Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The publishing world is replete with debut novelists who are “dazzling” or “groundbreaking” or “tremendous” and “spectacular.” They can’t all be that good can they? Well in the case of Yaa Gyasi and her debut novel, Homegoing, believe the hype.
I’m taking the occasion of the paperback publication of this magnificent book to draw your attention to it, just in case you missed it last year.
In this epic story of half-sisters born in eighteenth century Ghana, Gyasi follows the tortured history of black America to the present day. Effia is married to an Englishman and lives in the comfort of the Cape Coast Castle on Ghana’s Atlantic coast. She doesn’t know her sister Esi, captured by traders from another village, is a prisoner in the dungeons below the castle who will be part of the Middle Passage, the estimated 10 million Africans who were transported to the New World during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Gyasi follows the family trees of Effia and Esi, through Ghana’s history of colonialism and through America’s slave trade, civil war, restoration, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, providing searing emotional texture to this history that captivates and enthralls from the first page to the last.
Yaa Gyasi is twenty-seven years old. She was born in Ghana but moved to the States as a toddler and grew up in Alabama. It was a summer visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle as a college student that first got her thinking about the African part of the story of slavery. “African complicity in the slave trade is something we don’t really talk about” she told the literary magazine Guernica. “People whisper it, but the conversation doesn’t usually go past there…I was really struck, in going to the Cape Coast Castle, by how much anger I felt at the fact that we don’t talk about these things.”
Each chapter focuses on the story of a descendant of one of sisters either in Ghana or in the U.S. The Ghana chapters have a greater lyricism and flow to them. It’s a tricky proposition, alternating between these two branches of the family tree, and two country’s histories, and while it’s uneven, it is ultimately worth taking the journey with her. What stands out for me that is unusual in books about slavery is her focus on the role that Africans played in the trade, a part of history that gets short shrift.
She admits that fictionalizing this part of history, one that is not as well documented as the American history gave her latitude, “Being able to rely on my imagination and not having to be beholden to the truth, or to facts, in the same way that I was in some of the later chapters was actually freeing for me! There is so little written about that time that I didn’t feel stifled by the research, so it was probably the most fun part.”
While the book is a novel, each chapter is almost its own short story. The main characters are all descendants of either Effia or Esi, but the sisters do not feature as central to the narratives that unfold. We the reader, know they are a through line even though their descendants may not.
Gyasi’s chapters on America sometimes suffer from fealty to the history of key periods in the African American story and characters can feel as if they are in service of the milestones of that history – the Civil War, Restoration, the Great Migration, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement and today’s drug wars and mass incarceration, rather than stars of their own stories.
But for the casual reader who is not as familiar with the history these stories will provide a useful corrective. The story of H, a freed slave who found himself in penal servitude after the Civil War sheds light on the insidiousness of the 13th amendment, whose repercussions are alive and well today (an issue brilliantly explored in Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th).
Willie and Robert’s story is a poignant reminder of the challenges of the Great Migration as millions of blacks moved north in the early twentieth century looking to improve their lot. Their tale is made all the more heartbreaking as it explores the issue of “passing” something that light skinned blacks did as a way to get work, a nod to the history of miscegenation in this country.
You will come away from this book moved by the sheer ambition of it and enthralled by this wonderfully talented writer. She has exploded on to the literary scene with a book that is sweeping in its scope and absorbing in its commitment to expanding our understanding of the history of slavery from its origins.
In her book Yaw, a history teacher, starts his class with a statement for the students “history is storytelling.” Gyasi is a talented storyteller and if you are like me, you will be awaiting more of Ms. Gyasi’s work with excited anticipation.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 300 pages
Genre: historical fiction
Themes: slavery, African American history, family
Commitment: an absorbing read worth your time.
Buy here and support this site and indie bookstores
