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.
Themes
Slavery, Imprisonment, and Freedom
The legacy of the slave trade dominates Homegoing, affecting each side of the family in vastly different ways. On Effia’s side of the family, the slave trade allows her family to live comfortably and maintain power in their village and beyond. The lucrative trade allows Fiifi to form an alliance between his family and the Asante, creating protection of their wealth and power while keeping the English as an ally. However, for the individual lives of Effia, Quey, and James, the slave trade has trapped them in compromised situations, in which continued participation means sacrificing individual happiness for the success of the family and the tribe.
While Effia lives comfortably with James Collins, she is aware that she could just as easily be in the dungeon. Additionally, this alliance means losing her connection to her village and tribe, along with the status she would have enjoyed as Abeeku’s first wife. As the slave trade grows, it affects Quey’s life as well, for he, too, must compromise his own desires to become a leader in their Fante village, feeding the trade with more and more captured Africans. Finally, James Richard Collins most fully realizes his opposition to the slave trade when confronted with Akosua Mensah’s words, “I will be my own nation” (99). He realizes he is not his “own nation” but rather bound to the slave trade, and he ultimately frees himself, and his descendants, for a hard life, but one that is truly free.
On Esi’s side of the family, which is brought to America on slave ships, slavery has a direct impact on their family story. Being bought and sold as property steals each person’s ability to live freely, grow as part of a family, and make choices for the self and children. The absence of freedom centers the question for each of Esi’s descendants: What does it mean to be free? Homegoing answers question this for each of Esi’s descendants as they face the limitations of slavery, then the racist laws put into place following the Civil War to limit the freedoms of Black men and women in both the North and the South. Even after slavery is abolished in H’s lifetime, he is still unjustly convicted and imprisoned by the prison leasing system, just as his children and grandchildren live with compromised freedom in an ever-changing America.
Duality, Separation, and Parallel Lives
From the first pages of Homegoing, separation emerges as a prominent theme in the text. Maame’s flight into Asante territory from her Fante home marks the beginning of this traumatic split in her family line, as she in many ways represents the archetypal mother of Africa. The violence of slavery splits her family but also splits Africa into those who stayed and those who were stolen away. This split is symbolized through the two family stories that intertwine in the narrative, as Gyasi alternates them one after another in a narrative braid until the two strands reunite in Africa.
Abronoma’s words encapsulate this separation and duality of lives when she says of separated sisters, “They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond” (39). Gyasi’s narrative structure creates this mirror as well, with each pair of stories sharing similar themes of freedom, isolation, trauma, scarring, haunting, and healing that interweave through the generations. Marjorie’s poem speaks to this duality of African identity and the vast differences between Africans and the “Akata,” who are “too long gone from the mother continent to continue calling it the mother continent” (273). However, her poem also draws the connections between the two communities, reminding the reader that they come from the same family and share the trauma slavery has inflicted on the continent and its diaspora. This separation is resolved in the union of Marjorie and Marcus, distant cousins who finally return to the Gold Coast together.
Storytelling and Telling One’s Story
Homegoing is filled with individual stories, each narrating pivotal moments in each descendant’s life. These stories overlap, so the reader gets multiple perspectives on a moment and a character, seeing shared moments through different eyes. For example, the moment Willie drops her song book and sings aloud in front of the church is later recalled through the eyes of a young Sonny, who may not know the memory she attaches to “I Shall Wear a Crown” but who nonetheless feels the beauty of the moment. These 14 stories come together to form a larger picture that details the effects of the slave trade on one family living in Africa and the United States, but which could be the story of millions of families living today.
Gyasi’s novel sets out to tell fictionalized stories with historical accuracy, to give voice to a side of history that has been long overlooked in fiction. Yaw’s words to his students stand out as an invocation to the reader as well to ask, “Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?” (226-227). Many voices of enslaved people and their descendants are lost to history, in favor of a dominant narrative, but her characters show the importance of having a voice in the face of oppression.
The ability to tell one’s story, particularly within the family, is crucial to the healing of these family lines. In Effia’s family line, sharing one’s truth, whether it is James telling Abena the truth of her origins, Akua finally sharing her own trauma with Yaw, or Marjorie reciting her poem to her schoolmates (and father), allows each generation to move forward with better surety. For Esi’s family line, speech is at first stifled—Ness struggles with the shift from Twi to English, and this difficulty with expressing the self is echoed with Pinky, representing the inability of a slave to truly express the self. As Ness’s grandson H finally gains his freedom and joins a union, he finds his authoritative voice and his role as a leader in his community. Like her father, Willie is naturally talented at using her voice, which manifests in song so powerful it silences her listeners and gives her grandson visions of their ancestors. In turn, Sonny’s protesting and Marcus’s research are forms of lifting up their own voices and speaking louder in a culture that privileges dominant White narratives.
Family, Elders, and Grandmothers
In a family line defined by separation and isolation, the prominence of elders, and particularly grandmothers, emerges as an important theme in Homegoing. In the novel, elders hold the answers to family secrets that haunt their children and grandchildren, and this information often proves liberating once shared. Conversely, the lack of elders in the family line often leads to a feeling of being untethered to the past, requiring characters to create an identity where the family history is missing.
On Marjorie’s side of the family, both Effia and Akua live long lives and are an important influence in helping their grandchildren learn about their family legacy and progress towards healing that legacy. Effia, whose authority is always second to her husband James’s and then subordinated to the wills of Fiifi and Quey, still plays an important role in guiding James Richard Collins towards his truth, encouraging him to find a new way and leave behind a family legacy he knows is toxic. Like her great-great-grandmother Effia, Akua plays a similar role for Marjorie, sharing what she knows of their family history, the inheritance of trauma that seems to haunt their family line, and guiding her towards reckoning with the painful past of Africans on the Gold Coast.
By contrast, in Marcus’s family, generations of his ancestors are separated from one another, so the lasting memory and insight of the elders is mostly absent. From Ness to Kojo to H, each generation is orphaned in a sense, and that family legacy is lost with each elder. However, with H gaining his freedom, he is able to raise Willie into adulthood, and Willie is then able to pass along some of their family history to her descendants. Marcus’s passionate interest in his family history, which leads him back to Africa, is part of that recuperation of the past, lost through generations of anonymity through enslavement. With freedom, Willie emerges as an elder in her family line, like Akua and Effia, helping her grandson to embrace his interest in the family history and the history of African Americans more broadly.
Finally, the grandmothers help their children and grandchildren to think unconventionally, in a way that defies social norms. Willie can see that Marcus’s visions of their ancestors may be rooted in a spiritual gift. Similarly, Effia challenges the conventional knowledge that James Richard Collins should stay in his comfortable position, maintaining the status quo, while Akua visits the fetish man and learns to interpret her firewoman dreams, passing along this information to Marjorie. Each elder woman in the family uses her long experience to help her grandchildren envision a new and different way to navigate their worlds and heal their scars.
Big Man Versus Weak Man
In the first half of Homegoing, the theme of the Big Man emerges, particularly in Effia’s family and descendants. The expectation that men, and particularly leaders of the village, are strong and unyielding leads to numerous problems for the village, and particularly for the women of the village. In part, this theme emerges as a problem with patriarchy in the African village, which is built around a male chief who can be married to multiple women. The need to maintain that structure, and the resulting need for the Asante to dominate the Fante, for example, leads to numerous conflicts that only undermine African autonomy and feed into the British slave trade.
Big Man Asare’s harsh punishment of Abronoma after she spills only a few drops of water is required or else he will be seen as weak. Even the little children singing the song understand how power is maintained: “The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her suffer, or you’ll fail too” (37). Being a “Big Man” means being merciless, or else one is seen as weak and a failure. Gyasi shows that the violence of power echoes through the generations, for the harsh punishment ultimately leads to Esi’s attempt at befriending Abronoma out of guilt, which leads to Esi’s capture and the destruction of their village. Esi sings this same song to her daughter, Ness, as the evil of that moment then echoes through the generations, now enslaved across the ocean.
On Effia’s side of the family, the drive to be a “Big Man” starts with Cobbe, whose rape of Maame leads to this split in their family. The pressure on Fiifi to be a Big Man is then passed on to Quey, who has a gentler nature and is not suited for tribal leadership. Quey would prefer to be with Cudjo, but the pressure to be a Big Man, compounded by Fiifi’s intervention and the humiliating memory of his father’s disappointment on seeing him with Cudjo, drives him to accept a role that only makes him miserable.
The violent dominance of the “Big Man” is at the root of the slave trade, where two tribes of people are pitted against each other, while the English slave traders reap the benefits. It is a social structure that only seems to undermine itself, feeding into and perpetuating the slave trade. However, while the men in James Richard Collins’s life are grooming him with this same talk of being a “Big Man,” he can see through it, and with the sharp words of Akosua, he realizes that true freedom is being able to choose another way. His rejection of the “Big Man” ideal allows him to start anew. Eventually, Yaw transforms that energy into an intellectual contribution, leading his country with a different kind of strength, rather than physical dominance and cruelty.
