Homegoing by Yaa Gysai

Yaa Gyasi’s powerful and painful novel begins in Ghana in the late 1700’s where we meet two half-sisters, Effia and Esi. James Collins, the British governor of the western African “Gold Coast,” marries Effia. Effia moves into the large white castle with Collins and he treats her well. However, Collins reigns over the castle’s dungeon where unbeknownst to Effia, her half-sister Esi waits to be sold into American slavery. The novel’s harrowing narrative rotates between the travails of Effia’s descendants in Africa and Esi’s descendants in America. Both Effia and Esi’s children must contend with new versions of subjugation.

Each generation finds themselves captive to some trauma at the hand of white men. Over time, Esi’s progeny experience captivity in the dungeon, the horror of the ship ride to America, the barbarity of rape and slavery, freed slaves sent back to plantations, indentured servitude, Jim Crow laws of the South, and the drug trade and prejudice in the North. Effia’s progeny in Africa experience fierce battles between the Ashanti and Fanti tribes as they fight for the right to align with European countries to profit from the slave trade. There are tribal wars, sexual violence, machete battles, Colonialism, fires, madness, banishment, and isolation. On both continents, old oppressions end and new ones take their place.

Like a richly textured painting, Homegoing is layered with generations of pain and suffering. It is as if the layers of tragedy are seemingly transferred consciously and unconsciously from one generation to the next. It becomes clear that the dominant survival task of each generation is to navigate the oppression they experience while hoping for a better life for their children. Overcoming racism and/or oppressive tribal customs is a daily task of the characters we meet.

The novel’s structure is as effective as it is impressive. Gyasi does not follow each person from birth to death but instead allows each son or daughter to pick up the narrative from his or her perspective as they connect their own decisions to the hard choices made by their parents. Each individual must navigate oppressive institutional racism along the way.

In beautiful language, Gyasi conveys how, even centuries later, Effia’s seventh great-granddaughter living in the present carries the burden of all the suffering that came before. Marjorie says, “She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family stories.” In spite of all the horror, the characters exhibit a deep spirituality and psychological awareness about their plight. Even with incremental improvements in the lives of each generation, Gyasi says, “No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”

In the final pages of "Homegoing", Esi’s seventh great-grandson Marcus Clifton, a Ph. D. candidate at Stanford University, wonders, “How could he explain it to (his girlfriend) Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it - not apart from it, but inside of it.” I believe that this desire is what Gyasi sought to achieve in her novel. She has achieved her goal and so much more.