Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Genre: Black Historical Fiction | Published: 2016
Months ago, I first recommended Homegoing on my Black Women Book List; it was the only one I hadn’t yet read. I finally picked it up last month, and it was well worth the wait. I even added it to my Giftable Reads list soon after. In honour of Black History Month (which, I’ll confess, I only remembered yesterday!), I wanted to begin with a book that truly speaks to the themes of legacy, identity, and history. This is that book. It’s one I believe everyone should read — a deep, haunting story about how a people and a culture were torn apart by slavery and colonialism.
I often find it harder to review books that earn an instant five stars, because it’s difficult to articulate why I loved them so much — critique usually comes more naturally. But Homegoing left such an impression that I wanted to try. Homegoing is a powerful novel that explores the lasting impact of slavery and colonialism on two branches of an African matriarch, illustrating how history shapes identity and notions of belonging. It also beautifully captures how tradition and familial lines were so easily torn apart, even on the African continent itself. As far as debut novels go, Homegoing is both epic in scope and intimate in feeling.
Synopsis
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born in eighteenth-century Ghana, but in different villages. Effia is married to an Englishman and lives in comfort in Cape Coast Castle, unaware that her sister, Esi, is imprisoned in the dungeons below, soon to be sold into the booming slave trade and shipped to America.
One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of conflict in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations struggle with the slave trade and British colonisation. The other traces Esi’s lineage in America, from the plantations of the South and the Civil War to the Great Migration, the coal mines of Alabama, and the jazz clubs of Harlem. Through these intertwined histories, Homegoing makes the past visceral, showing how the memory of captivity endures in the soul of a nation.
Major Themes
Legacy of Oppression
The central theme of Homegoing is the legacy of oppression, how trauma endures and transforms across generations. A recurring idea in the novel is that the family’s lineage is cursed, a metaphor for the inescapable reach of racism, slavery, and colonialism. Even those who remained in Ghana were not spared, as the shadow of British rule and white supremacy persisted in new forms.
“Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”
As someone who knows a fair bit about British colonial history in Africa and the transatlantic slave trade, I usually avoid reading fiction on this topic; it tends to make me furious. But Homegoing felt different. There’s a quiet melancholy that runs through it. Because each chapter moves on to a new generation, I didn’t grow attached to any single character long enough to feel rage; instead, I felt deep sorrow. The sadness is pervasive but strangely grounding, an emotional recognition rather than outrage.
Yaa Gyasi gives faces and names to vast historical moments. One that stayed with me was her depiction of the Fugitive Slave Act, showing how it endangered all Black people in the North, whether born free or freed. The fear and fragility of that “freedom” were palpable, and Gyasi rendered it with heartbreaking precision.
Family and Identity
The most painful part of Homegoing is witnessing how easily families were broken apart. Through the novel’s structure, alternating between descendants of Effia and Esi, Gyasi captures both the personal and historical loss of connection. In Esi’s lineage, there are several moments when children grow up not knowing their parents, a recurring reality of slavery that severs identity at its root.
At the same time, Gyasi shows how threads of identity still endure. Though each chapter features new characters, the novel’s recurring motifs connect them all. Echoes of ancestry reappear across centuries, suggesting that even when history erases names, memory still lingers in blood, language, and spirit.
By the end of Homegoing, the two family lines finally converge, creating a sense of closure — not just for the characters, but for the reader as well. It feels like a homecoming of sorts, a quiet reconciliation of past and present.
Ghana’s History
I knew bits and pieces about Ghana — its cultural heritage, traditions, and tribal histories — but this book offered a much deeper insight. It revealed how British power exploited and inflamed existing tribal tensions among the Asante and Fante people (long before the country became Ghana), and how those divisions persisted even as they later united to resist colonial rule. I thoroughly enjoyed this glimpse into Ghana’s history and identity as a people, and I think this novel serves as a wonderful starting point for anyone looking to explore more Ghanaian literary fiction.
“If we go to the white man for school, we will learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.”
Writing Style
Homegoing is written beautifully, especially in the early chapters. Yaa Gyasi’s prose is lyrical and melodic in the way she describes Effia and Esi’s lives, and the emotional weight of their circumstances is deeply felt but never overly sentimental. I appreciate this restraint; it doesn’t feel as though she’s trying to upset the reader or sensationalise what is already horrific and graphic. She simply tells it as it was, which makes it hit even harder.
True to history, the novel is filled with blood, whippings, racist language, British superiority, and other scenes that turn the stomach. Yet Gyasi handles it with remarkable sensitivity, ensuring the violence serves as an honest portrayal of history rather than something gratuitous.
What I found most beautiful is that this isn’t a story of strength and triumph through oppression. It is rooted in the reality that Black people have suffered, and continue to suffer, under racism and white supremacy. But its beauty lies in the small, fleeting moments of goodness in each individual’s story: the hopeful undertone. Homegoing doesn’t tell a neat, linear tale of hope overcoming adversity across generations. Instead, hope and happiness appear scattered throughout, side by side with pain and injustice, in places you’d least expect.
It’s in Ness and Sam finding a moment of reprieve on their wedding night before returning to the fields at dawn. It’s in Kojo speaking tenderly about his wife’s body — how it defines their love-making — and what a gift it is, despite the injustice surrounding them,
“to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.”
It is the ability to continuously humanise a people who have been denigrated in society throughout generations.
Critique
This is a very ambitious book. It spans 400 years of history across not one but two countries. It is vast in scope, with so much to cover and condense, which is why I understand some of the criticism suggesting that Gyasi’s ambition occasionally allows the narrative to lose focus.
The storytelling does lose some of its power towards the end, particularly in the more modern chapters, where it begins to feel more like a means to an end. The emotionally resonant stories of the earlier generations give way to shorter chapters that seem designed mainly to fill historical quotas and eventually bring the two family lines together. Although I liked the ending, it did feel a little rushed.
Many readers have also struggled with the structure and its fragmented nature. The story moves swiftly from one character to the next, and this pacing quickens towards the end, where each story grows shorter. Personally, I didn’t mind this — I enjoy anthologies and vignettes — but I did feel, as I mentioned earlier, that the depth of characterisation diminishes as the novel progresses. I felt I knew and understood Effia and Esi far more intimately than their descendants. Later chapters offer only glimpses of their lives, rather than the fuller narratives we’re given at the start.
Part of me wonders if this was intentional. Perhaps Gyasi wanted to reflect how, as time passes, the connection to the original trauma of slavery and colonialism weakens — not because it disappears, but because we are encouraged to “move on” or “forget”. Yet, as the novel suggests, history continues to simmer beneath the surface, a deeply uncomfortable truth that remains part of who we are.
Final Thoughts
I think this is a near-perfect book and an incredibly strong debut novel. Yaa Gyasi tells a painful history with such beauty and grace. Though it’s rooted in historical events, we still feel deeply connected to each character and every story being told. I’ve tried to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, so I haven’t delved too deeply into the racial issues explored, but Gyasi is incredibly thorough in portraying the full breadth of the Black experience.
The novel powerfully captures the intergenerational consequences of history and how pervasive they remain, no matter how much the world tells us to move on and forget. The suffering of our ancestors — whether on the continent or in the diaspora — is, and always will be, ingrained in who we are, no matter how many centuries pass. May we never diminish their pain, and may we never forget their sacrifices.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this review and that it inspires you to read Homegoing if you haven’t already. It teaches us so much about memory, resilience, and the human cost of history — lessons that feel especially profound during Black History Month. But as I like to say, every month is Black History Month; may we always reflect and never forget those who came before us.
“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing?”
Homegoing by Yaa gyasi
Signed,
