Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

There has been a lot of hype surrounding this book in the reading community recently, despite it being published back in 2016. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is not a particularly long novel, at around 300 pages, yet its breadth is hugely expansive and reaches across a 300-year period in Ghana. The novel is made up of short-story or novella-like chapters which each focus in on a different voice, and yet over the course of the novel we begin to see links between the stories and characters which are expertly woven together by the author to create a magnificent web of interconnected lives, each as devastating and poignant a story as the last. We begin with the characters of Effia and Esi, half-sisters who are born in different villages in Ghana and under very different circumstances. Effia is married off to a rich English soldier and lives a luxurious lifestyle in a Cape Coast castle, whilst her sister (unbeknownst to her Effia) is imprisoned in the castle's dungeon beneath her feet, having been sold into slavery alongside thousands of others.

From here, Homegoing travels through the centuries, following the descendants of Esi and Effia and how life changes with warfare, colonization and the slave trade - and the ongoing opposition of the Asante and Fante nations. Gyasi links the stories together, often with subtlety and at other times with a more hard-hitting rawness, in an intricate and tangible way, guiding us from the plantations of Ghana to the civil war to twentieth-century Harlem, all the way to the present day. I find that it is often difficult to become invested in the characters of a novel when you only hear each voice for a short time - in this case a chapter - but in this instance you really feel the sense of an entire family line, each impacting the next generation. This really strikes a chord as we are exposed the horrors, hardships and struggles of so many generations who were exposed to the disgusting reality of British rule. There are scenes of whipping, rape, death, war and racial attack (to name a few) throughout the book, and yet Gyasi manages to scatter moments of beauty, insight and hope throughout. 

Somehow this novel, which could have easily been hundreds more pages in length, manages to achieve both a detailed as well as expansive look at the lives of fourteen protagonists who are all interconnected based on their bloodline as well as their shared experiences across the centuries. Gyasi's writing is impactful yet easy to read and her characterisation is just stunning. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone as such an educational piece as well as an emotive and heart-wrenching story and portrayal of Black lives. Please read!!!