Written by Sophia Staffiero
Reading time: 4 minutes
Author’s note: At the time of writing this book review, I have yet to complete my reading of Homegoing. My thoughts have therefore been formed on what I have read so far.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi tells the story of two sisters, Effia and Esi, who separated at birth, are further torn apart by the forces of colonialism. Commencing with the lives of these two women, each chapter unravels the parallel stories of their descendants, scattered across village lines and international borders.
This book was originally recommended to me by two friends, both of whom commented on the deeply sensory and haunting way in which Gyasi brings to life the key experiences of the middle passage, life (and death) on plantations, and the Civil wars (amongst others things). What I found myself being drawn to from the start, however, was the root of this very novel: origins. How is it that the origin story of one family leads to two utterly different realities for the sisters and ultimately, countless disparate experiences for their lineage?
From what I have read of the book so far, I feel that Gyasi strikes a well-poised balance between complete alienation and redirection of the individual narratives and at the same time an underlying uniformity to the experience of loss and deep sadness to which each character is, to some extent, subjected. Each chapter, though a snippet of the life story of its self-confessed protagonist, contains within them an entire novel onto itself, so much so that it, at times, felt nauseating to be immersed so profoundly in one character’s plight to then be completely unrooted and thrown across oceans to another place, time, and individual. And still, in a paradoxical way, I experienced a kind of continuity in the ‘choppiness’ of the chapters, a literary, as well as physically stimulating thread between the lives of those who live in the diaspora and in the homeland. The awareness of the how these characters’ seemingly disconnected lives are in fact intergenerationally linked through the causal chain of both their ancestors’ individuals destinies and the wider societal transformations at the time encourages us to recalibrate the lens through which we may view the world: in what ways do our stories both intersect and derive from the same origins?
Reading Homegoing so far has been a disruptive, yet compelling experience and I believe that Gyasi intends for her book to be, at least in part, unsettling. The fact that she does not allow for any one story to remain in a vacuum and only affords us a snapshot into the lives of her characters urges us to make sense of the bigger picture of what each of these stories collectively communicate.
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