BOOKS: Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi, who was born in Ghana but raised in Alabama, grew up with the distinctive perspective of a vicarious participation in the African-American experience of the descendants of slavery, while also having a more immediate connection to her West African roots. From this experience, she has crafted Homegoing, a beautiful, sweeping novel that captures all of that complexity by telling a story of seven generations on two continents. On the “Gold Coast” of West Africa, two centuries ago, a fortification called the Cape Coast Castle housed British governors in relative luxury while the dungeons beneath them held hundreds of slaves waiting to be loaded onto ships to the New World. Through that portal, one woman passed through the dungeons while her half-sister lived for a time above before returning to her Fante village. Homegoing tells the story of these two women and six generations of their descendants. In West Africa, the lives of the characters provide a lens on village life, the customs of the warring Fante and Ashanti peoples, the experience of European incursion and the slave trade at the source, and later, missionaries, the introduction of cocoa, and moving toward national independence. In America, her characters experience slavery, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, northern migration, Harlem. While all of this is as epic as a Michener novel in its scope, it doesn’t feel the weight of all that history because each chapter is a very personal story of one person in the genealogy, focused on their personal hopes, desires, frustrations, and achievements. It’s really a series of short stories linked by ancestry, and the stories are told in beautiful prose that captures the language patterns and feel of each person’s place and time, and with a lovely whiff of magical realism. I was not surprised to read that the author has mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez as one of her inspirations. There is some wonderful imagery around fire and the ocean. In one passage describing how evil has touched a whole family, a character explains that evil is like a net cast wide by a fisherman who keeps the fish he wants and puts the rest back, but even the released fish are no longer the same because they know they were not free. As a genealogist, I was especially intrigued by this fictional genealogy because it illustrates the many distinct challenges of tracing African-American roots, where for various reasons a person might not have known who their grandparents were, or sometimes even their parents. Gyasi’s beautiful book imagines a fantastic genealogy, making magical sense of the complexities she grew up with.