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 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...
Post a Comment
Read more