Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

© Amazon UK

Yaa Gyasi's literary debut, Homegoing, begins in Africa’s Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in the 1750s. Our opening character, Effia Otcher, is born to a mother that does not love her, on the night of a fire which destroys her father’s property. Though Effia is beautiful - more beautiful, we are told, than any other girl in the village - plans for her to marry into the chiefdom fail to be realised. Instead, through her mother’s malign planning, Effia is married to James Collins, British slave-trader and governor of Cape Coast Castle.

But while Effia freely roams the halls of Cape Coast Castle, becoming accustomed to a new language, new people and an entirely new life, her half-sister Esi lies trapped within its dungeons. Here, in underground, confined and overcrowded spaces, babies cry, women are raped, and people lie chained and layered atop one another. Ultimately, Esi’s fate lies behind the locked doors of her dungeon and aboard a British ship headed for the Americas. It is clear from the outset that the destinies of the two sisters could not be more different.

The ensuing narrative of Gyasi’s novel tells the stories of these women’s descendants over seven generations, alternating between the family lines of Effia (in Ghana) and Esi (in America). Interestingly, this impressive chronological and geographical scope is the key to both Homegoing’s weakness and its strengths. On the one hand, the fact that Gyasi’s narrative changes hands every twenty-or-so pages means that among a confusing storyline is minimal character development. Gyasi’s writing can be a little thin and surface level, the reader only just coming to know a character before they virtually disappear from the narrative. While Gyasi attends to the quiet urgency of moving onto the next character and generation, her reader is left a little wanting.

But to focus on such weakness would be to miss the point of Gyasi’s novel. Homegoing, rather than providing in-depth consideration of its characters, looks instead to give a birds-eye (and very human) view of the wounds left by the transatlantic slave trade. Contrasting the fates of Effia and Esi’s descendants throughout, Homegoing contemplates the monumental differences between the African families that were taken to America and those that stayed at home. The fast-moving plot and minimally outlined characters come at the expense of this bigger picture, which reveals how very different understanding of ancestry and origin is for Africans and African-Americans as a result of slavery. Indeed, both Effia and Esi are gifted a similar pendant from their mother as young girls, but where Effia’s pendant and personal history is passed down with every new generation, Esi’s is lost in the fetid dungeon of her captivity. This tragic contrast is where Homegoing’s power lies.

For many African-Americans, myself included, questions of origin and ancestry are ever-present. Because the names and origins of African slaves in America (considered the property of their owners) were never recorded, their existence is near untraceable. As a result, African-Americans trying to trace their origins today hit a documentary brick-wall around 1870, when the US census included black people (newly freed slaves) for the first time. Simply put, there is no way of knowing anything about those of our ancestors who endured slavery, and what of Africa they knew. That knowledge lived and died with them.

But in Homegoing, Gyasi fills the ancestral hole that many African-Americans experience. Tracing Esi’s descendants from the Gold Coast, to a Mississippi plantation, to the Bronx in 1980s New York, Gyasi provides Esi’s family with a complete lineage to the African continent. Though the characters in this novel may be fictitious, they serve to embody the reader’s ancestors. Indeed, in Gyasi’s characters, one can see the image of their own history, and can acquaint themselves with the African ancestors they were unable to know.

The title, Homegoing, refers to the old African-American belief that in death, one’s soul is returned to the African homeland. Thanks to Gyasi, I no longer need to wait for death to journey home.

© Time