Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing feels like it's both a good book (a very good book) and an Important Book, capital letters intended and all. There are ways in which that makes it a little harder to figure out how to approach a review, whereas, fluff is generally something about which I easily dash off a bunch of words. Or if a book is right in my wheelhouse and I have something to expound upon. In this case, though, I liked this book a lot. I was moved by it. I was troubled by it. I think many other people should read it. (It was near the top of my list of books most often on top ten lists at the end of the year in which it came out, so that might not be a problem? Although I suppose that "on the most top ten lists" is not the same as "bestseller.")

One of the most interesting things that Gyasi is doing here is refusing her readers a throughline, characters they can follow through the whole story. Instead, we have chapters, which alternate between two half-sisters, then between two of their children, then two of their grandchildren, on and on, for at least seven generations. One chapter per side, per generation. Chapters do not often wrap up an entire story neatly. Instead, they are a glimpse into a life for a while, a single, individual life, but also illustrative of something about the experience of Black people in what is now Ghana or in the United States.

I read one review or one comment somewhere that was about how Gyasi is focusing on Black complicity in slavery, but I kind of think that's bullshit. White demand for slaves, racism from whites that constrains life in different ways, they're all most definitely here, they're just not the focus. The focus is on Black people, far and above any way in which it is interested in exploring white guilt. Which is not to say that that person was wrong - the early sections of the book do concentrate on the practice of slaves being taken by one tribe from another tribe, and sold to the white men at the trading post for the transatlantic slave trade.

It took me a long time to figure out how all these bits fit together - the family ties were obvious, but thematically, it took me a bit to figure out why these were the stories Gyasi wove, why those personalities for each generation, why, just, in general. The answer is actually given by one of her own characters, a young Black man working on his Ph.D., but stymied about what story to tell. How do you tell this story about Blackness without also telling this one, how do you look at one piece of history without also needing to show all the pieces that came before that led to it? How do you find a landing spot? Where do you begin? How do you bring it together?

This book is one answer, of fiction, not of history. You try to tell as many as you can, but not all of them, because that risks universalizing experiences and obscuring real people who experienced all these events, through Ghanian history, through the history of being Black in the United States. So you pick moments you need to capture to tell one version of the whole thing. You don't make them all flow together seamlessly, you let them be a little bit different in terms of story, you don't make neat narrative bows at the end, except perhaps for the very end, where the two branches of the family converge.

This is very strongly written, and I was always eager to pick it up again, even when the stories were dark, or filled with fire. That connection that Gyasi is threading into her stories, insisting that these characters are connected to each other, even when they've never met, that you can't tell one story without the other is so strong, so interesting. I can't wait to see what she writes next.