Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

These men could not tell good from evil if they were Nyame himself.

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.

These tears were a matter of routine. They came for all of the women. They dropped until the clay below them turned to mud.

Asking if the story had been heard before was a part of the story itself.

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

She would always associate real love with a hardness of spirit.

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.

“I am proud to be Asante, as I am sure you are proud to be Fante, but after I lost my brothers, I decided that as for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation.”

If he could, he would listen to her speak forever. If he could, he would join that nation she spoke of.

They say you are an African witch, and so what? So what? Who told them what a witch was?”

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?”

“You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua. The white man has earned his name here. Remember that.”

“This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.

“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.”

wanted that from his book. An academic rage. All he could seem to muster was a long-winded whine.

A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.

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.

Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.

When they were living they had not known where they came from, and so dead, they did not know how to get to dry land.

The Ruin of a Nation Begins in the Homes of Its People.

It was one thing to research something, another thing entirely to have lived it. To have felt it.