Skip to main content

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing
The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure.

Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down.

Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separated by force. It's not 'homecoming', but 'homegoing', which requires a journey of everyone.

One aspect that, as a wordy, nerdy word nerd, I really appreciated, was the way that Gyasi showed the changing language of each new generation as they picked up new influences and developed their own inflections on the previous generations’ cultures. There’s a real focus in the book on the fact that African and African-American history isn’t written down or learned in school, but passed down as an oral history, and the gradually-shifting language is a carefully-observed and lovely way to reflect that.

The other thing that comes across really strongly is the way that history is cumulative. Injuries done to past generations are passed on, not physically, but through stories, parental behaviours, shared phobias. It shows the true depth of racial division, held on a shared emotional level as much as anything that’s easily demonstrable in day-to-day life. It does the same for gender, showing how no matter what victories black people on either side of the ocean have been able to win, somehow the black woman has always ended up winning less one way or another. And when (as is more common) black people lose out, the black woman loses out even more.

Overall, this is a powerful, deeply sad, anger-stoking and often uncomfortable book that really cuts to the heart of the ongoing damage done by black slavery, with an impressively wide emotional range.


--

This is my seventh book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 23: Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in. The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails. That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part –...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 42: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

It’s hard not to respect trees. I try my best, but they always get me in the end, the cunning green-and-brown scamps. They don’t do anyone any harm. They just stand there, absorbing nutrients from above and below, pumping out oxygen with the quiet confidence of a wizard puffing his pipe. It would be wrong to call that the central premise of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian , because it’s not. But the idea of comparing human morality against the gentle harmlessness of vegetation rings through its core. The central character, Yeong-hye, a housewife, decides to stop eating meat. While this seems like a fairly small choice and one hardly worth building a whole novel around, the novel explores the reactions of her family and her own gradual slip into extremism in a slow-but-steady deterioration. The most intriguing, and in many ways frustrating, aspect to the novel is the impenetrability of Yeong-hye herself. You’re never quite allowed inside her head, and so have to observe her change from...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 44: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, the star of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger , is about as big a shit as you can imagine without actually being a psychopath or criminal. This book, then, is all the more impressive for being able to take such a dislikeable character and reveal the reasons why she is the way she is, and make you empathise and sympathise with her. Actually, before we get into that, let’s address the stripy lunar elephant in the room: Moon Tiger is a brilliant title for a book. It’s the sort of title I imagine that, when she came up with it, Lively lit a big cigar and swanned around the house for days chuckling to herself. A tiger! From the moon ! Whimsical diversions aside, this book has nothing to do with tigers or the moon, so get that out of your head right now. It’s actually about a woman evaluating the history of the world as it relates to her, and the discovery of the events in her life that developed her personality. It’s also a book that’s very concerned with the fal...
Post a Comment
Read more