Homegoing, written by Yaa Gyasi, is so beautifully and skilfully written it’s hard to believe this is her debut novel. Homegoing is a historical novel whose sweep of history is breath-taking in its scope, featuring wonderfully drawn characters and giving a voice to those whose story is rarely told.
The catalyst is the fates of two sisters, unknown to each other, born in the 18th century in what was later to become Ghana. One sister marries a slave trader while the other is sold into slavery. As each chapter unfolds we learn what happens to their descendants with each chapter telling the story of a specific family member, the characters so well-written and the historical setting so evocatively described that every chapter could easily be a short story in its own right. Nevertheless there is a strong through line throughout the novel, as it depicts the black experience both in America and on the West coast of Africa.
Gyasi’s writing reminds me somewhat of Anna Segher’s ability to expertly depict man’s inhumanity to man by underlining the very humanity of the people their oppressors were so keen to negate. Given the nature of the material it would be easy for such a novel to be a polemic, instead Homegoing is written with a lot of verve and a great understanding for the human condition.
You are drawn into the lives of each character which makes the sufferings and injustices they suffer all the more acute. And the historical details are horrific, from the conditions the slaves are kept in at the Castle prior to being sent overseas into slavery to the iniquities of the American legal system. Gyasi intricately weaves in the historical details so they are part of the weft of the story, obviously aware that there will be many readers not au fait with the history being told here. This ranges from political machinations by Western powers such as the British to divide, exploit and control the local African populations for their own profit; to using the American legal system post-emancipation to criminalise and enslave future generations of black men for the most petty of reasons and where, under the lease system, their lives are worth less than when they were slaves: in one case Timothy is arrested and convicted for disturbing the peace for the ‘crime’ of having gone outside his own house late at night and trying to quieten a dog: another guy is sentenced to 20 years for stealing a nickel. What is clear when we read about H.’s life is that slavery might, in theory, have been abolished but, in reality, it was just replaced by a far more insidious system.
Via Willie we see a representative of those who migrated northwards to avoid the Jim Crow laws only to face a different kind of segregation up north; where it’s easier for you in society if you’re light-skinned enough to deny who you are and pass as white and where someone like Willie is unable to get a singing job despite her fantastic voice because she’s considered ‘too dark-skinned’ to be seen on stage. Later on, we see the social turmoil that results from such a tortured and fractured past to Marcus, studying for his Ph.D. at Stanford, acutely aware you can’t talk about one aspect of the black experience as if it existed in a vacuum as well as the inequalities that still abound. Perhaps one of the most prosaic examples of such inequality is best expressed when Marcus concludes ‘And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day.’
The depictions of the descendants in Africa are no less intriguing, from James who turns his back on his family’s name, power and prestige because he is painfully aware it’s due to their involvement in the slave trade, to the Crazy Woman of Edweso, one of the most striking figures in the entire novel, to Marjorie, who as an African living in America feels cut off from everyone, regarded as a foreigner when she is back in Ghana while at the same time she is ostracised from her fellow African-American students at school. These chapters also give us a snapshot into the traditions, beliefs, politics and way of life to be found in that part of Africa while never shying away from the participation of some West Africans in the slave trade.
To be able to combine such a grand sweep of history, daunting themes on both sides of the Atlantic and wrap it up with such great characters and wonderful storytelling is writing of jaw-dropping mastery. Homegoing is so well-written that despite the tragedy that haunts most of the characters’ lives, the novel is by no means a depressing read but rather an enthralling one.
