By Kemuel Othieno
The novel Homegoing by the Ghanaian novelist Yaa Gyasi can be a deceptive read, and this is possibly by design. At first glance, it seems like a novel exploring the colonial legacy of Britain in Africa, but further reading reveals that it is so much more.
Homegoing traces a family in Ghana destroyed by slavery. Two sisters who know nothing of each other’s existence are pulled apart by the slave machine. One is shipped off to the newly formed United States of America (USA). The other is married off to a British official – a slave runner – and finds herself in a gilded cage. The novel traces these parallel lineages and details the struggles both face before they return to their true homes. The sister who ends up in the USA is brutalized before her family, generations later, manages to come out of suffering. The family back in Ghana must deal with the legacy of being willful participants in the slave trade and endure the prejudices of the community at home, so enraged by these actions.
The novel covers the slavery that engulfed both Ghana and America, the abolition in both countries that did nothing to free the enslaved and the search for freedom launched by black people across the world. The plot of the novel makes use of some less well-known and less covered historical events and periods, such as the heroin epidemic in New York, the convict leasing system in the postbellum Deep South and the goings-on in modern-day Ghana.
The most prominent theme in Homegoing is identity. Every discussion on slavery, colonialism and racial violence must end in identity. Colonialism diluted and eroded the cultures of the places affected by it, as did slavery and all other forms of racial violence but, as Homegoing reveals, new identities, histories, societies and cultures were formed from the silt of previous ones. Central to the novel is the idea of the rejuvenation present in resistance to subjugation.
Homegoing works as a sort of anthology of an abundance of stories and characters created in the wake of colonialism. Different forks in different roads are explored in the mini-stories in Homegoing and somehow all of them end back along the same path. The quasi-anthology style used in Homegoing allows the author to tell the stories of a wide cast of characters and devote equal attention to each one.
The experience the novel offers is a thrilling take on a story that many have told before but this is a different kind of take. Homegoing is a seminal work in its genre and in this continent’s literature. Homegoing is a perfect 10.
Title: Homegoing
Author: Yaa Gyasi
No. of Pages: 320
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Price: Shs45,000 on Mahiri books, $15 on Amazon
