Homegoing tells a compelling story of the lineage of two half-sisters who have never met and live two entirely different lives in 18th century Ghana. The book takes us into the family trees of both, several generations that can be traced back to a single point in time, during the great slave trade of the Gold Coast. The Cape Coast Castle near the sea becomes the starting point of their journeys. Incidentally, the story also ends at this very place. What transpires between is a tale of darkness, tragedy, struggle, sacrifice and hope, culminating with the present-day descendents meeting unknowingly and ending up at the very same place in Ghana.

Each chapter in Homegoing focuses on a turning point in each character’s life. In doing so, Gyasi moves neatly down the family tree that begins with the sisters, Effia and Esi. She leaves each story at the end of every particular fragment narrated, not revisiting it, so that the novel reads quite like a collection of short stories, each chapter autonomous of the next. The central story’s continuity is maintained with the reader tracing the movement of each character of the family tree, their choices and predilections, and most of all, their struggles spanning from the villages of Ghana to present-day Harlem, New York. Their narratives track the evolution of tribal wars, slavery, the Great Migration, the American Civil War and emancipation. Because of the short glimpses into their lives we are often left wondering what is next, before the next captivating account takes over.

Gyasi highlights in visually descriptive and rich poetic prose the cotton fields of the southern plantations as described by the “field slaves”. She is evocative and precise when taking us through their journeys, telling us stories of grit and survival of an entire race of people before and after emancipation. In doing so, she highlights the flaws of both the coloniser and the colonised. She ensures the book is as much about legacy as it is about tenacity and courage as she takes us through the cotton fields of Alabama, the shipyards of Baltimore, the coal mines of Birmingham, all the way up to the jazz bars of Harlem where African-Americans settled by the thousands, finding their way further and further away from the south, wanting to start afresh.

The story of how a family ripped apart by violence and war, spanning centuries and across continents, comes together

Effia, the town beauty, charts her own destiny by marrying a British officer residing in the castle. Her own ancestry unknown to her, her half-sister Esi remains captive in the dungeons below. Effia’s grandson James, unwittingly taking part in the slave trade, opts out of it after realising its moral implications. Leaving his life in the castle, he yearns for a new order and returns to his grandmother’s homeland to marry a local village girl and start over. Kojo Freeman, who works at the shipyards with fellow freed slaves, credits his parents, both field slaves in Alabama, for hiding him up a tree in order for him to escape slavery. H, mistaken for a runaway slave, is captured, declared a convict and sold to a coal mine to work for the next nine years shovelling coal, to carry out a contrived sentence. Casting a light on the warped prison system Gyasi reminds readers that even after emancipation the systemic continuation of the slave trade thrived, especially in the south.

Yaw, a teacher and scholar in Ghana, has settled in Alabama, but his daughter Marjorie is an anomaly at her high school, where the majority of African-Americans have been cast out of institutional life, such as schools, by way of either prejudice or meritocracy. She is also the first of her generation to visit the famous Cape Coast Castle and Ghana. Examining the history of her ancestors, she remains extremely close to her grandmother who can be traced back to Effia. Marjorie feels a strange affinity to the castle by the sea which she visits every summer, and which her grandmother repeatedly reminds her is her homeland.

Marjorie meets Marcus at Stanford Uni­versity where he is a PhD candidate and so the two strains of the family tree unite by chance. Marcus, whose history can be traced back to Esi, becomes fast friends with Marjorie, and at her insistence they travel to Ghana and the home of her ancestors which, unknown to him, is also where his history began.

The book ends on this hopeful note, giving the story much closure yet leaving it open-ended for the descendants to discover about each other and their lineage.

Carving out compelling characters, Gyasi tells the story of a family before and after the Civil War, and leaves it at the current generation grappling with the aftermath of its burdening history, self-effacing as it may be. She tells the story of a people and their culture, giving credence to their movements and their plight, not referring to the political climate except to record the people’s geographical placement and migratory patterns.

In her acknowledgements Gyasi makes note of the texts and literature referenced while writing this book which, although a work of fiction, is no doubt based on the slave trade conducted between the various African-American tribes — mainly Asante and Fante — and the British, American, Dutch and Portuguese who gained from it. She looks at the wars, the trade, the forced change from their native language to English, alongside highlighting the importance of the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the white man’s burden.

Her powerful and memorable narrative cements the resilient and defiant characters, carrying the immense weight of telling the story of a journey and a legacy of a family that started apart only to come beautifully together at the end. The book’s mesmerising quality urges you to keep reading, while its intensity recalibrates the depth of history and of the personal narratives told.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist writing on politics, current affairs and culture.

Homegoing
(NOVEL)
By Yaa Gyasi
Knopf, US
ISBN: 978-1101947135
305pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 6th, 2016