Black History Month Book Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: June 7, 2016
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

Homegoing is a great book to read for Black History Month because it covers such a broad swath of Black history in such a brilliant way. It starts out with two-half sisters, each born in Ghana, knowing nothing of the other. Effia marries an English slave trader and stays in Ghana, while Esi is captured and sold into slavery. Gyasi traces the lives of the sisters and their descendants through the generations up to the present day. Esi’s family’s trajectory shows very clearly slavery’s legacy in America – convict leasing, Jim Crow, etc. I think it will be eye-opening for people who have trouble understanding the roots of systemic racism in this country.

There are two chapters for each generation, one for each sister’s descendant. Each chapter is a snapshot of a signal moment in the life of the subject. In that way, it’s almost like a short story collection. I still felt deeply invested in each character’s fate, even though I didn’t get to spend much time with any of them. I can’t even imagine the research that went into a work of historical fiction like this – spanning almost 300 years in both Ghana and the United States. It was quite an undertaking, I’m sure. It’s amazing that this is Gyasi’s first novel. Highly recommended.