#homegoing

Last night I finished reading Yaa Gyasi's 2016 debut novel Homegoing. I think this is one a coworker recced to me awhile back but can't remember exactly who or when.

This book is a piece of historical fiction following 7 generations of a family line split in two, beginning with the stories of two sisters separated at birth, each growing up in the back half of the 18th century in what would become current-day Ghana.

Effia, a girl known in her Asante village as "the beauty" and all but guaranteed to become a wife of the village chief, ends up coerced into marriage with a British slaver in an attempt to appease her abusive foster/stepmother.

Esi, her estranged sister unbeknownst to either girl, lives with their shared mother Maame in a new village after the woman escaped her own life of domestic slavery with Effia's father by setting his farm ablaze on the night she gave birth to their illegitimate child. When Esi's father gifts her and Maame a house girl of their own named Abronoma, Maame's own circumstances lead her to treat this girl with an irregular kindness that Esi begins to mimic. This dynamic leads to Esi honoring Abronoma's request to send word to her father of her whereabouts. When Abronoma's father raids Esi's village to rescue his daughter, Esi herself is captured and sold into slavery.

This is the structure for the book: the linage of the slavers, and the lineage of the slaves, spanning all the way through the turn of the millennium.

I enjoyed reading this book, but because of its structure meaning we don't get to spend a significant amount of time with any one character, I don't think it's the right fit for this blog's reclist. That said, I think for being nothing more than truncated flashes of each subsequent protagonists' life, the character writing was very strong. Without sacrificing the voice of her own prose, Gyasi was able to make all of these characters distinct, and interesting enough that I remained curious about them even once their segment was over. She was very quick to lay the groundwork you'd need to make you care about these characters: what do they want, why do they want it, what's stopping them from getting it, and what are they going to do about it.

Two of the character segments I found the most memorable and interesting were those of Willie and Akua, each the fifth in their respective lineages.

Willie, the daughter of a coal mining convict turned union leader, marries a light skinned boy in her hometown of Pratt City, Alabama. The two move to Harlem and quickly find that the racial dynamics there differ heavily from those of their much more intermingled hometown, which grew up alongside the Pratt mines. Willie herself is too dark to find a job in the Harlem jazz clubs despite her more than satisfactory voice. Her husband faces the inverse problem; he passes as white, and leveraging that for a modicum of financial security for their family involves publicly distancing himself from his wife. These tensions reach their breaking point when Willie finds he has been working at the same club she's been trying to get her foot in the door of as a cleaner and upon the discovery of this two of his white colleagues force him to publicly assault her as they watch. The two split and Willie struggles to care for their two children on her own. Eventually she rekindles her love of music as a gospel singer in her local congregation.

Akua is a troubled woman. Raised by missionaries after her mother's death but never a believer in the Christian faith, she seems to suffer from a type of dissociation that manifests as a fixation with and fear of fire and a tendency to zone out for periods of time. This was sparked by an incident when she watched the villagers burn a white man to death as he pleaded for mercy. She leaves the missionary and marries a man whose mother is not fond of her, having two daughters and eventually becoming pregnant with a son. Her sleep is plagued by nightmares of a woman made of fire, which worsen when her husband leaves to heed Yaa Asantewaa's call to action to fight against the British in their most recent war. In her son's absence, Akua's mother-in-law keeps her in what is essentially a psychiatric hold, separating her from her children. Her husband returns from the war with a missing leg and rescues her from isolation; soon after that their son is born. A dissociative episode in the wake of her son's birth that to me is pretty easy to read as postpartum psychosis sees her setting their hut on fire without coming to awareness until it is too late. Disabled as he is, her husband was only able to save their infant son and their two daughters perish in the fire. The townspeople are set to send Akua the same way, but her husband pleads for her life and they eventually relent, sparing her.

There are times when the severity of the subject matter doesn't lend itself well to subtlety with such short windows peeking into each era and it's issues, but I think wherever possible the author manages to let the humanity of her characters supersede the inhumanity of their circumstances. The narrative chooses often to focus on the darkest moments of their lives as part of its rather straightforward focus on the generational trauma of black people in the wake of the slave trade, but characterizes and contextualizes them enough outside of this that they don't just feel like punching bags that exist for nothing other than shining a spotlight on the violence they get subjected to.

I found the prose to be straightforwardly unpretentious, but poetic often enough when it needed to be, and when and where more florid imagery was included felt carefully considered and well proportioned. The American segments tended to feel more heavyhanded to me than the Ghanian ones but I suspect this is mostly due to my own extremely disproportionate familiarity with one set of historical events over the other. Tackling over two hundred years of parallel history between two continents and dealing with some of the worst atrocities the human race has committed therein is a big bite to try and chew for your debut novel, so I'm incredibly sympathetic to any small parts of this book that maybe don't go down as smoothly as they could have in a perfect world.

One bit of framing I didn't mention earlier is that Maame has given each of her daughters a matching stone pendant - black, with a gold sheen. Effia's is passed down to each subsequent generation of the family. Esi's was buried and hidden in the dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle where the slaves were stored and processed before being shipped overseas, left behind and forgotten. The ending note of the book sees the most recent of Effie's line, Marjorie, and the most recent of Esi's line, Marcus, meeting at a college party in Berkeley. The two strike up a friendship, unaware of their two-centuries-gone familial ties, and eventually travel together on a sightseeing trip to Ghana. There, on the beaches by the castle, within spitting distance of where Esi was traumatically parted with her own, Marjorie gifts Marcus her pendant. It's not a particularly groundbreaking note for things to end on, but it is a satisfying one.

The instructions are simple: show me who you are via the books that have stayed with you. The top four, all time. Tell me why you chose them. That’s it, that’s all. Pick the four most meaningful books to you, according to whatever measure(s) you value, and reveal your innermost depths

Thanks for the tag @nonagesimus! I have no idea who has or hasn't been tagged already, so I'll go ahead and tag @reevuhs, @bluerose5, and @thebrokengate if you're feeling so inclined as to participate in a lil tag game.

This was shockingly easy, I'm not gonna lie.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

So, I read this book in high school. I didn't realize it at the time, but it would go on to shape almost the entirety of my worldview, my spirituality, my perception of homeland, ancestor veneration, and it most definitely broke the lock I was keeping my sapphic-ness (sapphicicity?) in. The love between Shug and Celie (that the movie all but erased, smfh), the love between Celie and Nettie, and the love between Nettie and Africa taught me more about love than just about anything else in my first 16 years of life.

Too bad Alice Walker turned out to be such a raging anti-Semite.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred was the book that taught me black women could do horror, sci-fi, and fantasy too, and that horror, sci-fi, and fantasy could be black. I had never seen a black woman tackling these genres before, and I had never seen the genres done in a way that clawed deep into my soul and ripped me open to bleed out and leave a little bit of myself behind on each of the pages. It's one of the most difficult books I've ever read, but also one of the most meaningful.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

This book finished what The Color Purple started. It cemented my love of (black) history and watered the seeds of ancestral veneration the Color Purple planted. I saw myself and my ancestors in this book, and it reminded me that the distance between myself and my ancestors on the ships isn't nearly as long as I thought it was.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

The Vanished Birds is one I read this year after I was irrevocably changed by The Spear Cuts Through Water. It had everything I love in a story and then some: deep, three-dimensional characters with sprawling backstories, vibrant landscapes that tell stories in and of themselves, deeply personal stakes, unique worldbuilding. It's exactly the kind of story I want to write. And the surly black woman captain, the genetically engineered immortal, and the mute, super-powered orphan were tailor-made to fuck ME up, specifically.

Some honorable mentions include...

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham-Jones

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Sula by Toni Morrison

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange