116 pages • 3 hours read
Yaa GyasiHomegoing
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 11 Summary: “Yaw”
“Yaw” begins around 1950, with Akua’s son Yaw teaching history at a Roman Catholic school in Takoradi. He is almost 50 years old and in the process of writing a book entitled Let the Africans Own Africa, with which he is not very satisfied. Later that evening, he is eating dinner at his colleague Edward Boahen’s house, where Edward’s wife cooks for him most nights of the week. Edward says Yaw needs a wife, but Yaw is more passionate about the growing independence movement. He counters Edward’s insistence that he study in America, believing he would “just learn the way the white man wants us to learn” (223). Yaw doubts his book will be successful and decides to leave when Mrs. Boahen suggests she arrange a meeting with a young woman. While walking home, he sees a group of boys playing soccer, and one of them is frightened by his disfigured face.
For the 10 years Yaw has taught at the school, the first day of class has been the same, and Yaw’s reputation precedes him among the students. He wishes he could teach the students in their regional tongues, but “there were too many languages to even try” (225). He asks the students what is written on the board, and a student replies “History is Storytelling” (225), and Yaw follows up by asking who among them would like to recount how he got his face scar. All the boys are uncomfortable. Yaw calls on the previous boy, Peter, who answers that Yaw was “born of fire” (226), and that is also why he is so smart. Other students offer stories, until Yaw asks, “Whose story is correct?” (226), making the point that the problem of history is that “we cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience” (226), and that historians only have sometimes conflicting stories to go by, with the most powerful storytellers dominating the narrative. He urges the students to consider, “Whose story am I missing?” (226). One asks how he got his scar, and says he was only a baby, so he has only heard stories.
What Yaw heard was that his mother had set their hut on fire while the family slept, and “the Crippled Man” Asamoah had been able to save only him (227). His parents were then exiled to the edge of town, and the town collected money to send Yaw to school when he was still quite young. Asamoah died while he was at school, but Akua lived on. Yaw has not yet returned to Edweso despite his mother’s letters and instead became part of Edward’s family in Oseim, like a “stray dog.” That summer Edward joins the pro-independence Convention People’s Party, and Yaw begins to feel less welcome at their house since Mrs. Boahen is expecting her fifth child. He gets a local “house girl” named Esther to cook and clean for him, but he is uncomfortable having another person in the house, feeling exposed. He reads about the Black American’s freedom movement and wishes he could capture the leaders’ rage in his own writing, which seems like a “long-winded whine” to him (229).
Esther interrupts his reading and is nervous at first, but he realizes she is uncomfortable in English, and switching to Twi frees her to be herself with him. Her smile seems brighter to him, and she asks him dozens of questions and then invites him to the market with her. He is insulted by the question, given that she works for him, but she brushes off his anger and says it is good for writers to get up and use their bodies. Yaw smiles, and they go to the market together. At the market Yaw realizes he is nervous with her, and on the way home, dragging along an obstinate goat for dinner, Esther asks about his mother. He says his mother is the one who scarred him, and he has not seen her since he was six. Esther stops walking and observes, “You’re very angry” (232), and he agrees, admitting the is projecting all his anger about his loneliness and colonial rule onto his mother.
Yaw is in love with Esther, it takes him five years to realize it. One evening while trying to figure out how to win her, he asks if she would like to go to Edweso with him to visit his mother but regrets it instantly. She agrees, and they make the long journey together, while Yaw worries about the reunion. When they arrive, the townspeople stare at them, and a little boy shouts about Yaw’s face. The boy’s father scolds him but then recognizes Yaw—it is Kofi Poku, who deduces they are visiting to see “the Crazy Woman” (235). He convinces them to stay with him and his wife for a night before visiting Ma Akua.
Arriving at Kofi Poku’s house, his children hush at the sight of Yaw and Yaw realizes he must be legendary in Edweso. Everyone is embarrassed, but Esther shocks everyone by shouting, “Enough!” and asking, “Has this man not suffered enough that he should come home to this?” (236). They apologize, and Yaw thanks Esther, who says they can think she is the crazy one. Over dinner, Kofi Poku tells them what to expect of Ma Akua: that she keeps to herself on the edge of town but is kind, with a beautiful garden. He assures Yaw that she will recognize him, and that night Yaw sleeps on the mattress while Esther insists on the floor.
The next day they wait until the evening to visit Ma Akua, with Yaw getting increasingly nervous. Yaw is skeptical of forgiveness. Kofi Poku leads Yaw and Esther to Ma Akua, leaving them at the door. Kukua the housemaid answers the door and drops her bowl in shock, praising God for Yaw’s return. Yaw steps into the house, finding Ma Akua sitting in the living room. She approaches him and seems much younger than 76 to him, and touching her hands he feels how soft her own burns are. Esther and the housemaid go to make dinner, while Ma Akua touches his scars all over. He ends up in tears as she holds him.
After Yaw cries for a long time, he asks about his scar, and she replies that to know about his scar, he must know about her dreams and their family. She tells him about her life in the missionary school and how she tried to be happy with his father and their daughters but witnessing the White man’s death by fire triggered her dreams. She recounts what happened in the fire, and how Asamoah saved Yaw but also herself, though she wished he had not. She was only allowed to see Yaw for feedings, and they never told her where he was sent to school.
Her dreams of the firewoman continued, showing her Cape Coast, a cocoa farm, and Kumasi, though she does not know why. She returned to the missionary to find out more about her mother and received Effia’s black stone necklace. Ma Akua then took it to the fetish man’s son, who told her there was evil in her lineage, but she was carrying something that was not hers, and she had been chosen by an ancestor, the firewoman, so she could learn about her origins.
Although Yaw is angry, Ma Akua says she will never forgive herself, but the firewoman has shown her the wrong done by their family “because they could not see the result of the wrong” (242). She says their fire scars are a warning to them, and Yaw sees how they share the same skin and same scarring. She tells him, “Evil begets evil” and apologizes that his life has been so affected by this (242), urging him to free himself. He hugs her, and the women arrive with the food as they celebrate the reunion until morning.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Sonny”
“Sonny” begins around 1956 with Willie’s son Sonny (Carson) reading in jail as he awaits his mother to bail him out. He is reading The Souls of Black Folk for the fourth time, as it gives him strength in his work for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Willie arrives, asking him, “Ain’t you tired of this?” (243), carrying the broom she uses while cleaning houses on the Upper East Side of New York City; her habit of carrying it everywhere used to embarrass him as a teenager.
After she bails him out, he avoids her questions and thinks about the seeming futility of his constant arrests, marches, wounds, and letter writing seeking change in America. Sonny does not actually want desegregation; rather, he wants to get away from White people and go back to Africa, since “white folks owned just about everything an eye could see or a hand could touch” (224). However, he believes this is unrealistic since segregation still assumes his inferiority. Willie is trying to get his attention as they walk, and he thinks about how he is still angry with her because he does not know his father. She tells him to spend more time with his children instead of in jail, and he sees the irony in his anger with her for not having a father when he is also an absent father.
Sonny is on the housing team of the NAACP, so he makes weekly visits to families in Harlem. He constantly hears about the deplorable living conditions of Black families, knowing from his own experience how bad it can be. Sonny remembers a time when Eli left with their rent money and Willie, Sonny, and Josephine had to find housing in an apartment with 40 people living in it. Back in the present, a boy asks Sonny for help but says to him, “You can’t do a single thing, can you?” (246). This moment stays with Sonny, causing him to leave the housing team.
Sonny is arrested three more times at marches, and a policeman punches him in the face and threatens his life. People in the civil rights movement are being shot and killed, and the boy’s discouraged words haunt him. Sonny skips work frequently and chats with a man on a bench who sweeps barbershops, asking him what he does when he feels helpless. The man responds that he smokes and then hands Sonny a bag of dope, saying, “When that don’t help, this do” (247). That night, Sonny flushes the bag down the toilet and quits his job at the NAACP.
Sonny is living with his mother because he cannot pay rent anymore. Willie nags him about getting in touch with the mothers of his children, one of whom, Lucille, has come by looking for him. Sonny decides it is time to find his own place. He visits his friend Mohammed about a job, and Mohammed encourages him to join the Nation of Islam, but Sonny refuses.
Mohammed gives him a contact at Jazzmine, a new jazz club in East Harlem, where Sonny gets a job as a bartender. He does not tell Willie, knowing she would disapprove, having previously warned him off nightclubs and “that kind of life” (249). One night a woman orders a drink at the bar, moving down to him so slowly she seems “like a world-weary old woman” (250). Her name is Amani Zulema, and when she goes on stage the band stops playing and gives her the stage. She plays the piano and sings a song that silences the crowd, ending with a hum that reminds Sonny of the day his mother first sang out in church. That day, Willie’s voice was “the most beautiful thing Sonny had ever heard” (251), and it made him love her more. Amani finishes her song to the roar of applause and walks out.
One day, Lucille arrives at his new apartment with their daughter looking for money, but he tells her he has nothing. She asks, “What kind of father are you!” (252), which angers him. He thinks about how he and Angela were only teenagers when she got pregnant, and he wanted to take care of her but was prohibited by her parents. Lucille leaves angrily when he again refuses to help.
Sonny looks for Amani and after three months finds her sleeping in the back of a club. He tells her he wants to be with her, and she says, “Well, come on” as they take a walk (254). When asked about her name, she tells him she was born Mary but chose Amani, which means “harmony” in Swahili, because it was a better stage name and felt like it was hers. He lightly criticizes her for using an African name but not believing in the Back to Africa movement, and she earnestly tells him going back is impossible and American is theirs. Their walk ends in a dope house in West Harlem, and he realizes she is a heroin addict. They go to a room where other musicians are shooting up, and he watches her do it as her eyes seem to ask him, “This is me. You still want it?” (256).
The narrative jumps forward: Sonny is now a 45-year-old “dope fiend,” and Willie is pounding on the door of his apartment. She leaves, and he goes out to score more in Harlem. He uses it before returning home, where Amani is getting ready to go out. Her mid-section is growing, and she encourages him to see his mother before they make love. Sonny walks to his mother’s apartment with a glassine bag of dope in his shoe. He has not spoken to her for a while, since the police shooting of a boy in Harlem in 1964 that made him realize that being a Black man in America was “worse than dead, you were a dead man walking” (260). He uses the heroin when he arrives at the apartment but then eats while his mother and sister watch.
Josephine leaves with her children for a bit so Willie can talk to Sonny, and Willie abruptly tells him about his father being White, and Sonny asks why she never told him before. He is angry with her for never fighting for his father. She tells Sonny she fought for him—that she marched from Alabama to Harlem to give him a better life. Willie tells him he was always so angry, as if he were born knowing his father could choose his life, but he could not. She shares her disappointment that he barely knows his own children, saying he has imprisoned himself so the White man does not have to do it anymore. She offers him money, and while he wants to leave to buy more drugs, he forces himself to stay.
Chapters 11-12 Analysis
Chapter 11 opens with the image of the dry, windy Harmattan season blowing across the land, symbolizing a change in seasons, not just literally but with the growing independence movements across Africa. Yaw is a part of this change, even if he doubts his contributions, writing his book on African independence and how to rebuild their countries without European systems. While Yaw is just a newborn at the end of Asante sovereignty, by the time the reader meets him again it is around 1949 and Yaw is middle aged. As a teacher, he is working to change the way young boys think about history and society.
Beginning the new school year with his students, Yaw challenges them to question the narratives they hear in the classroom and elsewhere, highlighting a major theme in this chapter and in Homegoing more broadly. He tells them “History is Storytelling” (225), helping them to understand that people believe those who have power and do not look beyond the main narratives to hear other voices. Yaw himself is seeking to elevate those suppressed voices—from the children he wishes he could teach in their native languages to the book he is writing for his fellow Ghanaians to help them envision a new societal structure.
Despite his desire to contribute to making positive change in his students and in his country, Yaw remains unbalanced in other ways. Because of his scarring and his deeper trauma of being separated from his family as a child, he is lonely and has never had a relationship, despite having a romantic heart. He essentially relies on his friends’ willingness to have him over for dinner almost every night, and when that changes, he agrees to hire Esther as his housemaid so someone can take care of him. He is so focused on intellectual pursuits, he has neglected his body and his heart, so he is blindsided by his love for Esther and her open, questioning spirit. Over the course of his chapter, Esther helps him to gradually open himself up to the love of a woman and to his mother, whom he has been painfully estranged from for most of his life.
When he finally returns home to Edweso, in part because of Esther’s influence, Yaw is able to heal the wounds holding him back, and this healing eventually results in an impactful book on African independence. Being reunited with his mother helps him find that fire that gives meaning to his words. Esther’s role in this transformation is essential, for when they return to Edweso, Yaw is still humiliated by the “naming” of Kofi Poku and his family, the unwitting source of so much strife for Akua, who whisper about Yaw and perpetuate rumors about his family. This torment is like the evil that Akua says begins in the home and that “grows” and “transmutes” beyond the village. Esther, an outsider, confronts it head on, and her intervention frees him to move past the torment inflicted on him and his family.
Yaw’s story is one of reconciliation and forgiveness, and of being able to tell one’s story after it has been told by others for so many years. Just as Ma Akua is finally able to tell her own story to her son, who has heard it from others for years, Maame is likewise telling her story through dreams to Ma Akua, who can communicate them to Yaw and Marjorie. In telling her own story, Ma Akua is also finally free to apologize to him and seek forgiveness, which is liberating for them both. It is important he hears her story, for she is the only one surviving, and it shifts their dynamic. As Yaw told his students, it is the powerful whose stories survive, and by finally embracing the messages of her dreams and learning from the firewoman, Ma Akua embraces that power and heals herself and her family.
The anger that Yaw has held onto for decades has left him lonely and isolated, and his reunion with Ma Akua helps him realize that his deep grievance is not with a hard monster, but a women whom he is surprised to find is as soft as her scars, and human. In turn, she can see he is holding himself captive, and Ma Akua urges him to let himself be free. He cannot write about the liberation movement because he has not yet freed himself. While the chapter begins with a change in season and the arrival of the Harmattan, the sunrise at the end of the chapter symbolizes a new day dawning for Yaw and an end to the long estrangement of his family, to be resolved with Marjorie’s journey.
Like Yaw, many of Sonny’s problems stem from his not knowing the truth about his family, his father’s identity, and his mother’s struggles in Harlem. Like Yaw, he lives with anger and resentment, and he is scarred in his own way. While they are not separated by distance as Yaw and Akua are, the emotional gulf between Willie and Sonny is huge, in part because she withholds so many truths about herself that could have bridged that gap and bonded them closer. Willie withholds her struggles because they are humiliating and painful to her. Ironically, sharing that truth with her son is what he needs to heal.
In “Sonny,” the beautiful and unique voices of Amani and Willie intersect in Sonny’s life, and while he sees them as opposites, he does not realize how similar the two women are. Sonny does not know of Willie’s dreams of jazz singing when she tells him to avoid that life; he only sees the life she has embraced through the church, never understanding the roots of her pain. Left to his own methods, Sonny first tries to funnel it into making a change through his work at the NAACP. He reads extensively and marches in protests regularly, partially supporting Garveyism in believing that the repatriation of African slave descendants to the African continent would be better than desegregation in the United States. However, he bristles at the underlying racial hierarchy of segregation, so instead he seeks better conditions for Black people in Harlem.
The Back to Africa movement is rooted in redefining the Black community in the United States, embracing African roots rather than venerating White social systems. Renaming the self plays a role in trying to define the self, particularly for Sonny, who feels a lack of connection to his family. Amani chooses a new name as well, one with African origins that suits her better than “Mary,” a name deeply rooted in Christian symbolism. Amani’s rejection of the name Mary is somewhat humorous given Willie’s religious devotion and perhaps contributes to Sonny’s attraction to her.
Reinvention has its limits, however, and Sonny feels the limits of his power. His encounter with the boy who names his powerlessness has a profound effect on him. Not being able to change anything and feeling the futility of the difficulties and violence of the early civil rights movement in the 1960s pushes him over the edge, and he turns to heroin for an escape. Sonny realizes that Black men cannot choose their lives the same way White men can, so he has relinquished control over his body, his children, and his life. Like his grandfather H’s prison sentence, Sonny has essentially lost 10 years of his life to this addiction when the reader encounters him again in the mid-1960s.
By the end of the chapter, however, Willie helps Sonny to see how he has enslaved himself through his addiction, so the “white man don’t got to do it no more” (263). Her confession about his father helps him to let go of his anger towards her and begin his own journey back to his family. In “Marcus,” the reader learns that, unlike with his first three children, Sonny embraces his role as a father and raises Marcus into an accomplished young man. In both “Yaw” and “Marcus,” accepting one’s place in the family and role as a father is central to the healing process.
