In the late 18th century, in the African region that
became Ghana, two half-sisters’ lives took different turns. One
was sold into slavery and taken to America. The other stayed in
Africa as the wife of a British colonial official involved in the
slave trade.
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s début novel, features their
descendants down to the present. The book unfolds more like a
collection of related short stories than a traditional novel. The
tale is told chronologically, generation by generation, with
chapters alternating between each woman’s descendants.
For American readers already knowledgeable about the history of
enslavement, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights
movement, the US chapters will be less eye-opening than the
African ones. Gyasi indicts not only the British and the Americans
but also the inland Asantes who captured their compatriots and the
coastal Fante who traded them. Subsequent African chapters range
over tribal wars, droughts, cocoa farming, white missionaries,
colonization, revolutionary movements, and independence.
The title Homegoing is taken from an old belief that an
enslaved person’s spirit could travel back to Africa. The novel
concludes with a hopeful trip back to Ghana by living, distant
American cousins.
Gyasi was born in Ghana and came to the United States as an infant
in 1991 so that her father could complete a PhD at Ohio State
University. He subsequently joined the University of Alabama
faculty, and she grew up in Huntsville. She said that Homegoing
was inspired by a 2009 trip back to Ghana. It received the
National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award, the
PEN/Hemingway Award for best first book, and the American Book
Award for contributions to diversity in American literature, and
it earned Gyasi a National Book Foundation “20 under 35” award.