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 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 9 Summary: “Akua”
“Akua” is set at the turn of the 20th century, opening just before the War of the Golden Stool. Akua was born to Abena in Kumasi around 1879, so she is about 21 years old. She grew up in the missionary school but now lives in Edweso. The chapter opens as Akua cooks, with the narrator saying that “Akua’s ear was growing” (177), and that she “had learned to distinguish sounds she had never before heard” (177). This change started when she was 16, sometime after witnessing a White man being burned alive, and 15 years after her mother died. She suffers from insomnia, and her dreams are haunted by a “firewoman” who rages, as Akua sees her holding, then losing, her two daughters.
Akua wakes up her husband, Asamoah, with her screams and says they should not have burned the White man. He dismisses her fear of fire, saying he is more concerned about the exile of the Asantehene, who was arrested and exiled after refusing British sovereignty. Akua senses the growing anger of the Asante and decides to hide her fear from her husband.
Akua lives with her mother-in-law, Nana Serwah, and her two daughters, Abee and Ama Serwah. She cooks and cleans, but Nana Serwah does not approve of her. Both Nana Serwah and Asamoah are mistrustful of her upbringing among the White men at the mission. On her way to the market, she walks by the spot where they burned the White man, and she remembers how Kofi Poku, a three-year-old, called him “Obroni!” (180).
Her mind wanders back to when she was six years old and learned the meaning of Obroni from the fetish doctor, who taught her it was a derivative of “Abro ni” or “wicked man.” The fetish doctor had been there to comfort her when her mother died, and she continued to visit him despite being forbidden by the school. Her mind returns to Kofi Poku’s accusation, and the angry village mob that forms around the White man, burning him alive. The White man calls for help in English, saying he is only a traveler, but no one, including Akua, does anything to help.
Returning to her compound after the market, Akua finds the women busy preparing a meal for the men, who are all shouting in outrage because the British will not return King Prempeh I from exile. Moreover, the British governor was demanding the Golden Stool to sit upon himself or give to Queen Victoria. For the Asante, this would mean the death of their spirit, and both women know war is coming. By the next week, all the men are leaving for war, including Asamoah.
The narrative jumps back to when a missionary pulls her out of class for private tutoring with him. At first, she thinks it is because she has learned to write her English name, Deborah. However, he threatens her with a switch and calls her a sinner and a heathen, like her mother. He tells her to be thankful the British are there to help her live “a good and moral life” before making her repeat “God bless the queen” and lashing her five times (184). While she is recovering, she thinks he looked hungry, “like if he could, he would devour her” (184).
In the present, the women rise early to sing a song for their troops and cook for the men in shifts. Alone at night, Akua screams in her sleep again. Akua has been married to Asamoah, a businessman from Kumasi, for five years. The Missionary forbade their marriage, but she was 16 and left anyway. Akua, who is now six months pregnant, bonds more with her mother-in-law while the men are gone, but her dreams get worse. Often she cannot stop staring at the cooking fire, and it gets bad enough that Nana Serwah confines her to her hut. At first Akua is thankful for the break, but then she dreams of the firewoman who asks her, “Where are your children?” (187), telling her she must always know where they are. When Akua tries to leave her hut, the village Fat Man blocks the door. She fights him but cannot leave, and as her mental health declines, she prays continuously, “Fire. Fire. Fire” (188).
In a memory, the missionary tries to stop her from leaving, Akua tells him, “You’d have to kill me to keep me here” (189), and he offers to tell her about her mother, information he has withheld for ten years. He tells her Abena would not repent, and then he confesses that she fought being baptized and that he accidentally drowned her while forcing the baptism. He burned her body in the forest, he says, and while he cries on the floor, Akua walks over his body to get out.
Asamoah returns at the end of her week of confinement and is furious to find Akua locked in their hut. He has lost a leg in the war. The family is reunited, and Akua regains her strength. The Asante lose the war, which ends in September, as crops die from a dry season and their Queen Mother is exiled to the Seychelles. Their “broken family” finds a new rhythm and comfort, but Akua cannot sleep, fearing the firewoman, and Kofi Poku labels her “Crazy Woman.” After a long time, Asamoah and Akua make love; her son Yaw is then born two weeks later, and she feels like things will be all right.
Akua wanders at night. She takes her children for long walks, resting to sing songs and talk. One day Abee says she is the daughter of “a Crazy Woman,” and Akua is upset, but too tired to react. That night, in a dream, Akua takes the firewoman’s two daughters into her arms as they all burn together, until the fire begins to burn out and “the children begin to disappear” (197). When Akua awakes, she is being carried by the village to shouts of “Akua, the Crazy Woman!” (197). They tie her to a burning tree, but she has no idea what is happening. Her hands and feet are burned, and Asamoah intervenes to save her. She hears that she has killed both of her girls, though Yaw has survived, and Asamoah convinces the village that he and Yaw need her. She is released and returns home to her wounded son, but no one will tell her where the girls are.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Willie”
“Willie” begins in a church in Harlem in New York City in the 1920s, with Willie joining the church choir practice after her housecleaning shift. Her son Carson is sitting in the audience, and she thinks about sending him to live with her sister Hazel “down south.” She cannot send him to school until his sister Josephine can go, too, and he seems to hate her for it. On their way home, she buys Carson an ice cream and he seems happy, and she wishes they could walk all the way to Pratt City.
The narrative jumps to Willie’s youth in Pratt City. She is singing the national anthem at her father H’s union meeting. She becomes hyper-aware of her own skin color at 10 years old on the day she meets her future husband, Robert Clifton, who is “the whitest black boy she had ever seen” (201). She knows she is possibly the best singer in the town, and when she is done Robert’s father introduces them. When Hazel insults him, Robert says their father H is “old as dirt” (202), and Willie pushes him down. He lets it go, and the little spat breaks down a barrier between them, who become so inseparable they are known around town as “RobertnWillie.” They marry at 18 and have Carson at 20. H dies a month later, followed the next month by Ethe. Their deaths are hard on her, and Robert is supportive. She sings at the funeral, with Carson in her arms.
Eventually, both Robert and Willie start to think about leaving Pratt City, where he works as a store clerk. The mines will not hire Robert, and Willie compares him to her father, who was “twice the size of Robert, ten times as strong” (204); she knows Robert could not survive the mines. They decide to move to New York City, and when they get there they stay with Lil Joe, Joecy’s kid, who is a schoolteacher in Harlem. Robert and Willie look for employment together, but Robert is refused employment because people think he is a White man married to a Black woman. Robert drops her off at home while Willie watches Carson and feels a “forward memory” or premonition of loneliness. Robert later returns home, determined to make a life for them, having gotten himself a haircut and clothes with their remaining money.
Robert finds employment but struggles with the everyday racism of people at his job, quitting soon after. Two weeks later Robert finds a job in Manhattan, while it takes Willie three months to find work as a housekeeper for a wealthy Black family. After work she leaves for auditions at jazz clubs, but she is considered too dark skinned. Willie ends up getting a cleaning job at a club but does not tell Robert, who is making good money and would not approve. The world perceives them as a mixed-race couple, which makes finding an apartment together nearly impossible and strains their marriage. One night at work, Willie is asked to clean up vomit in the men’s room and finds Robert, whom she does not recognize at first. Two men enter the room looking for Robert, but finding Willie there, too, they assume Robert has “got him a girl” (214), and they make overtures to join him. He stops them before they can rape her, but they realize she is his woman. Instead, one of the men masturbates while Robert is obligated to kiss and touch Willie in front of them, and then they tell him not to return to work. Robert is in tears and tells her “I’ll leave tonight” (215).
Returning to the present day, Carson is still licking his ice cream cone as they walk. Willie remembers that Joe offered to marry her, but she leaves and finds a new apartment, leaving Carson alone during the day. She works odd jobs and tries to audition but is unable to sing. Willie eventually joins a church and “couldn’t get enough of it” (216), and one day she meets Eli, a poet. Their relationship is “a rush” for her, as Eli is the opposite of Robert—adventurous, curious, open to expansion. They have a child together (Josephine), but then he disappears for three days, and Willie is angry. Eli comes and goes from the household, as does his financial contribution, so Willie must leave the baby with Carson so she can work (this is why he cannot go to school yet). Her attendance at church wanes when Eli is home, but when he leaves, she joins the choir, although she still cannot find her singing voice and just moves her lips in the back row.
Back in the present, Willie and Carson’s walk approaches the limits of Harlem, where Black people are not typically welcome to venture beyond. However, they continue on into Manhattan until they are standing on a street corner and she sees Robert tying a young child’s shoelace. He kisses his blonde wife and then sees Willie across the intersection. Seeing Robert, Willie smiles, realizing she has forgiven him and “the pressure of anger and sadness and confusion and loss” seems to shoot out and away from her (220). Robert smiles back but walks away with his new family, as Willie and Carson return to Harlem.
That Sunday, Willie, Eli, and the children are in church; Eli is home and happy because his book of poems is set to be published that spring. Willie is standing in the choir, and she thinks of her father, H, coming home from work and how he said he loved to come home to his girls. She looks at her own family and loudly drops her songbook. With everyone in the church looking at her, she finally steps forward and sings.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
“Akua” takes place during a time of transition for Ghana, as the defeat of the Asante during the War of the Golden Stool (1900) marks the end of Asante sovereignty and the lands annexation by the British until Ghanaian independence in 1957. This transition is seen through the eyes of Akua, a young mother of three children struggling with mental health issues. While the “evil” that has followed Maame’s descendants for generations has always manifested in their lives, here Maame herself seems to come to Akua in her dreams as “the firewoman,” an angry mother who has lost her two daughters (Effia and Esi). These dreams begin for Akua at 16 and increase in intensity, just as she deteriorates mentally, hearing voices and sounds and falling into a trance staring at fires.
Akua is attuned to another world—to their spiritual legacy—in a way no other character is in Homegoing. She is plagued by insomnia, afraid and unable to rest or to trust herself in sleep. These dreams are rooted in the trauma passed down through generations, here represented by fire, and her vulnerability to it destroys her family. These sounds and dreams are triggered by seeing the White man burn alive in their town but also by the constant trauma of living at the mission with an abusive man who killed her mother.
That education with the white Christian missionaries sets her up as an outsider in the town, engendering mistrust with her own mother-in-law and the village itself. Gyasi shows how these missions often played a direct role in reinforcing European dominance in the hearts and minds of the African people. This larger crime is symbolized through the murder of Abena, as the missionary forces Christianity onto her through baptism—his desperate struggle to “save” her is what ultimately kills her. That trauma is passed on to Akua, who not only loses her mother at a young age but is also targeted by the missionary as “a sinner and a heathen” and whipped into submission (183), for a time. That trauma and abuse ruin her mental health, but Akua has strength enough to leave as the missionary crumples before her on the floor after his confession.
Throughout “Akua,” and Homegoing more broadly, themes of exile and loneliness dominate the narrative. Akua herself is an orphan and seen as different in the village because of her upbringing in the mission. She is often is lost in her own thoughts and the sounds she hears, and even within her own family she is somewhat of an outsider. Akua is sent into isolation when her mother-in-law does not know how to help her, and she feels she cannot share her dreams with her husband, who is more focused on the wars to come than his family. This loneliness is echoed in the image of the empty Asante throne and the exiled royals, who have been captured and shipped to faraway lands in the British empire.
That loneliness becomes a theme in “Willie” as well, telling another story of a mother’s isolation within her own family. Willie’s chapter opens during the Great Migration of African Americans in the early part of the 20th century as they moved out of the rural South to look for work in the urban North. Perhaps more than any other chapter in Homegoing, Willie’s story is focused on the nuance of color as African Americans gain more rights but face continuous segregation and racism. In “Willie” Gyasi addresses the question of racial “passing” in America, where people of mixed descent sought to “pass” as white and assimilate into the White majority to escape segregation. As seen in the different struggles Robert and Willie face while seeking employment, those with lighter skin faced fewer barriers than those with darker skin, and ultimately Robert succeeds at passing as White but must abandon Willie to do so. From their first meeting, their relationship is put in the context of their differing skin tones, and it is the factor that breaks them apart.
Here Gyasi flips assumptions: In Pratt City, where White and Black families lived together, skin tone did not take on much importance, coming to New York from the deep South, the couple faces deeper racism for looking like a mixed-race couple. Willie begins to see the subtle differences in skin tone, taking note of the “mahogany-colored woman” (200), “a man the color of milky tea” (200), and “a tree-bark woman” (200), and noting her own skin, which “wasn’t coal black” but seemed so next to Robert’s (201). This new hierarchy of color suffocates their relationship and sets her on a path of loneliness throughout the chapter. She is an exceptional singer but cannot find a job in a club because she is too dark, and while she is the more adventurous person in their marriage, craving the spotlight, she has no opportunities to fully embrace those strengths. This lack of opportunity manifests as poverty, for without Robert’s support, and with Eli’s unreliability, Willie is left to forget her dreams so her family can survive.
Despite these oppressive circumstances, singing emerges as a way for Willie to shine in her community and to find herself again. By joining a church, she finds community, and she eventually creates a new family with Eli. Despite his weaknesses, Willie embraces happiness in her new, imperfect family by the end of the chapter, when she finds her voice again. As Gyasi reveals in “Sonny,” in this moment of returning to herself, Willie sings “I Shall Wear a Crown,” the same song she sang at her father’s funeral.
The stories of Akua and Willie establish the family matriarchs for the last generations of the family. These women become the grandmothers who guide Marjorie and Marcus, helping them to rise above their circumstances and find healing together. Both women live long lives, helping to heal the trauma of slavery in their families despite their own struggles as young women. Christianity plays a different role for each woman, as Gyasi again demonstrates how something can benefit one life while destroying another. For Akua and many Africans, European missionaries were a cruel, abusive, and oppressive influence in the country, causing more harm to the people than good. However, for Willie, her church community helps her find herself again as an outsider in Harlem and lets her sing again, just as her faith later gives her the strength to help Sonny heal from heroin addiction. While religion might be a force for good, that same faith in the context of imperialism can be devastating.
