Yaa Gyasi, _Homegoing_

This novel reminded me of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, in which one sister decides to pass as white while the other lives as Black. Bennett may have been in part inspired by Gyasi’s novel, which came out five years ahead of hers—but who knows. Great idea, in any case.

Bennett’s novel stays focused on the two sisters for the whole novel, though, while Gyasi’s covers an immense range of time. The novel begins in the 18th century in the territory that is now Ghana. In the first two chapters, we meet Effia and Esi, who are half-sisters but do not know each other. Effia marries a British officer involved in the slave trade; Esi is captured, enslaved, and shipped to North America.

Rather than staying with the two half-sisters, though, the next pair of chapters are about their adult offspring. Then the next pair are about their grandchildren. And so on, each pair of chapters moving on to the next generation, until we arrive roughly at nowadays, and one of Effia’s descendants meets one of Esi’s descendants, and they fall in love.

A lovely ending, but most of the novel is about trauma, with the trauma of the enslaved worse than that of the colonized, but not by all that much. 

Gyasi's conception of contrasting the stories of one branch of a family that ended up enslaved with the stories of another branch that did not is bold and original. Likewise bold and original was the attempt to cover so many generations in a novel of moderate length.

What I missed, though, was that sense of investment in a character (or a few characters) that is one of the usual rewards of novel-reading. Several of the characters were particularly intriguing (e.g., Quey, Kojo, Akua, H), but once their 20-page chapter was concluded, they were whisked offstage and scarcely even referred to again. This created a kind of rhythm of delight then disappointment in my reading of the novel.

Gyasi could not have satisfied my interest in these characters without making her novel two or three tines longer than it was, and I can see how that might have been impracticable. Still, I did miss that sense of investment in a character, and that wound up being the dominant note in the impression the book made on me.