Ghana-born, Alabama-raised writer Yaa Gyasi takes the title of her debut novel from the belief traditionally held in African-American culture that after a slave’s death their spirit was set free to travel back to their ancestral Africa. The homegoing charted in the novel involves two estranged branches of a family tree.
The story begins in East Africa in the 1750s, the birthplace of half-sisters Effia and Esi, and traces the travels and travails of their descendants through six generations before drawing to a close back in Africa 250 years later.
Even before the British and Dutch colonialists arrive, life in the Gold Coast is fractured by regular skirmishes between the Fante and Asante (Ashanti) peoples. Effia’s mother, Maame, is an Asante slave in a Fante household who is raped and impregnated by one of her captors.
The night she gives birth to Effia, she abandons the baby, torches her rapist’s crops and flees into the bush. Years pass and Effia’s father – a powerful warrior in the village – marries her off to the newly-appointed English governor of the Cape Coast Castle.
For the briefest of periods, yet unbeknownst to each other, the sisters’ lives cross paths. Effia lives with her husband in his comfortable apartments high up in the castle, while below in the dungeons, Esi – born to their mother and her Asante husband after Maame found her way back to her people, but who is now captured in a battle – awaits transport to America alongside fellow “cargo”.
Before she is imprisoned, Esi’s mother’s house girl tells her that separated sisters “are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond”. Thus Gyasi’s story plays out: Effia and her descendants living in the Gold Coast (later Ghana), Esi and hers across the ocean in America.
With a timeline that spans two-and-a-half centuries, set across two continents, and featuring 14 central characters, Gyasi has been wildly ambitious in Homegoing, and on many counts, excitingly so.
The novel’s structure allows for a particularly potent portrayal of the legacy of slavery; one that highlights the impact of the past on the present, exposing just how precarious post-civil rights freedom really is.
With just one chapter per character, it’s made crystal clear how the choices each makes – or, more often than not, the fates they endure – have a direct impact on their offspring.
The often less successful flipside of this, however, is that certain characters are uncomfortably cipher-like, reduced to type, both them and their settings necessarily representative of an entire generation and historical period: from Esi’s daughter, Ness, a field hand on a barbaric antebellum Alabama estate, to her great-great grandson, Sonny, who lives in Harlem in the 1960s, who has fathered three children with three different women, all of whom he neglects, and who works for the NAACP and becomes a heroin addict.
With their compelling cocktail of horror: the image of a slave whipped "until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby"; the barbarism of the Fugitive Slave Act and Jim Crow segregation; and the unapologetic racism of a supposedly-liberal New York in the early years of the 20th century; combined with familiarity from echoes of works such as 12 Years a Slave, Passing and the writings of Toni Morrison, the vignettes set in America initially seem the more accessible. But most engaging of all are the book's earliest chapters, those that document Effia and Esi's lives.
It’s surely no coincidence that these also showcase the most daring and original elements of Gyasi’s narrative: her acknowledgement of the participation of the West Africans themselves in the slave trade.
As Effia’s great-great granddaughter explains to her grandchild, Marjorie, “Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”
Marjorie, Ghanaian but living in the US, struggles with her identity. “I’m not African-American,” she tells a teacher who asks her what being African-American means to her. “You’re here now, and here black is black is black,” is the teacher’s (well meant) reply.
Marjorie's sense of self, of course, is not that simple though, and so too the messages of Homegoing are as similarly complex and complicated.
For every cliché Gyasi falls back on, there’s a previously suppressed voice invited forth to tell its story. It’s not a perfect book but it is a promising one, and Gyasi is undoubtedly a writer to watch.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London.
