With being a college student comes great responsibility… and numerous amounts of reading assignments. If you love reading as much as I do, I’m sure you’ve spent some of your time in college thinking, I wish I had more time to read for fun! In one of my classes this semester, students were assigned a “free read” presentation. Basically, I had to do a book report. Remember those? Let your mind take you waaaaay on back to middle school. Being the dorky English major that I am, I did not dread this assignment. Instead, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and read a book that’s been in my To Be Read (TBR) pile for too long (while adhering to the assignment’s requirements, of course). The only restriction for this assignment was that the book had to be written by a female African woman. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
I came across this title just before it’s publication date in the summer of 2016. Gyasi, 28, was born in Ghana and raised in the US. With Homegoing she made her literary debut, which is hard to believe as it is so elegantly written. With a BA in English from Stanford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the woman is bound to be good at what she does. She has made appearances on talk shows such as “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah to discuss the book’s success and the stroy itself.
The book begins in Ghana with the stories of two half sisters—Effia and Esi—who lived separate lives without knowing one another. The plot quickly glides through the family trees of both women, following their descendants through generations as the reader witnesses their separate hardships. The main struggle starts with the British occupying the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, where they made deals with surrounding villages to capture and sell slaves, whom they would then sell to America or Europe.
This is not a light read. The story itself moves quickly, and it is hard to put down, but there is plenty of violence and sadness on each page. This should not discourage you from reading Yaa Gyasi’s first masterpiece, as it is filled with fictional truths that demand to be heard. The sisters’ descendants experience pain as the decades pass in both Ghana and the US. Slavery, colonialism and racism are all confronted throughout. What makes it so compelling, however, is Gyasi’s way of telling it.
Each chapter releases a new narrative as the characters’ history becomes more and more recent. We quickly move from the late 1700s to the 2000s, as the edured suffering does not slow, but change along with history itself. These intimate tales so easily pull you in that it’s hard to turn away. The novel did not win the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction for nothing.
“It’s all about the familial,” claimed Gyasi when explaining Homegoing‘s essence to host Trevor Noah. While the book goes to great lengths to describe every possible pain a family tree such as this has experienced, she is sure to explain its main theme: family. While families are torn apart time and time again in this novel, it is each character’s main reason for fighting on. Everything in the story makes its way back to family.
This book is a must-read for its strong themes and effortlessly produced structure. In just one book, she has already told multiple stories that everyone should read. Gyasi, who was only 26 when Homegoing was published, will do great things with her writing capabilities.