Homegoing (Gyasi novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.
The novel was selected in 2016 for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017. It received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for 2017.
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Plot
Effia's line
Effia is raised by her mother, Baaba, who is cruel to her. Nevertheless she works hard to please her mother. Known as a beauty, Effia is intended to be married to the future chief of her village, but when her mother tells her to hide her menstrual cycle, rumours spread that she is barren. As a result she married a British man, James Collins, the governor of Cape Coast Castle. He and Effia have a happy marriage. She returns to her family village one time, when her father dies, where her brother tells her that Baaba is not Effia's mother and that Effia is the daughter of an unknown slave.
Effia and James have a son called Quey who is raised in the Cape Coast Castle. His parents, worrying that he is friendless, eventually have him befriend a local boy named Cudjo. When they are teenagers Quey and Cudjo realize that they are attracted to one another. In fear of their relationship James sends Quey to England for awhile. When he returns, Quey is assigned to help to strengthen the ties between his familial village, who sell slaves, and the British. He is frustrated by his uncle Fiifi, who seems evasive about trade relations. Eventually Fiifi along with Cudjo, raid the village of the Asante people and bring back the daughter of an Asante chief. Realizing that to marry her would join his people, the Fantes, with the Asantes, Quey resolves to forget Cudjo and marry the Asante girl.
Quey's son, James, learns that his Fante grandfather died and returns to Asante land where he meets a farmer woman, Akosua Mensah. Growing up with his parents dysfunctional political marriage, and promised since childhood to the daughter of the Fanta chief, Amma, James longs to run away and marry Akosua. With help from Effia, James runs away from Amma and lives among the Efutu people until they are raided and killed by the Asantes. He is saved by a man who recognizes him though James makes him promise to tell everyone he has died. He then travels to reunite with Akosua.
James's daughter Abena only knows her father as a rural farmer called Unlucky for his inability to grow crops. By the time she is twenty five she is still unmarried. Her childhood best friend, Ohene promises to marry her after his next successful season and the two begin an affair which coincides with the start of a famine. The village elders, discovering the affair, tell them that if Abena conceives a child or the famine lasts more than seven years Abena will be cast out. In the sixth year Ohene successfully farms cocoa plants. Rather than marry Abena he tells her that he promised to marry the daughter of the farmer who gave him the seeds. Abena, now pregnant, decides to leave her village rather than wait for Ohene to marry her.
Akua grows up among white missionaries after her mother dies early in her childhood. When an Asante man proposes, she accepts and marries him and the couple have several children. Before the birth of her third child Akua begins to have nightmares about a woman on fire with burning children. At the same time war breaks out and her husband goes to war. He, returns missing one leg, in time for the birth of their son, Yaw. The nightmares continue to haunt Akua and, while sleepwalking, she murders her daughters by setting a fire that consumes them. Her husband is able to save Yaw and successfully prevent Akua from being burned herself by the townspeople.
Yaw grows up to be a schoolteacher who is highly educated but angry about his facial burn scars. After his friends go through a difficult pregnancy he decides to take on a house girl, Esther, and he grows to love her. To please Esther he goes to see his mother for the first time in over forty years where she tells him that there is evil in their line and also tells him that she regrets causing the fire that burned him.
Marjorie grows up in Alabama, which she hates, and spends summers in Ghana visiting her grandmother. In her majority white high school she struggles to fit in as the black students mock her for acting white and the white students won't have anything to do with her. While reading in the library she meets a German born army brat, Graham, and develops a crush on him hoping he will ask her to prom. Instead his father and the school ban them from attending together and when Marjorie hears him telling others that she is not like other black girls her crush on him dissolves. Her grandmother dies shortly after and Marjorie returns to Ghana for the funeral.
Esi's line
Esi is the beloved and beautiful daughter of a Big Man and his wife, Maame. Her father is a renowned and successful warrior and he eventually captures a slave who asks Esi to send a message to her father about where she is. Esi complies out of pity as her mother was formerly enslaved. As a result her village is raided and her father and mother are killed. Before she leaves Esi learns that her mother had a child before her, while she was enslaved. She is then captured and imprisoned in the dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle where she is raped before being sent to America.
Esi's daughter, Ness, is raised in America. Her mother teaches her some Twi but she and her mother are eventually beaten for it and separated. In her new, more lenient plantation, Ness is forbidden from becoming a house slave because of the deep scars on her back. Before arriving at the plantation Ness was forcibly married to an African man who spoke no English though they eventually came to love one another and have a child, whom she named Kojo. After a woman heard her speaking Twi, Ness was offered the opportunity to escape north. Ness, her husband, Sam, and Kojo escaped but in an effort to protect her son, she and her husband allowed themselves to be caught and then claimed their child died. Ness was severely whipped, causing her brutal scars, and forced to watch as her husband was lynched.
Kojo is raised in Baltimore where he goes by the name Jo Freeman and marries a freeborn black woman Anna. When Anna is pregnant with their eighth child the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is passed. Jo is warned that he should go further North but he decides to stay. Though he worries that he will be captured as his papers are forgeries, in the end it is Anna who disappears while pregnant. The kidnapping destroys Jo's family.
H is freed during the Reconstruction era, but sometime after, as an adult man, is arrested and accused of assaulting a white woman. Unable to pay the ten dollar fine he is sentenced to work in a coal mine for ten years. When H is released from his sentence he intends to rejoin a black community but discovers that he is ostracized for being a convict. He settles in Pratt City in Birmingham, Alabama, made up of other convicts both black and white, and works in the coal mine as a free agent. After a few years he writes to his ex girlfriend Ethe, whom he cheated on shortly before being arrested. She eventually comes to join him.
Willie marries Robert, her childhood sweetheart who is light-skinned, and they have a son named Carson. After her parents die Robert suggests they move away and Willie asks that they go to Harlem as she wants to start a career in a singer. As they look for work Willie realizes that her dark skin will prevent her from being a professional singer while Robert is able to pass for white. The two grow farther apart and begin keeping secrets from one another. After Willie runs into Robert at one of her jobs and they are both sexually humiliated by his white coworkers, Robert abandons her. Willie eventually begins a new relationship and has a daughter. After seeing Robert with his new white partner and their white child she realizes she forgives him.
Carson, who as an adult goes by the name Sonny, tries to find meaning in marching for civil rights and working for the NAACP but instead becomes demoralized by his work. Like his own father he becomes an absentee parent to three children. He meets a young singer named Amani and after she introduces him to drugs he becomes addicted to drugs as well. When Willie finally reveals details on his father and offers him a choice between her money or getting clean he chooses to get clean.
Sonny and Amani's son Marcus goes on to become an academic at Stanford University. He meets Marjorie, now working as a lecturer and the two form an intimate bond. She suggests that they go to Ghana and while they are there visiting Marjorie's family he suggests they go to the Cape Coast Castle which Marjorie has never visited. While seeing the Door of No Return Marcus has a panic attack and flees through the door to the beach. He and Marjorie swim in the water where she gives him Effia's stone, which has been passed to her through the generations, and which unbeknownst to the both of them, was given to Effia by their mutual ancestor, Maame.
Major themes
The novel touches on several notable historical events, from the introduction of cacao as a crop in Ghana and the Anglo-Asante wars in Ghana to slavery and segregation in America. Because of the novel's scope, which covers several hundred years of history and fourteen characters, it has been described as "a novel in short stories" where "each chapter is forced to stand on its own."
