Let's Bust a Recap : Homegoing

Well, so much for getting caught up on the blog in November (or blogging anything at all in November, for that matter). We're already nine days into December and I'm just now writing the first of the four recaps I mentioned needing to write back in October. And I haven't even started drafting any of the posts for the five states we visited during 2019 for our #SeeAll50 project. Oops. Oh well. The Christmas tree is up and I've been listening to all the holiday music so no complaints over here.

Homegoing is Yaa Gyasi's debut novel and was published in 2016. For a first offering from a 28 year old (at the time of publication) author, Homegoing is a wildly ambitious attempt to explore the historical origins and ramifications of slavery throughout seven generations in one family. Beginning in late 18th century Ghana, we meet the first character Effia who, through the scheming of her stepmother, is given to a British slave trader in "marriage" and taken to live with him at the Cape Coast Castle. There she lives in comfort and experiences a mutually fulfilling relationship with her British husband. 

Unbeknownst to Effia, her half-sister Esi whom she has never met and knows nothing about has been captured in the ongoing tribal wars and taken to the dungeons of the very castle Effia is living in to be shipped to America and sold into slavery there. In the following chapters alternating between Effia's and Esi's family lines, we are given glimpses of the family's history from that time all the way up to the present day.

While the subject matter and the style in which Gyasi decided to tell this story was a massive undertaking, I would say that she was successful overall in creating a compelling novel that had some depth to it. I was very impressed by the meticulous research that went into the writing of this novel which informed her writing beautifully without becoming dry or overly detailed which easily could have taken away from the characterization of the people she created. In Effia's family line, she covers the perpetual tribal wars and British colonization of Ghana; while in Esi's line she moves through slavery on American southern plantations, the Great Migration after the Civil War, the convict-lease system in Pratt City, Alabama, and the jazz clubs and dope houses of Harlem. To adequately research one of these periods of time for this novel would be admirable, but Gyasi deftly moves through all of them with skill and compassion. According to Gyasi, one of her biggest goals in writing this book was to put individual names and faces to people who lived during some of these horrific and traumatic times in our history, to remind us that these things were happening to real people, individuals, just like you and me. I think she was largely successful in doing that. 

The book is 14 chapters total, each chapter about a different character. Often I found myself getting frustrated by the lack of development of these characters. It seemed that just as a chapter was getting started, just as I was really starting to feel invested and interested in a particular character, the story stopped and we moved on to the next character, the next generation, in the book. While this was irksome to me as a reader (each character could easily have had his or her story developed into a whole novel while in Homegoing their stories were limited to approximately 20-25 pages apiece), it also made me think about how in many cases (in the book and in actual history), family members who endured slavery were often ripped apart and cut off from their own history. While I have no idea if this was something the author intended (I was unable to find any interviews in which this question was explored by the author), it added another layer of gravity to the book which, while exasperating, was profound. 

This book was not on my list for 2019 and not really on my radar at all. A sweet friend of mine put it in my hands and told me I needed to read it (thank you, Ms. Kathy!), and I'm glad because this one will stay with me for a while. It's probably not a book I will read again, but I'll be interested to see what Yaa Gyasi does in the future and I'd be willing to read another book by her.

Have you read Homegoing? Which character would you pick to get his or her own full-length novel?