they only walked so far south before splitting off, and Willie lost Robert to the rest of Manhattan. She'd done it once, and Robert had turned, and everyone had stared.Īt first, they both looked for jobs in Harlem. Robert always walked a little ahead of, and they never touched. For instance, we hear the story of one of Esi's descendants - a man simply named 'H,' - who's entrapped in the convict leasing system, which is essentially another form of slavery in post-Civil-War Alabama.īeing meant they no longer walked together on the sidewalk. Gyasi - wisely, I think - skips over the Civil War and, instead, explores some less familiar historical episodes. We're told that 'Effia started to think of him as a rain cloud: sallow and wet and shapeless.'Įffia eventually gives birth to a son, and his descendants remain in Ghana to face war and colonization Esi's descendants labor as slaves in America and then, well, although you can anticipate some of the terrain Gyasi covers, she makes some surprising detours. For instance, when Effia first meets her future husband she sees a white Englishman, sweating profusely because he's unused to the heat of West Africa. Here's the origin story at the beginning of Homegoing: in 18 th Ghana, two half-sisters named Effia and Esi are born in different tribal villages and grow up in ignorance of each other's existence.Įffia is married off to an Englishman who is the acting governor of Cape Coast Castle, one of the sites that features an infamous 'door of no return' through which thousands of captives are pushed onto waiting ships to carry them into slavery in The New World.Īuthor Interviews Slavery Scars A Transatlantic Family Tree In 'Homegoing'Īgain, it's a stagey premise, but Gyasi coaxes us into accepting this baroque situation through the conviction and, occasionally, even the playful novelty of her descriptions.

She's only 26, yet she writes with authority about history and pulls her readers deep into her characters' lives through the force of her empathetic imagination. Gyasi's lyric and versatile language makes all the difference.

In the end, the two separate family sagas merge into one, back in the place where it all began.Īs plots go, this is one is pretty formulaic, but one of the achievements of Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, Homegoing, is that, although it's patterned on the 'same-old, same-old' narrative blueprint that's framed many a blockbuster, the feel of her novel is mostly sophisticated, rather than pre-fab. Some of their descendants are in Africa, some are in America some are free, some are enslaved. How?Īfter two half sisters are separated, we follow their family lines over the course of two centuries through a series of short stories. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Homegoing Author Yaa Gyasi

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