Brutal and honest, Homegoing is also full of love, a longing for home and for family. Its pages reading like a biography as it follows the generations of a family split in two, with each branch of the tree running parallel or in contrast to one another, whilst also having that far away connection. In a style of writing that effortlessly flows in its reading, Yaa Gyasi’s stunning but also harrowing novel contains multiple stories, the characters’ lives feeling as real as your own. And though they’re fictional there is more than a breath of reality and history to the book.
Homegoing begins in the period of the African slave trade; where villages pillage one another, and where soldiers from European countries marry local girls, while trapping and sealing the fates of others as they’re sold to foreign lands. In the first chapter the viewer meets Effia whose family tree stays in Africa, and in the next chapter Esi, who is torn away from her home and sold into a world of cruelty, her family lineage continuing in America. The two bloodlines revealed to share more than just a smooth and iridescent black stone.
Each chapter, from the beginning of these two women, then switches back and forth between the bloodlines, a chapter dedicated and named after each new member of the family, and in this we see the progression of time, but not necessarily of society. Gyasi’s strong writing carrying across the hurt experienced in the lives of her characters, and so deeply, that you flinch even at reading the words.
Homegoing records the darker times of humanity and brings them forward to be heard today, to be remembered, and understood for its horrendous acts like never before – the depiction of dungeons where people are piled on top of one another both sickening and sad. Its history brought alive through a gripping narrative that leads you to hope for a better future even as your shown it’s not; people claimed as possessions; the European slave trade; wars for freedom; missionaries; police brutality; discrimination; persecution; superiority; and wrongful imprisonments – with tombs made of coal, to a dangerous love in deadly times.
“One day the world gon’ know what you done here” Gyasi’s history of oppression and of entrapment, is conveyed in different ways, different times and different countries. In this there are parallels of connection and difference between the characters – one son freed from slavery, the other free from the demands of birth. The characters also regularly escape from the paths set for them – leading them to forage new ones. For all the times of hurt and sadness, there are also many moments of triumph, and in their opposition of each other Africa’s beauty is made even more real, its ravaging more painful.
When reading some of the characters’ stories you expect a certain direction, or to otherwise prepare yourself as you expect their lives to suddenly become worse, but at times like this the book changes on you, becoming lighter. There are reprieves from the darkness of Homegoing due to the strength of the characters, moving them forward against the obstacles that continue to exist.
Often the characters’ individual stories are never concluded, just as in life – you’re not given a satisfying end as to what happened to them, but by not concluding their lives they can represent so many more people who had similar experiences. In writing the chapters and the characters’ lives in this way, it also has the effect of making their voices linger that much longer – you want to know they were okay (although you suspect at times they weren’t). However, in the later chapters of the book, the last three generations are far more detailed in depth, with their history being that much nearer to the present day.
An uncomfortable rawness exists in every line of Homegoing, such is the powerful recounting of lives that were torn and divided apart hundreds of years ago, and the difficulties faced across the subsequent generations. But there’s also hope in the book’s ending. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a beautiful, informative and a highly emotive novel, one that’s hard to put down and impossible to forget.
Other Notable Works by Yaa Gyasi:
- Transcendent Kingdom 2020
Book Edition Information:
Publisher: Penguin Books (part of Penguin Random House)
ISBN: 9780241975237
Cover Design: Nathan Burton
Presented Edition: 2017 Paperback
Background image courtesy of JP Desvigne on Unsplash
