Homegoing was recommended to me some time last year when I was raving on Instagram stories about the History of Slavery podcast. Only, I was so traumatized by all the horrors I had listened to that I needed a break before I revisit this topic. So, I have had this book on my shelf for some time now before getting to it.
About Homegoing
Two half-sisters, 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.
~ Synopsis from goodreads
Homegoing review
You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.
The above quote pretty much summarizes the direction of the entire book. Two sisters who never see each other and who live dramatically different lives on two separate continents. Effia marries a British officer who runs the station from which slaves are shipped to the Americas, while Esi is captured in her father’s village and traded as a slave to America.
From there, we follow six generations of their families. We follow one half while they live through co-operation with the British, wars against Europeans, colonialism, and national independence. The other half live through slavery, convict leasing, The Great Migration, and the civil rights movement. All these events, and the racism that surrounds them, play an important part in the stories of these lives.
How easy was it for life to go one way instead of another.
Both sides of the story show how events, circumstances, and decisions, either the person’s own or often those made by others, can ripple through generations, building up resentment and anger. However, forgiveness is also an important theme in the book.
There are a couple of things that I’m very impressed with in this book. Each character receives only one chapter, but Gyasi manages to create a full and unique character in every chapter. In her writing, Gyasi maintains a very good balance between relying on what the reader will already know of the historical events and showing how these events have consequences for the lives of the characters. The other thing that I found very interesting was the mirroring that took place in the stories between two descendants in the same generation. There were many small things where one was experiencing the opposite, in a certain regard, of the other. Sometimes it’s subtle, but mostly the mirroring is very clear, even in the small parts. It tied a lot of the different characters together.
It’s probably one of the best books I’ve read this year. I saw the ending coming a mile away, but it was still well-written.
This is definitely a journey book, not a destination book, but the journey is so beautiful that I didn’t mind the weak ending. I highly recommend it!
