‘Homegoing,’ by Yaa Gyasi
Towards the end of Yaa Gyasi’s tremendous family saga “Homegoing,” a Ghanaian teacher with revolutionary aspirations lectures his students on a problem of history: We need to rely on others’ words to know what happened. He continues, “We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So, when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing?”
“Homegoing,” Gyasi’s first novel, unspools a number of missing stories, all arising from the births of two half-sisters: Effia and Esi. They are born in the 18th century from the same mother but different fathers. They grow up in villages in the rival nations of Asante and Fante, respectively, in what is now Ghana.
On the night Effia is born, a fire blazes outside her father’s compound, damaging his yam crop. Her father believes that the memory of the fire will haunt his descendants. It’s a fire we later learn was set by Effia’s birth mother, a slave raped by her father, and indeed it foreshadows the chain of haunting stories that follows.
Effia is raised with her father and his resentful first wife, Baaba. While she and her father hope she’ll eventually enjoy a good life married to the village chief, Baaba has other plans and manipulates Effia so that she’ll be sent far away. James Collins, the white British governor of the spacious Cape Coast Castle, asks to marry Effia. After their marriage, Effia realizes to her horror that James keeps slaves in the putrid dungeon beneath their extravagant quarters.
Little does Effia know that her 15-year-old half-sister Esi is among the hundreds of imprisoned women. Esi is the daughter of the best warrior of the Asante nation, a man who’s won more than 55 tribal wars and taken numerous prisoners, many of them kept by fellow villagers as slaves. Before being captured by a warrior and taken as a slave herself, Esi learns from one of her family’s own slaves (house girls) that her mother bore a daughter before her. The house girl tells her that separated sisters “are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” In spite of their proximity, Effia and Esi never do meet.
Instead, Esi is shipped to the American Deep South. While Effia’s descendants face warfare, colonialism, repercussions of the slave trade in Ghana, and eventually independence, Esi and her descendants are forced into slavery on an Alabama cotton plantation and later join the Great Migration north. On the American side, the novel transports us through coal mines, jazz clubs and academia into contemporary life. (Gyasi herself knows about both worlds: A native of Ghana, she grew up in Alabama and now lives in Berkeley.)
Midway through the novel, social change engenders personal strife. Rifts appear in the lineage of both sides of the family. In America, Esi’s grandson Kojo fathers numerous alphabetically named children with a free woman. However, a law is passed requiring any alleged runaway slave in the North to be arrested and returned to the South, and Kojo’s wife is erroneously seized while pregnant with “H.”
Meanwhile, faraway in Africa, for James, a child of slavers, the power and money he inherited from the slave trade is no consolation. He flees from the entitlement of that guilty legacy, pretending to be a lowly farmer in a small village where nobody knows him. In the next installment, featuring his daughter Abena, we learn how this moral decision adversely affects her.
In these breaks with family, characters are disengaged from their genealogies, and what happens in subsequent generations provides opportunity for reinvention or a terrible loss of the insights gleaned from experience. It’s a jarring but perspicacious narrative move that mirrors what seems to be a common experience for immigrants and minorities. Those from strong oral traditions who try to research their family trees sometimes discover they can only trace facts so far back before sinking into legend.
Generations later, the two familial lines intersect in a resonant conclusion. Contrary to the house girl’s words to Esi, reflections on opposite sides of the pond can meet.
Spanning three centuries of Ghanaian and American history, each chapter functions like a linked story, each with its own dramatic and emotional arc. While telling what happens to one descendant for each generation, the novel also sheds light on a point in history. In the wrong hands, this massive ambition — gliding through long periods of time with different characters — could result in disaster, but Gyasi pulls it off with spectacular results.
Even the shape of the novel artfully traces its themes: depicting the chains of slavery, but also the spiritual bonds of ancestry and family. Although the histories and cultural contexts of Ghana and the United States are significantly different, Gyasi’s eye for details and her subtle, restrained style — neither scolding nor impressed with itself — trusts the reader to draw fascinating connections between the moral and social issues faced by the two family lines.
At each link, the losses sustained by Effia and Esi’s descendants are deep, brutal and shattering, but this is a novel about survival, endurance and transcendence, beyond the degradation of slavery. The characters are harshly confined by historical circumstances, and yet they have varying degrees of agency within that bondage. Irreducible to saint or villain, each travels along the great gray moral spectrum where we all live.
“Homegoing” brims with complex emotions and insights about the human condition. It is essential reading from a young writer whose stellar instincts, sturdy craftsmanship and penetrating wisdom seem likely to continue apace — much to our good fortune as readers.
By Yaa Gyasi (Knopf; 305 pages; $26.95)