Book Review : Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing?, Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

These lines strike a chord, don’t they. This is the story penned down by Yaa Gyasi that spans 8 generations, showing different times and places while highlighting the true suffering of people. This is not a pitiful tale on the plight of Africans but a series of short stories highlighting how a few decisions triggered a chain of events that affected millions of lives.

Brief : Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day.

This book is beautifully written, thoroughly researched and keeps you hooked on till the very end. Though I was slightly confused after every chapter trying to connect the family ties, it is a small price to pay for the story that tells you more in one go than you could ever know. The stark difference in the lives these two sisters lead is brutal. The book has no emotions whatsoever, it is the reader feeling everything.

Now, I shall not spoil the story for you. You know it’s about the Africans, it talks a lot about slave trade but what it doesn’t do is tell you what’s right and wrong or who’s right and wrong. It just tells a story.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on it initially and I would urge everyone to read this book. It summarizes and humanizes one of the greatest tragedies of modern history. This story deserves to be read.

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

That’s all for today peeps.

See ya guys soon with another book, another review.

XOXO

Pearl