Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

“You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”

Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.

“The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be.

There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”

Besides, if we go to the white man for school, we will just learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.”

“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.”