Homegoing Traces a Family’s Lives Across Continents and Generations

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing comes a couple of generations later, but it is another rare achievement, a book that is as successful in detail as it is ambitious in scope, and one that deserves to be read alongside Roots, as well as Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.
The institution of slavery seems, in some ways, like an inexhaustible source for fiction, offering conflict, drama, poignancy, heroes, and villains, much in the way that war does. But while war novels proliferate, slavery novels do not, possibly because, in America, the subject still feels too raw. Perhaps authors are intimidated by the notion of contending with normalized, state-sanctioned evil, or perhaps by the standards against which their work would be measured: Beloved is widely considered to beone of, if not the, Great American Novel, and conventional wisdom at the time held that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped start the Civil War.
If Gyasi is intimidated, though, there is no evidence of it in these pages. Her writing is assured and her storytelling confident from the moment she begins her tale on Africa’s Gold Coast. Three hundred years, and as many pages, later, she ends it with two Americans visiting contemporary Ghana. At the outset of the tale, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are separated by circumstance: one, who is affiliated with the element of Fire, stays in Africa; the other, whose element is Water, is kidnapped, abused, and shipped across an ocean to be enslaved. Homegoing drops in on their descendants’ lives on both continents as time passes and they marry and mourn, burn with rage and flood with grief.
The novel’s morals are clear: fathers should value their daughters, for example; mothers should not be parted from their sons; corporal punishment is almost always a destructive misuse of power. But it never descends into moralizing. And although there are dozens of characters to keep track of, each manages to stand out in some quiet way. Foremost among them is the ex-con coal miner who attains folks hero status as Two-Shovel H. (He was the eighth child of a free black woman in mid–19th century Baltimore who was nonetheless kidnapped and sold into bondage while pregnant and before she and her husband had chosen a name for their unborn son.) And there is Akua, a tragic figure known as the Crazy Woman, who manages to outlive her misfortune and refuses to let it define her. “You have to let yourself be free,” she tells her son, in what could pass as the message of the book.
Gyasi’s empathy for her characters is generous enough to extend even to warrior kings, greedy slavers, and impoverished drug addicts in Harlem who produce children they can’t support. Throughout, she asks the reader to look down. Referring to the English slaver headquarters on the Gold Coast called the Castle, where some luckier individuals walked, learned, and even prayed mere meters over the heads of others destined for the most abject torture, Gyasi writes, “it was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath.” Though Gyasi does not make it easy for us to peer underneath, she does make it very much worth our while.