With her first novel, Yaa Gyasi crafts a captivating and potent narrative. Homegoing alternates between the parallel lineages of Ghanaian half-sisters Effia and Esi. Born in the 18th-century in Fante village, Effia never knows her mother, Maame, a slave to the girl's father who flees to the nearby Asante village, where she later gives birth to Esi. As the girls age, Effia is given in marriage to a British slave trader, "all the better for [the village's] business with them." Meanwhile, Esi, captured and raped by slavers, bears a family destined for continued abuse--bought, sold and shipped to the New World. Demonstrating a firm grasp on several hundred years of Ghanaian and American history and brutal details of the African slave trade, Gyasi portrays the effect of personal and political decisions unto the seventh generation.
Years pass but family ties bind the sisters' offspring. Their hopes, regrets and secrets alike are handed down like the twin glimmering black-gold stones that Maame bestowed upon both girls. Each of Gyasi's 14 main characters face distinct quandaries of submission and resistance to social systems of oppression.
Quey, Effia's son by the British governor, grows up in affluence until his hopes of true happiness are dashed when his Fante uncle pressures him into a political marriage to the Asante king's captive daughter. "This was how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured. Marry for protection." Half a world away, his cousin Ness is also forced into marriage, but by a slave owner aptly referred to as "the Devil."
With each chapter, Gyasi delves into pivotal moments for specific members of the family tree. Each narrative is rich with poignant details about the lingering colonial influence of Christian missionaries in Ghana or the infuriating machinations of Jim Crow laws in the U.S. Joy is elusive, but not unattainable. It can be found when Willie (Esi's great-great-granddaughter) sings and imagines "that sound came from a cave at the very bottom of her gut... she was a miner reaching deep down inside of her to pull something valuable out." And it can be found in the clear-eyed and rowdy boyhood friendship Quey shares with a Fante chief's son. And even though chapters open and close on a single character in but a moment of time, the other branches of their family tree linger in the background like faint fires from distant campsites, until they converge at last in the moving final chapter.
Rarely does a grand, sweeping epic plumb interior lives so thoroughly. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing is a marvel. It reminds readers that, every step of the way, the African diaspora has been shaped by individuals at their best and at their worst, vulnerable human beings craving the safety of a place to call home. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: In Yaa Gyasi's momentous first novel, seven generations of one Ghanaian family experience the far-reaching consequences of the African slave trade and diaspora.