Homegoing is an expansive novel tracing the lives and descendants of two half sisters born in the mid-18th century in Ghana, Effia and Esi. The sisters were raised by rival tribes ( the Fante and the Asante) at a time when English slave traders were fueling the tribal animosity for their own profit. The Fante and Asante peoples raid each other’s villages, taking captives to be sold as slaves to the English traders at the Cape Coast. They also allowed the European soldiers to marry their daughters in exchange for generous gifts. Effia is married off to the Cape Coast British Governor, leaving her Fante village to live in the Cape Coast Castle. Esi is captured in a Fante raid and sold as a slave and imprisoned in the lower levels of the same Castle, to be shipped to the plantations in Mississippi. The stories of Effia and Esi and their 8 generations of descendants, is the complex history of the slave trade, the legacy of miscegination, and the struggle to preserve culture and identity in the brutal face of forced displacement. But the novel does not assign blame to one group or people for slavery and its legacy. Slavery is part of all the cultures in this book – Fante, Asante, English and American – and all bear its scars. As one character notes, “sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your home.”

Homegoing has a rigid structure, as the stories of Effia and Esi’s descendants are each given a chapter, alternating between the descendant of Effia and the descendant of the Esi. Characters you meet in one chapter return in later pages as we meet their children and grandchildren. So although this is the story of one family, there is not one character through the novel for the reader to identify with. Each chapter had a new cast of characters, and all these characters were sometimes difficult to keep track of. There is a family tree at the beginning of the novel which I frequently referred back to. I didn’t mind this though, and was gripped by these mini-stories, such as the attempt to escape the plantations, being sent as a convict to work in the coalmines, and the privilege of passing as white in Harlem. There are many pockets of American history that I know little about and the book provided a lot of information to absorb.

The broad vision of this book is ambitious, particularly for the first novel of a 26 year old writer. I was struck by the restraint with which Gyasi describes conditions of violence and depravity, often describing one or two specific (and often horrific) details which conveyed the whole.
The Asante slave girl being forced to carry the large container of water without spilling. The urine dripping through slaves stacked in the Castle prison waiting to be shipped to America. These details stick, get under your skin and do not go away.