Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing

[bibliogramma]

Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi's novel Homecoming is both compelling and difficult to read. Its scope is vast, encompassing two centuries of the African Diaspora and multiple elements of the transAtlantic slave trade and its consequences in both America and Africa, but its focus is always personal, each chapter forming a link in a double chain of protagonists telling uniquely personal stories. The novel follows the descendants of the two daughters of Maame, a West African Asante woman in the late 18th century. Maame, who is both a slave and a secondary wife of a Fante farmer, gives birth to her first daughter during a disastrous fire. Fearing that she will be blamed for the ill fortune, Maame runs away. Her first daughter, Effia, is raised by a malicious and abusive stepmother, but grows up to become the 'bush wife' of British officer James Collins. Effia's people, the Fante, are middlemen in the slave trade, acquiring captives of other tribes, sometimes by purchase, sometimes through raiding, from inland, and then selling them to the British slavers based in the fort where Effia comes to live as a new bride.

Meanwhile, Maame has made a new life for herself, marrying a 'big man' of the Asante. Her second daughter, Esi, is raised lovingly in the heart of her extended family, but is taken from her hime and people in early adolescence by raiders, traded by the people her sister is raised by, passing to a life of slavery in America through the very fort her sister lives in.

In one narrative line, Gyasi's characters deal with colonialism and its many effects on the culture and political landscape of West Africa, while in the other, they survive slavery, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, segregation, and life as marginalised people left out of the American Dream.

The chapters that tell the story of Esi and her descendants are much harder to read than those featuring Effia's descendants, capturing as they do the soul-destroying experiences of slavery and racism in America. Unfortunately, if there is a weakness in the book, it lies in these very American-centred chapters. Somehow, Gyasi's American characters, particularly as the novel approaches modern times, seem to be more archetypes than living characters, representing categories of African-American experience rather than real people who live through circumstances reflective of the lives of Black Americans. Her African characters seem somehow freer to be themselves. But this is a small flaw in an ambitious, and largely successful narrative.