Homegoing

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi begins with the story of two half-sisters in the 1700s in what’s now Ghana. One of them is taken as a British slave-trader’s mistress, while her sister is sold and shipped to the American south.  Then the book follows each set of descendants, through hardships and success, through to the present day.  Motifs appear again and again, in different generations.  There are elements of magic here, but they’re more like epigenetic trauma dreams than magical realism.

Overall, I liked it, but I wanted more. With so many different characters and storylines, it’s hard to really connect to anyone. Once I got to know a character as more than a symbol of a place and time, their segment was over, and I’d see them next in a reference to a parent or grandparent in a future story.

The generations are representatives of their time, experiencing polygamy and cocoa farming in Ghana, or addiction in Harlem, for example.  Again, I wanted to chance to see more, because the setting were so varied, and once I grasped the setting, it was time to move on.  In the final pages, the story reconnects to my familiar feelings, with the youngest generation, Marcus, contemplating the sheer size of history and the inability to narrow it down to a manageable grad school focus.

By the end,  the mystical pull of the family necklaces and the land brought distant descendants Marcus and Marjorie back to the Ghanian beach. I sort of hoped they’d recognize their connection, but it’s not like I’d recognize my own sixth cousins, well, not outside my granny’s Scottish village where everyone is our cousin.  In way, that’s sort of the point, because the descendants of Maame have lost their family village and their family lore, but as a reader, I really want to get to know the characters in a novel.