The Past, Present & Future: Homegoing Review

Homegoing: A Novel, released on June 7, 2016, is a sweeping story about family, how the choices of people and governments in the past impacts the present, and the connections between the history of African Americans in the United States and the slave trade and later colonialism in Ghana. The author, Yaa Gyasi, begins the story with literal fire, which grounds the tale of a pair of half sisters, Effia and Esi, who never meet but whose life trajectories still connect, then diverge across continents. Effia lives a relatively privileged life as the wife of a White slave trader in the Gold Coast of Africa (now Ghana) in the 18th century, and Esi is kidnapped from her home and imprisoned in a hell underneath the castle of her sister and slave trader husband, before she is shipped to the United States to live a life of enslavement. The rest of the book tells the stories of each sister’s descendants, up into the present. Along the journey of these two connected family lines, we see how the slave trade, war, enslavement, White supremacy, colonialism, and poverty changed the life trajectory of the characters.

There are so many themes in this book, but two really stood out to me. The first is the theme of imprisonment. All of the characters are imprisoned in some way, either literally through captivity on slave ships, enslavement in the American South (one of the chapters tells the story of a free family, yet they are still imprisoned in a way because of the Fugitive Slave Act and having to live in fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery), incarceration through the convict lease system that evolved into our modern hyperincarceration system, or their difficulty in reckoning with their complicated and traumatic histories renders them mentally imprisoned in a way. The other theme that stood out to me was the importance of history to understanding not only a person’s individual life story, but the story of a people.  We can’t properly tell our own story without telling the story of the place or places, and the ancestors that we originate from.
 

I recommend reading Homegoing: A Novel in tandem with Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, to start to gain an understanding of how lives, families, and whole countries were altered due to actions and violence undertaken by people operating from white supremacy and anti-blackness and because of the continued resistance to this violence by a beautiful and resilient people.