There is a breadth of African literature out there that is now becoming more and more mainstream in bookshops, and I do think that this is not a bad thing at all. There are new voices coming out of the Middle East, the subcontinent, Latin America and Africa which adds colour to our perspectives. Obscure voices are becoming less so as migrant writers combine the experiences of their countries of origin with their adopted countries, and being somewhat out of place in all of this, unable to properly fit.
The presence of Ghana and African history weighs heavier than the gravity of America as the adopted land, if we want to call it that. The two are interdependent — our latter protagonists carry with them the mien of both Africa and America as they navigate through to find their own identity. Haley’s Roots come into mind. While the ambitions of Homegoing match that of Roots, the former is more compact and falls way short from the foundations that Roots has laid. It is not to say that it’s a bad book. It is a solid read, painfully beautiful and gut-wrenching in places, but falters and stutters in the latter parts when the story approaches the present day.
Homegoing is remarkable in its structure. The form serves the plot. I can imagine it being almost like the double helix of a DNA, which moves in a spiral through time, but hardly intertwining. The book is not really a novel, but more of a collection of short stories where the viewpoint shift to the following generation at a different time and place, with different hardships which come from the challenges of the same vein — rooted in slavery and racism.
The principal is Maame, who mothered Effia while she was a servant, and Esi when she married a big man of the village. She left Effia during a village fire, which brought contempt from her adopted mother, who schemed to get her out of the village by marrying her with white slavers, despite the ambitions of her father to marry her with the future chief of the village. Esi had legitimate upbringing, but when her village was attacked, she ended up a slave below the infamous Castle — a transit post for slaves on the way to American plantations. Their seeds will bear fruit, and the story is propelled through these different perspectives.
It is difficult to write about all the stories, but the earlier ones for me are the most poignant. Maybe it is a personal preference for me, because I’m a fan of African literature. It is a well-researched novel and as a result, it is impactful. The tribal culture of warring tribes, polygamous relationships and xenophobia was clear as day. Esi’s chapter is reminiscent of Kunta Kinte’s sea crossing in the bowels of a slave ship in Roots. Kojo’s loose proximity with the Jim Crow laws to recapture slaves can be compared to Solomon Northup. Yet, these stories and characters are coherent and stand on their own.
But perhaps it is also the biggest flaw of the book. As the new stories replace the old, the voices of the old are dimmed or silenced. Haley used this technique in Roots and it was powerful: the silence of Kunta Kinte when the story’s whole perspective shifted to Kizzy was nauseating. We wonder what happened to him then, and we don’t get any answers. In Homegoing, the lack of central character and loose connecting threads mean that our attention is also distributed to all the characters. Perhaps with a longer book, we will connect closer and deeper but the characters that we read here are only passing though.
Gyasi was young when she published the book, being 26. Zadie Smith was 25 when she published White Teeth. Smith also lauded praises to Gyasi. I think both of these women wrote very good if not flawed books. Ironically, Smith has not written anything better since White Teeth but hopefully Gyasi can develop her writing to write even more powerful books. Her prose is solid in the most part, achingly beautiful in spaces and touching juvenile towards the end. The latter parts of Homegoing was almost like reading a young adult novel for me — I couldn’t wait to get it over and done with.
Gyasi will be an important part of black writing for years to come. The success of Homegoing surprised her. She spends more time on PR related work than the work of writing itself, and she is often conflicted when
white people picked up her book for the sake of it. I feel strongly about this as well, but perhaps not in the same way. I think it is important to pick up a book from an author who has a completely different background from you. If anything, it is the most essential thing as a reader. But it really depends on what we do after we read, whether it will affect us for the better.
