Both girls leave their ancestral villages, never to return. Both have fathers who are Big Men, accustomed to sleeping with a machete under the bed in order to protect the family. The half-sisters, Esi and Effia, grow up in separate villages. Thanks to the family tree, we see Gyasi move back and forth between Effia’s descendants and those of Esi’s. There is little narrative glue that ties one chapter to the next, other than the reader’s knowledge that all of the characters are blood relatives. Gyasi records the fates of Maame’s descendants using stand-alone vignettes for one member of each generation. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night. It lived off the air it slept in caves and hid in trees it burned up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. Slave ships link the two halves of the family. Esi’s half becomes the slaves to be traded. Effia’s half of the family is destined to become slave traders. Her two daughters, Effia and Esi, form its branches. Maame is the matriarch who stands at the head of the family tree.
Homegoing is breathtaking in its ambition.
Generation by generation, across 300 years of West African and African-American history. It comes, no doubt, from the family tree Gyasi tacked on her wall while she was writing Homegoing. A family tree opens Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing.
0 kommentar(er)
