Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Wow, this book. I don't always like family sagas that cross several generations as I feel like so many of the characters are lost and don't really get developed enough to make the story compelling. But Gyasi created such rich characters for each generation and covered so much history I'm in awe. It was also a normal length for a story, so I'm amazed she was able to do so much and not expand to a 600 page novel.
Homegoing follows seven generations, fourteen perspectives in total. It all begins with two half sisters that never meet and then follows each of their separate families, some brought into slavery in America, but all coming back to their roots in Ghana. Through these characters, we experience life during the tribal wars in Ghana, the slave trade, the fear created by the Fugitive Slave act, and more.
Gyasi wrote a gritty, detailed story about the long-standing effects of the colonization of Africa and the slave trade. A great historical novel that had some amazing characters, all trying to make a life for their family.
Synopsis: The unforgettable New York Times best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.
Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.