A REVIEW OF HOMEGOING BY YAA GYASI
“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must 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. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture”.
What’s one silly excuse you gave for leaving a book unread on your shelf for so long? This time, and there almost certainly will be a next time, it was that I didn’t like the title. I didn’t just judge a book by its cover but by its title. I mean, what home was I going to? We’re in a pandemic and I’m home all the time. I know it’s silly, but it made sense at the time. A push here, a nudge there, the book has been read and my, oh, my, was I so wrong! Let me tell you why.
Homegoing portrays the role of West Africa in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The story, set in 18th-century Ghana, begins with Effia Otcher, Effia the beauty, who never knew the love of a mother. She is raised by her stepmother, Baaba, who plays an important role in her being married off (sold off actually) to a British slave trader and is taken to live with him in Cape Coast Castle. The only memory she takes with her is a black stone polished by fire, which she wore as a pendant and was passed down from one generation to the next.
Then, in another village, there is Esi Asare, her half-sister separated at birth by life’s circumstances. In a moment of childhood exuberance, Esi, the daughter of a big man, condemns her village to death and slavery. While Esi slaves away in a dungeon in the Cape Coast Castle, Effia is a wife loved by her husband in the same castle. It is amazing how the action of these sisters and those around them determine the course of the lives of several generations to come.
“What I know, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home”.
The story goes on for six more generations, with 14 point-of-views (POVs) in all. As the book progresses, we see not just fictional narratives but the infusion of varying amounts of important history such as the end of slavery, the great migration, the civil war amongst others. The writing style is so beautiful — Yaa Gyasi makes us connect with the characters on so many levels. You grow to love, dislike, or become shocked at the complete innocence or stupidity of some characters. I wished for the POVs of some other characters or that some chapters were longer. But that only shows how wonderfully Yaa Gyasi wrote, giving us just enough to enjoy the book but yet not too much, pushing us to look for more answers in our history books.
“There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing, you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”
P. S. — You should arm yourself heavily with an understanding of the family tree at the beginning of the book — it will help you navigate the sea of names better. And you might want to pick up that dusty book now. Your excuse can’t be as silly as mine.
Jesujuwon Olawuyi,
Medicine, 400L.
