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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

Start date: February 5, 2023

Finish date: March 1, 2023

Discussion: Country and Territories

Why we're reading this: Countries/Territories = Ghana

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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Country and Territories

A Dangerous Place (March 2023)
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Homegoing (February 2023)
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Aug 26, 2020 Radwa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: around-the-world, contemporary, historical-fiction, adult, e-books, 2020-favorites

English Review Below.
Around the World Project: Ghana.

يا للهول. أنا مش مصدقة أن دي رواية الكاتبة الأولى. ملحمة عائلية أفريقية من المستوى الممتاز. بتختصر تاريخ العنصرية والعبودية والفصل العنصري في أمريكا، وتاريخ السود ما بين أفريقيا إلى أمريكا في 300 صفحة، بشكل كانت تعجز عنه كتب تاريخية. أنا انبهرت فعلا بالإنجاز اللي يا جسي قدرت تحققه بالرواية دي.

في الرواية دي اللي بتبدأ بقصة أختين من غانا (لا تعلم إحداهما بوجود الأخرى)، بنشوف ازاي كل أخت ونسلها بيسلكوا اتجاه مختلف، لما أخت بتتزوج تاجر عبيد بريطا English Review Below.
Around the World Project: Ghana.

يا للهول. أنا مش مصدقة أن دي رواية الكاتبة الأولى. ملحمة عائلية أفريقية من المستوى الممتاز. بتختصر تاريخ العنصرية والعبودية والفصل العنصري في أمريكا، وتاريخ السود ما بين أفريقيا إلى أمريكا في 300 صفحة، بشكل كانت تعجز عنه كتب تاريخية. أنا انبهرت فعلا بالإنجاز اللي يا جسي قدرت تحققه بالرواية دي.

في الرواية دي اللي بتبدأ بقصة أختين من غانا (لا تعلم إحداهما بوجود الأخرى)، بنشوف ازاي كل أخت ونسلها بيسلكوا اتجاه مختلف، لما أخت بتتزوج تاجر عبيد بريطاني والأخرى بيتم بيعها كإحدى العبيد. وكل فصل هو بمثابة قصة لها بداية ووسط ونهاية لنسل الأختين بالتوالي، وبنشوف مع تقدم الأعوام، وضع السود في غانا وأمريكا، وبنشهد الحركات السياسية وتعامل البيض مع السود والعكس. الرواية فيها عاطفة جياشة، فيها علاقات حب وخيانة وعلاقات عائلية مؤثرة، فيها قسوة وعنصرية البيض والظلم اللي تعرض له السود، والرواية نهايتها أبهرتني، واللي من غير ما أحرق أحداثها حسيت أنها قفلت بنهاية تليق بالبداية. حسيت بالظلم اللي بيتفاقم في كل فصل، وعرفت كتير عن أفريقيا بشكل مكنتش أعرفه، زي التاريخ المؤسف للقبائل الأفريقية اللي في البداية ساعدت البريطانيين في بدء تجارة العبيد، تحول تجارة العبيد من كونها قانوية لغير قانونية، وازاي ده برضة مغيرش من طريقة تعامل البيض مع السود.

رواية ضرورية لمعرفة المزيد عن غانا وتاريخ العنصرية والعبودية في أمريكا بالذات ولمعرفة مدى أهمية مظاهرات السود في أمريكا وأنحاء العالم.

I honestly can't believe that this Yaa Gysi's first novel. It's an excellent African family saga, putting in 300 words the history of racism and slavery in the US, and the history of Black people between Africa and the USA, in a way that history books couldn't have done it.

In this novel we start by following two sister (where one of them doesn't know about the other), and how their futures and the futures of their generations change when one of them marries a British slave trader and the other gets sold into slavery. Each chapter is like a standalone story of the sisters' grandchildren, and as the years go by, we know more about the black lives in Ghana and USA. We see political movements and how whites perceive blacks and vice versa.

This novel is very emotional, we see love and betrayal and family, there's the brutality and racism of whites and the injustices that the blacks had to suffer. and I was blown away by that ending, which suffice to say, felt like the novel ended in a full circle. I felt the racial injustices grow with each story and each chapter, and I knew a lot about Africa's history that I didn't know before. How the tribes at first helped the slaves trade, how when the slave trade turned from legal to illegal that didn't change a thing, and it clarified a lot of the racism in the USA. I knew more about "passing as white" and how it's perceived by both blacks and whites, and how that changed over the years, also how the perception mixed-race children changed over the years.

A must read if you want to know more about Ghana, the racism and slavery history, and how the fight for black lives never really ended. ...more

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Jul 11, 2016 Maya B rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical, favorites, 1st-time-reading-this-author, africa, debut-novel

BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN! 14 characters. 300 pages. Epic family saga. Even though each chapter was about a different character, each chapter seemed to melt right into the next. The story flowed so well. Great weekend read when you have no distractions. Each chapter was short, but it was long enough to know the characters. I was glad for the family tree in the front of the book because I did find myself flipping back to it to keep up with the characters. I hope someone makes this book into a tv series ...more

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Jan 15, 2017 Jeanne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-around-the-world, read-2017, read-women, african-african-american, historical-fiction

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, is a series of stories following two sisters – Effia and Esi – torn apart by slavery, one to marry a white slaver, another sold into slavery by a rival tribe and shipped to the US. The sisters were separated much earlier, when Effia's mother "ran away into the fire" on the night she was born – and Effia was raised by her father's resentful first wife. Esi was Effia's mother's second daughter.

Homegoing's narrative switches back and forth between a single member of each f Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, is a series of stories following two sisters – Effia and Esi – torn apart by slavery, one to marry a white slaver, another sold into slavery by a rival tribe and shipped to the US. The sisters were separated much earlier, when Effia's mother "ran away into the fire" on the night she was born – and Effia was raised by her father's resentful first wife. Esi was Effia's mother's second daughter.

Homegoing's narrative switches back and forth between a single member of each family of each generation, ending at the turn of the 21st century. How do their parents' decisions serve to inform and contextualize their behaviors? How do their parents' reputations – and behaviors – change with time?

Homegoing explores both connection and separation. Separated sisters (Effia and Esi) "are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond”
(Locs. 684-685). On the other hand, the joining of a man and a woman was also the joining of two families. Ancestors, whole histories, came with the act, but so did sins and curses
(Loc. 381). These ancestors and histories, sins and curses, are the warp of this book. Fire, water, color, luck, suicide, race, color, exploitation etc. are the weft, threading their way through Gyasi's narrative, although with different effects in different generations.

Yaw, a 20th century Ghanaian history teacher, argued that history is storytelling, told by those in power. He observed,

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture” (Locs. 3847-3850).

Nyami is able to offer a more nuanced story, as her narrative extends across seven generations; her thesis becomes clearer as Marcus (from the next US generation) considered the problems he had writing his dissertation in Sociology:

How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction— the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was. (Locs. 4923-4934).

In Homegoing, everything is connected; it lays out many "clues" early in the book and its first chapters deserve a rereading. As does the whole of Homegoing. And then another, just for the richness of the story.
...more

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Jul 04, 2017 Stephanie rated it it was amazing

Rich, sweeping, fascinating book.

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Mar 10, 2018 Heather rated it liked it

3.5/5 stars. This isn't a popular opinion but this book was difficult to read. It took me forever because I just never connected with the overall story and the format. However, I did enjoy many of the stories and the writing was wonderful...it just wasn't enough to hold my interest over other books. I do think this is an important book and I'm glad I read it, but it was difficult to read. ...more

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Jan 11, 2017 Judy Lindow rated it it was amazing

Shelves: adult-non-fiction

Homegoing is hard to put down. I knew before the end that I wanted my own copy and to read it again. It's a story of many generations, families and their interconnections. Each character has a unique voice and story and how the past and future made up part of who they were. Homegoing is in part a very convincing telling of family history as it drives the fates and destiny of future generations. What it means to be at home, leave, or come home is very analogous all the way through the book. The m ...more

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Dec 30, 2016 Randy A. rated it really liked it

Like many, I really enjoyed this book and got a lot out of it. I appreciated a unique historical fiction framework to think about race and slavery. It covered decades masterfully through generations without painstakingly covering the passage of each year. I echo Roxane Gay's review point that the novel (amazing because it's a novel) makes a case for reparations. It wasn't perfect, to me, but it wouldn't stop me from recommending it to others. I'm returning my DC library copy ASAP so someone else ...more

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Jan 25, 2024 Mariana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2024, popsugar-2024

Desgarradora cada historia. Sentí que este libro fue una gran lección de historia, de una historia que me contaron apenas, pues así de injusto viene siendo el mundo.
No sé cómo logró la autora llegar a un equilibrio entre querer saber más de cada personaje y a la vez sentir que cada capítulo tiene un cierre. Las historias se van hilando con mucha inteligencia. Me gustaría seguir leyendo libros suyos

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