Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.

Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.

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

For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.

Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.