In Yaa Gyasi’s début novel, “Homegoing” (Knopf), a boy greeting the line of mourners at his grandfather’s funeral encounters a beautiful girl. “Respectfully, I will not shake the hand of a slaver,” she says, withholding the customary gesture of condolence. The boy, James, is dumbfounded. Both of them are West Africans, members of the Akan people, although she is Asante, from the interior of what we now call Ghana, and he is Fante, from the coast. “James had spent his whole life listening to his parents argue about who was better, Asante or Fante, but the matter could never come down to slaves,” Gyasi writes. “The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them. If the girl could not shake his hand, then, surely, she could never touch her own.”
“Homegoing”—the title is taken from an old African-American belief that death allowed an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to Africa—is rooted, like the Bible, in original sin. Unlike the Biblical transgression, however, the source of the curse that dogs an Asante woman’s descendants through seven generations defies pinpointing and straightforward assessments of blame; you might as well shun your own hand. The wrongs done emerge from the muddled ethics typical of domestic quarrels, but their repercussions are vast. As one prophetic character puts it, “sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your home.”
Here’s how it starts: Sometime in the late eighteenth century, Maame, an Asante slave in a Fante household, flees into the bush during a fire, leaving behind her newborn daughter, who survives. Soon afterward, Maame marries an Asante “Big Man” and gives birth to another girl. The older daughter, Effia, stays behind in Africa, as the wife of a British official; her half sister, Esi, once the pampered darling of a powerful father, is captured by raiders from another village, sold to the British, and brought to America. Each chapter of the novel is narrated from the perspective of a descendant of either Effia or Esi, one representative for each generation, and the two bloodlines alternate up to the present day.
This ambitious form and Gyasi’s determination to scrutinize the participation of West Africans in the Atlantic slave trade are the novel’s chief strengths. Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama, is twenty-six and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The bolder works of young novelists, like the more stylized performances of aging actors, often look better from a distance than in closeup, where cracks in the foundation start to show. Taken in as a panorama, “Homegoing” can be breathtaking. Marcus, Esi’s great-great-great-great-grandson, pursues a Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford and strolls through a San Francisco art museum, but feels that his grip on his middle-class life lacks strength and significance: “The fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance.” He doesn’t know Esi’s name or her story, a gap that only someone who has read the preceding three hundred pages can fully appreciate.
Meanwhile, Marjorie, Effia’s descendant, who meets Marcus at a party in California, possesses her full family history, both in the usual way, as a collection of stories linked by genealogy, and in the form of a stone pendant, handed down from generation to generation. Maame gave a similar pendant to Esi, but the girl lost it in the fetid, nightmarish slave dungeons under Cape Coast Castle, the British fortress presided over by her half sister’s husband.
Perhaps because “Homegoing” is more a collection of linked stories than a conventional novel, Gyasi tries to achieve continuity by leaning hard on recurring symbols like the stone pendant. Her American characters, in particular, lead lives starved of self-directed narrative, their fates dictated by people, institutions, and historical forces over which they have no control. Sometimes even their oppression lacks the consistency that enables effective countermeasures. There isn’t much humor in “Homegoing,” but the best of it comes from Marcus’s sardonic father, Sonny, who feels that “the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. Sonny had been trying to get away from white people for as long as he could remember, but, big as this country was, there was nowhere to go.” Unfortunately, Sonny’s surly intelligence—which could have been the makings of an indelible character—is overshadowed by a litany of experiences and traits that the novel takes to be emblematic of the male African-American experience in the late twentieth century. Sonny neglects the three children he has fathered with three different women. He works for the N.A.A.C.P., gets involved in the Harlem jazz scene, becomes a heroin addict, and so on. These episodes feel less like the emanations of a coherent personality than like boxes that must be checked to make sure that Sonny represents a generation of black men.
The rest of Gyasi’s American characters suffer from similar demographic imperatives. The John Henry-like sharecropper H., nicknamed Two-Shovel, for a feat he performed as a convict worker in a coal mine, stands for the hardships of the Jim Crow South and the multiracial utopianism that briefly flourished in some corners of the labor movement. His daughter, Willie, embodies the Great Migration, sings gospel, marries a light-skinned man who deserts her to pass for white, has her own skin subjected to the paper-bag test, and takes in a minstrel show while she’s at it.
Gyasi has conscientiously assembled the furniture of each of these American historical periods, but she never seems quite at home in them. The farther back in time she goes, the more prone she is to jarring anachronisms. For example, a shipwright living in eighteen-fifties Baltimore thinks of his family and reminds himself that “he had made a promise to Anna that he would be there for them, the way his own father had not been able to be there for him.”
The novel’s African characters, on the other hand, rarely come across as walking, talking history lessons. Their idiosyncratic lives transpire against the backdrop of the great Asante empire, which dominated the Gold Coast for two centuries, a reign punctuated by bloody clashes with neighboring peoples and the British colonizers. None of Effia’s descendants play major roles in that saga, but tantalizing rumors of it seep into their stories: an exiled king, a warrior queen, a British governor’s head exhibited on a stick. Human trafficking was funding, and tarnishing, the empire’s glory; every battle against a neighboring village—often incited by European slave traders—and every cross-border raid becoming a potential source of prisoners who could be sold to the British and the Dutch. Doing profiteering one better, this system turned war itself into a means of production, guaranteeing that conflict would never end.
When that beautiful girl rebuffs James (Effia’s grandson), she explains that, having lost three brothers to the Asante wars, she wants no more of any of it. “I will be my own nation,” she declares. James abandons his future as the leader of his own village to run off with her and start over, to be a modest farmer in “a small village where no one knows us.” This makes for a romantic ending to his chapter, but by the time the novel turns to his daughter, Abena, James has become an old man, barely subsisting on a meagre plot of land where, “season after season, the earth spit up rotted plants or sometimes nothing at all.” His neighbors nickname him Unlucky and have no interest in marrying his probably cursed daughter; she, in turn, blames her father for her spinster status and takes great pride in the “Asante soldiers’ valiant battles against the British, their strength, their hope for a free kingdom.” Gyasi deftly uses the alternating compression and expansion of time built into her novel’s structure to summon the fantasy of retreat into love and family, and then to show how history will, inevitably, trample that dream.
Too often, however, Gyasi struggles to make the linked-story form suit her epic enterprise. There are significant challenges to overcome, not least the lack of a central character to arrest the reader’s attention and carry it through the book. Each chapter must start in a new place and time, with a new set of people, at best picking up a few slender narrative threads from its predecessors. Linked stories aren’t the ideal way to deliver the amount of exposition that historical fiction requires. (It’s never a good sign when a novelist feels obliged to begin a bit of dialogue with “As you know by now, Quey . . .”) A novel has the room to work complications and variations on situations or characters, compelling readers to reassess them again and again. The short story is always in danger of reducing people to types, and Gyasi succumbs to this more than once. (“Like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness.”) She also has a bad habit of forcing an interpretation that any intelligent reader is perfectly capable of picking up on her own: “Marjorie reached for the stone at her neck. Her ancestor’s gift.”
Gyasi’s prose, too, is largely undistinguished. And yet there are flashes of quietly thrilling authority in the pages of “Homegoing.” She displays a particular knack for evocative repetition. A young man lies awake at night in a hut, trying to imagine how he might live discreetly with the man he desires: “The toad croaked. There was a way. There was no way. There was a way.” A detail from Sonny’s drug-using days conveys the addict’s compulsive, secretive rumination:
This shows the unmistakable touch of a gifted writer, and “Homegoing” is a specimen of what such a writer can do when she bites off more than she is ready to chew. Rough as it is page by page, hampered as it is by a form that would daunt a far more practiced novelist, “Homegoing” succeeds, by the end, in accumulating no small emotional power. Extraneous to the novel itself, but not irrelevant to its fate, is the seven-figure advance that is said to have resulted from a ten-bidder auction before last year’s London Book Fair. That makes “Homegoing” what publishers call a “big book,” the object of promotion and marketing campaigns designed to present it as the glorious flowering of a precocious talent. It isn’t. For all the enthusiasm that regularly attends literary débuts, more often than not it isn’t the first book that realizes the extent and the depth of a writer’s talent; it’s the third or fourth. If, in this light, “Homegoing” disappoints, Gyasi’s readers will have to learn to do what her characters do: wait for the spirit to find its way home at last. ♦
