A slim comfortable paperback; not much to say.
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Publication: 2016
Genre: Historical Fiction
I’m getting to the end of my pile of books that I read in 2020 - just two more will take us to the new year. This was a good one (unsurprisingly, given the hype I’d heard about it).
Homegoing tells the story of two families, related through a pair of half-sisters permanently unknown to one another. It begins in late eighteenth century Ghana. Effia is married off to a white slave trader and her descendants become involved in trafficking other humans. Esi is captured in one of their raids and shipped to America to live out her life enslaved. Each sister’s story gets an initial chapter, and then each subsequent chapter alternates between the perspective of one of the sisters’ descendants. The narrative structure of one moment in time gives the novel a quality of being a collection of short stories, all nearly identical in length.
Gyasi writes beautifully and constructs authentic characters. Her prose make sit easier to stay with the characters when their stories are difficult. On both sides of the Atlantic, the stories are heavy on pain, longing, unfulfilled desire, and failed relationships. Everyone in the book is sad. They’re enslaved or they’re incarcerated. They’ve lost their parents or been left by their spouses. They have unfulfilled dreams or unrequited loves. The stories are poignant and sometimes heartbreaking.
In the final few chapters I found myself fatigued with the “short story” setup – I knew every time a romantic interest was introduced that they were going to break the protagonist’s heart in the next fifteen pages. In tracing the lineage of each character, the narrative sometimes gets very hung up on their sexual pursuits and familial dissatisfactions at the expense of other aspects of their character.
It seemed that each chapter had a historical “subject”, which I have mixed feelings about. In this one we’re doing northern slave catching before the US Civil War, in that one we’re doing Christian missionaries in Ghana, in this other one we’re doing the Great Migration and colorism, and so on. While early on Gyasi makes sure to drop references to the year to anchor the reader, later on she neglects to do so. Meanwhile, she makes some of the characters so old that they begin cropping up in the stories narrated by their much younger descendants. Without some more careful re-reading and math, I’m quite unsure when the last two sections of the book, which ostensibly would bring the story into the late twentieth century, actually occur. The last few chapters feel like a sprint to the finish line, and IMHO there is a missed opportunity to bring the story into the present day.
Still, on the whole, Homegoing is a very interesting premise that was mostly well executed. Definitely recommended.