‘Homegoing’ a compelling tale of two sisters and two continents
Yaa Gyasi’s novel “Homegoing” is hands-down the finest story I have read so far this year.
Not since Alex Haley’s “Roots” have I been so taken by characters and their descendants spanning more than 300 years.
It has taken me some time to put into words why this story of half-sisters Effia and Esi, born in different villages in Ghana in the 18th century, is uniquely powerful. It is a story of Africa’s Gold Coast and the intrusive and overpowering effects of colonialism. It is the bifurcated tale of the sisters and their offspring as they live in colonized Ghana and under slavery and beyond in the United States.
Gyasi, an American citizen born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Ala., has written a most evenhanded story of enslavement from within and without. She does not shy away from warring tribes selling their captives to the slave traders or the squalid and inhuman conditions in which the English held the slaves before loading them onto the slave ships.
She describes life in the tribal compounds with an honesty and cultural integrity not often found in stories about African natives. There are no stereotypes. Customs and traditions are played out with characters we care about deeply. Courtship, marriages and childbirth may be different from our customs, but Gyasi’s characters are as human, flawed and gifted as any you will find.
The women especially stand out as tribal pillars. Edweso, a village whose men had gone off to fight the British, is a place where “the absence of the men felt like its own presence.”
The American side of the story begins with Esi, who is sold into slavery and shipped to America. From that point until the end, the narrative travels between the Ghanaian and American settings. The European and Christian colonization of Africa in the areas around the Gold Coast never overshadow the families and generations that follow the two sisters.
The American side of the tale does not remain long in the years of slavery, but all the bitter years of Jim Crow follow emancipation.
I can only speak of “Homegoing” as an American story. Gyasi reflects the influence of Africa on the two families on either continent when speaking of a son who returns to his mother in the village in which he was born: “Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future.”
The families of both sisters eventually live in America. When a granddaughter returns to Ghana to visit her dying grandmother, we feel the bonds that tie their failures and successes to Africa – where the stories of their ancestors have been committed to an oral tradition that cannot be erased. “Homegoing” is Gyasi’s commitment to those ancestors.
Sunny Solomon is a freelance writer and head of the Clayton Book Club. Visit her website at
bookinwithsunny.com for her latest recommendations or just to ‘talk books.’