Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I just finished reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a historical novel that follows the lives of two half-sisters and their descendants through six subsequent generations and over 200 years. Effia and Esi were born to the same mother but different fathers in West Africa in the late 1700s. Effia grew up in Fanteland, while Esi lived with her family in Asanteland until the age of 15. The first chapter describes how Effia remained in what is now Ghana and married a white man, a slave trader named James Collins. Esi, on the other hand, was sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic. The ensuing chapters describe the lives of their descendants, leading up to very recent times when Effia's great-great-great-great-grandaughter, Marjorie, meets up with Esi's four-times-great grandson, Marcus, in California. The book ends with Marcus and Marjorie visiting Ghana together.

The novel was so sad that it hurt to read. While tragedy stalked the family on both sides of the Atlantic, Esi and her descendants suffered far more. The effects of slavery were devastating to them and caused unimaginable loss and suffering. Esi, her daughter Ness, her grandson Nojo, Nojo's wife, Anna, and Esi's great-grandson H, were all very suddenly torn away from any immediate family, some of them on more than one occasion. Sadly, separatating brown-skinned people from their family members is a practice that continues to this day. Even after slavery was abolished, its aftermath caused immense hardship to the children and grandchildren of slaves in the book as they suffered from racism, lack of opportunity, inadequate education, poverty, and addiction.

It is only in the final chapter of the book that Marcus, who is doing a PhD in sociology at Stanford, shows that perhaps his generation of descendants of slaves will be able to move beyond the curse of the past. However, Marcus also grapples with the legacy of enslavement that blighted the lives of his ancestors. He struggles with his research as described on p. 289 of my edition (First Vintage Books, April 2017): "Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction -- the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, too, about the 'war on drugs'. And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University."

Those last few sentences of the above paragraph are absolutely chilling, especially given today's announcement of the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and the fact that his replacement will be nominated by Donald Trump, a man who called for the restoration of the death penalty back in 1989 when five black boys, the "Central Park Five", were wrongly convicted of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park. Their sentences were eventually overturned, thanks to DNA evidence and the conviction of a serial rapist named Matias Reyes. Disturbingly, Trump doubled down on his racial animus in October, 2016, one month before he was elected president, saying, "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous." What sort of successor to Justice Kennedy is this instinctive racist capable of selecting? I have to hope that the Democrats will be able to hold the line against Trump's worst impulses in the coming confirmation struggle.

Gyasi also deals with the collusion of Africans in the slave trade. She describes how the Fante (Effia's step-family) captured members of the Asante (Esi's family) and sold them to the British.

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, in 1989, and moved to the US in 1991. While she now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, she grew up for the most part in Huntsville, Alabama, where her father was a professor of French at the University of Alabama and her mother worked as a nurse. She completed Homegoing, her first (and thus far only)  novel, when she was just 25 years old. She studied english literature at Stanford and later graduated  from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She has won several awards for her book, and I hope she will continue writing. I'd love to read her autobiography one of these days!