Homegoing’s unusual structure perfectly amplifies Gyasi’s concern with colonialism.

These stories are left to the reader alone. Though the characters are often mistreated in the US because of their race, they are simultaneously alienated from their African roots due to geographical separation, the anonymity of slavery, and the stories that never have the chance to pass from one generation to another. Race and lost heritage play an enormous role in Gyasi’s novel. It is no mean feat to wrest real characters from such racially freighted moments in history, but Gyasi frequently manages it. In a later chapter, set in Alabama, we see Marjorie’s love affair with a white boy who refuses to take a black student to the prom. Another stand-out is “two-shovel” H, named for his prodigious coal-shoveling ability, which is revealed after he is sold into a chain gang.

One of the most affecting later chapters chronicles Willie’s marriage to Richard, who, unlike her, can “pass” as white in Harlem what follows is marital breakdown. Comparisons to Alex Haley’s Roots (which won the Pulitzer prize in 1976), are particularly apt.Ĭharacters are a strong point throughout. The book’s later chapters are reminiscent of the work of Helen Oyeyemi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These chapters, set in Ghana, resonate with the orality of spoken history and myth that has elicited comparisons of Gyasi to Zora Neale Hurston. Some of the best storytelling occurs at the start of the novel. Each chapter is from the point of view of one character, and as the chapters move chronologically and without skipping generations, each protagonist is the child of one we’ve formerly met.

The story ends with the reunification of the two family lines: Marcus, raised in New York, courts the bookish Marjorie, who, in an echo of Gyasi’s own life, moved from Ghana to America in her infancy. Effia’s Ghanaian descendants weather wars and colonialism Esi’s are sold into slavery in America, and witness the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heroin epidemic. The book subsequently moves over a period of three hundred years, with each chapter swapping between the two family branches. While Effia lives in luxury in the Cape Coast Castle, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is captured in warfare, and then raped and beaten in the ordure-filled dungeon below. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing opens in the eighteenth century in what is modern-day Ghana, where a character named Effia is sold by her parents to an English governor.

Homegoing yaa gyasi sparknotes