smash-cut ending that I’ve kept returning to again and again because it is so psychically troubling. All of Alagbé’s narratives have this quality. They are stark, complex and unforgiving, and often extremely upsetting. If you can read Yellow Negroes and not be moved, your heart may be missing.
This is the first time Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures has been published in English, thanks to a translation by David Nicholson-Smith. Considering the state of the world right now, the timing is sadly perfect and proves that, even though Alagbé begins this journey in 1994, nothing has really changed. As art-as-political-primal-scream, Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures will give you a lot to think about. Fingers crossed that all non-French speakers will now get to read much more of Yvan Alagbé’s work because it is quite remarkable.
YELLOW NEGROES AND OTHER IMAGINARY CREATURES / AUTHOR: YVAN ALAGBÉ / PUBLISHER: NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
