My daughter had to read Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Homegoing for her 9th grade English class, reporting that she thought it was extremely well-written, just sad. I tend to enjoy post-colonial literature, so I thought I’d give it a shot, further encouraged by the fact that the novel had won the PEN/Hemingway Award.
The novel is a sequence of fourteen connected short stories that follow the descendants of two Asante half-sisters, one of whom was sold into slavery, the other married to an English colonizer, down to the present day, by which point both lineages are in the United States. What happens from there isn’t as simple as you’d expect – this isn’t Sliding Doors, where everything is great in one set of stories and awful in the others – as Gyasi builds a new character in every chapter, developing them as independent people but also recognizing how history would define not just their circumstances but their personalities as well. The stories move through several centuries of history, from the way contact with Europeans tore apart the Gold Coast to how slavery and Jim Crow laws continue to limit Black Americans’ economic opportunities.
Even as the setting shifts from present-day Ghana to the U.S., the shadow of colonization obscures everything that happens in Homegoing. The course of history was changed when white people showed up in Africa and decided it was theirs – the land, the resources, and even the people – and the ramifications echo down through seven generations in this novel. Gyasi doesn’t deny her characters free will, but we are all shaped by our circumstances, and her characters’ circumstances build on themselves like a matryoshka, so that the characters in our present day, who would appear to have more freedom and more opportunity, are still weighed down by the centuries of oppression that preceded them.
I can also see why my daughter wouldn’t love the stories in this book, as most are grim, many are violent, and few offer much hope. There’s some graphic content in here, including rape and sexual assault, enough that I assume many schools wouldn’t assign it, but it’s almost certainly an accurate depiction of the way the English treated the Asante natives, and later enslaved, and of course the way American slaveowners treated their slaves.
Where Gyasi excels is in her ability to create one interesting character after another, despite only giving us a short time with each of them and also working with the constraints of the previous story in each chain (and, I presume, the subsequent stories as well). It’s an impressive feat of imagination within the confines of the novel’s structure, marking her as someone who is as deft with the short form as well as the longer.
It’s also why I’m not talking much about the individual characters and stories – they’re so short that I don’t want to spoil too much of them. Esi is the half-sister who is enslaved, then raped by a British officer; her daughter, born of that assault, grows up a slave in the American south, and manages to send her baby with an escaping slave to freedom in Baltimore, starting a chain of misery that moves back into the deep south and then to New York, with racism, further violence, forced labor, and more. Effia marries the Governor of the slave castle where, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is held in the dungeon below. Their child, Quey, is ill at ease in the white man’s world and returns to his Asante people, beginning a back-and-forth pattern between the Black and white cultures in east Africa until the final story sees their descendant in Alabama, where the two stories will eventually reconnect. It’s a masterwork of planning, with the parallel narratives coming together in a way that is driven by coincidence yet feels natural, almost inevitable, and that will never have you thinking how meticulous the novel’s structure is.
Next up: I’m reading some of the books on writing that you all recommended, having finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and started Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing.