This ambitious form and Gyasi’s determination to scrutinize the participation of West Africans in the Atlantic slave trade are the novel’s chief strengths. Each chapter of the novel is narrated from the perspective of a descendant of either Effia or Esi, one representative for each generation, and the two bloodlines alternate up to the present day. The older daughter, Effia, stays behind in Africa, as the wife of a British official her half sister, Esi, once the pampered darling of a powerful father, is captured by raiders from another village, sold to the British, and brought to America. Soon afterward, Maame marries an Asante “Big Man” and gives birth to another girl. Here’s how it starts: Sometime in the late eighteenth century, Maame, an Asante slave in a Fante household, flees into the bush during a fire, leaving behind her newborn daughter, who survives. As one prophetic character puts it, “sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your home.” The wrongs done emerge from the muddled ethics typical of domestic quarrels, but their repercussions are vast. Unlike the Biblical transgression, however, the source of the curse that dogs an Asante woman’s descendants through seven generations defies pinpointing and straightforward assessments of blame you might as well shun your own hand. “Homegoing”-the title is taken from an old African-American belief that death allowed an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to Africa-is rooted, like the Bible, in original sin. If the girl could not shake his hand, then, surely, she could never touch her own.” The Fante had protection from trading them.
“The Asante had power from capturing slaves.
“James had spent his whole life listening to his parents argue about who was better, Asante or Fante, but the matter could never come down to slaves,” Gyasi writes. Both of them are West Africans, members of the Akan people, although she is Asante, from the interior of what we now call Ghana, and he is Fante, from the coast. “Respectfully, I will not shake the hand of a slaver,” she says, withholding the customary gesture of condolence. In Yaa Gyasi’s début novel, “Homegoing” (Knopf), a boy greeting the line of mourners at his grandfather’s funeral encounters a beautiful girl.
0 kommentar(er)
