Homegoing

Homegoing is an excellent and sometimes frustrating novel partly because of what it doesn't do. A story of two branches of the same family that are split apart in the early 1700s when one half-sister becomes a white man's filly and the other gets shipped off as a slave, it's not generally interested in cheap payoffs. Characters get to occupy centre stage for a few pages, then disappear into the fog of history - often violently, and often with little other trace than the blood and the stories they pass on to their children. Instead of telling one person's story, Gyasi uses all those people to tell a larger story of oppression that seems less systematic than cancerous, feeding on itself without even thinking about it, whereas its victims can't not have to constantly try to live with it.

When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest back in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.

Yeah, there are things about this that feel a little too much like the product of creative writing courses. But there's enough ice-cold anger and compassion with those who were silenced, and a very keen sense of how to recreate history with a few sharp details, to make it work.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.