Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half-sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.
Homegoing: A novel Yaa Gyasi
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The novel was selected in 2016 for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017. It received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for 2017, an American Book Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature.[1]
The novel touches on several notable historical events, from the introduction of cacao as a crop in Ghana and the Anglo-Asante wars in Ghana to slavery and segregation in America.[2] Because of the novel's scope, which covers several hundred years of history and fourteen characters, it has been described as "a novel in short stories" where "each chapter is forced to stand on its own."[3]
Maureen Corrigan, reviewing for National Public Radio noted the plot was "pretty formulaic" and it "would have been a stronger novel if it had ended sooner," but "the feel of her novel is mostly sophisticated," and she concluded that "so many moments earlier on in this strong debut novel linger."[14] Michiko Kakutani noted in her New York Times review the novel "often feels deliberate and earthbound: The reader is aware, especially in the American chapters, that significant historical events and issues ... have been shoehorned into the narrative, and that characters have been made to trudge through experiences ... meant, in some way, to be representative," but it also "makes us experience the horrors of slavery on an intimate, personal level; by its conclusion, the characters' tales of loss and resilience have acquired an inexorable and cumulative emotional weight."[15] Other reviewers were not as critical of the novel's structure. Jean Zimmerman, also writing for National Public Radio, praised the novel as "a remarkable achievement," saying the "narrative [...] is earnest, well-crafted yet not overly self-conscious, marvelous without being precious."[16]
The novel was subsequently awarded the John Leonard Award for publishing year 2016 by the National Book Critics Circle for outstanding debut novel in January 2017.[23][24] In February 2017, Swansea University announced Homegoing had made the longlist for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize for the best published literary work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or younger.[25] The novel was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2017,[26] a nominee for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction,[27] and a nominee for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2018.[28]
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into the Fante and Asante tribes of 18th century Ghana. The book follows their families, with successive chapters mining stories from each lineage. Effia's descendents remain in Africa, warring and intermarrying with members of different tribes. Esi is enslaved by an American planter. The contrapuntal lives of the African and African-American progeny shape the novel's compelling narrative arc; in the end, it is the Ghana-born Gyasi who so artfully accomplishes her own home-going.
Meshing the streets of Harlem and the Gold Coast of Ghana in the pages of one novel is a remarkable achievement. Yaw, one of the book's 20th century descendents, teaches a class of African adolescents, whom he urges to think deeply about history: "You must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story, too." In Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi has given rare and heroic voice to the missing and suppressed.
Yaa Gyasi: My family is hugely into telling stories. That tradition I think is very important to this book. In the earlier chapters, in trying to research, I found it hard to find traditional written things about what the characters might be feeling and experiencing from the perspective of the Ghanaians themselves. I realized that so much of that reason must be because it was an oral storytelling tradition. So I wanted to give this novel an oracular feel. The other thing is that we are a nation of proverb tellers in Ghana. Everything has a proverb: the snake did this, the crocodile did this. I found one that suited the book very well, the one about the family being like a forest. That idea launched this book in many ways.
Yaa Gyasi: I did worry, yes. Each chapter is going to feel representational of that generation, because I gave myself a limitation of only giving each chapter 20 or 30 pages. I was strict about that because I wanted the novel to move with an urgency. One of the downsides is every character might portray a stereotype. I worked around it by making sure my first duty was to explore these characters with an intimacy and truth. To honor the lives of the people that were really living during those time periods. I was finding these moments to play off of these dualities that might exist.
The novel. Yaa Gyasi's historical novel Homegoing traces a long history of anti-Blackness, from European colonization in West Africa in the eighteenth century to contemporary mass incarceration and police violence in the United States. The novel and our community discussions will enable us to begin to address these long and ongoing histories of racism, inequity, and injustice.
Introduction and Welcome by Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Jane Adams. Panelists include novelist Yaa Gyasi, Nicholas Johnson (graduate student in Global Inclusion and Social Development, UMass Boston), and Janae Tooley (undergraduate student, Africana Studies and Communications Double Major, UMass Boston). Dr. Tony Van Der Meer (Senior Lecturer II of Africana Studies, UMass Boston) and Dr. Keith Jones (Visiting Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, UMass Boston) will serve as facilitators.
The evening will celebrate the Restorative Justice Colloquium's campus-wide reading of Yaa Gyasi's beautiful and haunting novel Homegoing. This exceptional evening will be composed of performances by a Ghanian-based dance troupe, Ghana Dance Ensemble, directed by Stephen (Kojo) Agalic; poetic and dramatic performances related to the novel produced by students and alumni of the UMass Boston Performing Arts Department under the direction of professors Rafael Jaen, Jessica Cooper, and Ginger Lazarus; and a poetry reading and original musical composition gifted to us by local, Boston-based community artists Ashley Rose, Thamanai Justine, and Op Browne.
Homegoing, her debut novel, was published in 2016. At just 26 years old, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. In 2020, she was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020.
Gyasi returned to Iowa city in October to give a reading from Homegoing. The novel follows the lives of two Ghanaian sisters and their descendants, tracing the circumstances and effects of the slave trade from a British slave fortress in 18th-century Ghana to modern-day California.
Ayana Mathis was one of my favorite workshop instructors. And I think when I had her she was on tour for her novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. It had just come out and it was doing so well and yet every Tuesday she showed up full of generosity, having read our work, totally present, and I never forgot that.
In Yaa Gyasi's novel "Homegoing," a black scholar can't find the words to explain to his soul mate why he is researching the painful past: "...What he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and everyone else, existed in it, not apart from it, but inside of it."
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written a miraculous novel - the intimate, gripping story of a brilliantly vivid cast of characters and through their lives the very story of America itself.
This novel boldly pushes the scope and possibilities of what historical fiction can do. Intimate yet expansive . . . one of the many extraordinary achievements of Gyasi's enviable debut is the writer's ability to make all the myriad descendants here - enslaved mothers, carpenters, academics - equally worthy of the reader's sustained engagement and compassion
Gyasi echoes [James] Baldwin's understanding of a common culture marked by both yearning and pain, in which black people can confront each other across differences and reach a political understanding about what unites them. What distinguishes Gyasi's presentation of this idea is its scope: She does not present us with a single moment, but rather delivers a multigenerational saga in which two branches of a family, separated by slavery and time, emerge from the murk of history in a romantic embrace . . . . . Homegoing is a reminder of the tenacity of fathers and mothers who struggle to keep their kin alive. The novel succeeds when it retrieves individual lives from the oblivion mandated by racism and spins the story of the family's struggle to survive. 2ff7e9595c
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