Asante traders collected captives Fante or Ewe middlemen would sell them to the British or Dutch, “whoever was paying the most at the time,” as Effia’s grandson, James, describes the family business of kidnapping and selling human beings. Old alliances fell to human greed to satisfy a ruthless market. Just as the Europeans intruded upon the world of the native people of America, so did they sow disorder in the West African kingdoms, exploiting pre-existing rivalries. The villages of West Africa come alive as Gyasi conjures a world of hand-swept compounds, families sharing goat pepper soup, men sleeping with machetes under their beds to protect against capture. Throughout, the focus is on the wounds inflicted on the colonized and the enslaved. Characters reappear in dreams or retellings as the action moves from the Cape Coast to Kumasi to Baltimore to Harlem.
The narrative unfolds through self-contained stories, some like fables, others nightmares, that shift between the family lines in West Africa and America, each new protagonist a limb of the disrupted family tree. The book tells the story of two half sisters unknown to each other and of the six generations that follow, their lineages broken by enslavement and cursed by premonitions that condemned those who were captured, those who were spared and those who sold hostages to the Europeans. The unhealed ruptures of slavery, persistent as memory and rubbed raw in such an instant, course through “Homegoing,” the hypnotic debut novel by Yaa Gyasi, a stirringly gifted young writer, that contemplates the consequences of human trafficking on both sides of the Atlantic. The guide waited at a remove, permitting us our grief. He stepped near the grave, leaned over and spat on it. At last, we reached the well-tended grave of the governor, and it was then that a member of our party, a professor of even temperament, broke from the group. We followed our tour guide, a cheerful Ghanaian, to the governor’s bright quarters with its views of the sea, to the courtyard where we were told the governor and his aides would pick which female captives they would have for the night. Might our ancestors have lain pressed against strangers in this tomb, their bodies no longer belonging to themselves, not knowing the horrors yet to come? The breath and sweat of the doomed seemed brined into the walls.
Nearly two centuries after humans had been chained in this fortress on the coast of Ghana, I stood with a group of African-American scholars too numb to speak. $26.95.įrom the floor of the dungeon, I could see a fragment of sky through an air hole near the ceiling, a tree length beyond reach and too small for a human body to squeeze through.
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