"Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi

I almost abandoned Homegoing early in my reading. Not because it was boring or poorly written, but because I wasn't sure I wanted to endure the violence essential to Gyasi's story (I was simultaneously reading Parable of the Sower, which didn't help). I'm glad I stuck with it, though. 

Homegoing follows the descendants of two half-sisters born in Ghana during the emergence of the slave trade. One sister, Esi, is taken into slavery, thus beginning her descendants' trajectory as slaves in America. The other sister, Effia, marries a white British official, and her descendants continue lives in Africa. Each chapter provides a snapshot of a descendant's life, with the final chapter bringing the sisters' great-great-great-great grandchildren together in both America and Africa.

Many books play on the theme of family, the inescapable way it shapes our lives, despite our attempts to break free. Homegoing's structure makes that theme all the more visible. Gyasi weaves into that universal theme the characters' Blackness--the way both their particular family and their race insists on defining their lives. Successive generations experience greater freedom (compare Esi's slavery to her great-great-great-great-grandson Marcus' doctorate program at Stanford, where he studies his family's history), but none are independent from their history (of the history of Ghana or America).

Most parents want better lives for their children, but that dream is continually thwarted in Homegoing. In fact, many of the descendants grow up more or less as orphans, and few escape lives of poverty. There's a sense, perhaps especially in America, that the progress of time is always for the better, but Homegoing suggests that is not the case. Each generation's suffering may be slightly different, but they suffer nonetheless. 

Though plenty of books address the time periods in Gyasi's novel, I've never read about them all in one piece. Part of Gyasi's point is that they're all interrelated. Marcus talks about the struggle of completing his research: how can he discuss the convict-leasing system that essentially made his great-grandfather a slave without talking about his grandmother's Great Migration to escape Jim Crow, or about his father's heroin-addiction and jail time, or about the current "war on drugs"? Freedom and success aren't about individual choices and grit but often about circumstance and culture.

I saw some reviewers complain about the incomplete nature of each descendant's story. We typically see them as young children, through the eyes of a parent; then for the longest time during a portion of adult life; and finally as snapshots through the eyes of their child. Because Gyasi covers so many time periods, it also means key events, particularly in American history, have to get covered quickly and somewhat shallowly. Nonetheless, I think the structure is the novel's great strength, as it emphasizes the interrelated theme.

A number of teachers use this book in the classroom, and I can see it being a strong way of engaging with American and African history.