Homegoing (Broke Through My Expectations)

Tracing real ancestry through historical fiction

When I first opened Yaa Gyasi (pronounced Jahsi)’s 2016 novel Homegoing, I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. I thought I would see a rather linear, maybe even cliched, story about a modern family returning from a foreign nation to their homeland, where they would reconnect with their heritage and embrace each other accompanied by sickly sweet, overly sentimental narration. Let me be honest here: this book was a summer novel for a literature class. Worn down by years of assigned reading, I really wasn’t expecting much.

Needless to say, Homegoing blew those lame expectations out of the water, through the Atlantic ocean, and onto a beautiful tract of fertile land where they would start a hopeful new life.

The catch to this book is that it is told like no traditional novel. Instead of following a single narrator along a single story, Homegoing is essentially a series of vignettes that follow members of a family down through the generations. Specifically, two half-sisters go through extremely different paths of life, and so do their many descendants. The story of the main event that kicks off everything else in the book is simple but effective– and perfectly delivers a message about the butterfly effect: in 18^th century Ghana, Effia and Esi, both daughters of a woman named Maame, are separated by a fire at a young age. Unaware of each other, Effia ends up marrying a wealthy white man, while Esi ends up captured during a war and sold into slavery. And that’s basically the hook! Everything that happens in this book can be traced back to this event, this exigence: one that serves as a reminder, according to Gyasi, of how individual actions can impact entire bloodlines.

No two vignettes are the same in this book. Readers cycle through about 14 different narrators. You might follow a young daughter during her quest to get married in a starving village in one vignette, then — fast-forward decades later! — her daughter, a child struggling to understand religious differences in one vignette. Then, her grandson, a wise, middle-aged schoolteacher writing a book that, as revealed in an even later vignette, would become deeply influential. I believe that this method of storytelling is both Homegoing’s greatest flaw— and its greatest feature.

Let’s start with the positives. Why is storytelling through vignettes a strength for this book? Firstly, it allows readers a comprehensive view of the historical context of characters and their circumstances. In one interview with bookstore Foyles, Gyasi states that “it’s important to remember that so much of what we talk about today... we have to put it in context, and remember our history, so that we can better move forward.” Indeed, as the novel moves solely forward chronologically, each character has a more complex background than the last. Every new character adds a new layer atop the Homegoing cake. (And the cake is red velvet: deep, dark, rich, delicious.) By the end, you have a crystal-clear picture of the modern-day narrators’ ancestry through hundreds of years. And also a 14-layer cake.

Readers also get to experience a variety of perspectives and settings throughout this novel’s vignettes. Gyasi takes readers along the Gold Coast, across the Atlantic, and up through the U.S. The first vignettes take place in the eighteenth century, and the last take place in the twenty-first. Each vignette is roughly 20-30 pages long, making the novel perfectly accessible. These vignettes are largely disconnected from each other. I found Homegoing perfect for reading in short bursts: readers won’t have to follow a long, complicated plot for hundreds of pages. It’s also not like some books that follow a similar format, but jump irregularly between time periods or recurring narrators. The typical experience with this book is simple: sit down, follow a unique character’s narrative for a little while, then stand back up. (Particularly observant people who read last week’s Wordle piece might even turn the book into a ritual; which it would be absolutely perfect for.)

However, this format also comes with its negatives. A lot of readers, accustomed to traditional novels, may desire a “deeper” story where one might follow the same character’s journey through hundreds of pages. Homegoing simply doesn’t offer that. The fast-paced structure of the book, while providing excellent descriptions and dialogue, doesn’t really provide for ultra-nuanced, multi-faceted characters. That structure also doesn’t really support huge, groundbreaking moments like in other novels: some readers may find this novel’s stories unappealing for that reason. Additionally, the first chapter (or two) of the novel move sluggishly without a real reason to care about these characters. As I previously pointed out, the historical context behind the characters expands over the course of the book: readers are given basically zero context at the start of the book, and may find themselves unwilling to see it through.

However, I really do think that readers should see this book through. Homegoing blew my (admittedly low) expectations out of the water. In my experience, the good outweighed the bad. I found myself genuinely enjoying Gyasi’s use of vignettes, the way each layer in the cake fits together like crumbly cakey puzzle pieces into one big history. And literary chef (book cook?) Gyasi’s call to action to readers is clear: to know our own history to better understand ourselves.

I give Homegoing a strong eight out of ten rating. In the MasterChef of modern literature, Yaa Gyasi takes home the gold with a layer cake that is probably taller than the average nine-year-old.