"Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi. Is there home for those who cannot remember it?

This is a story about family. A story made of many stories. A family which grows apart as a result of colonialism, but not only.

I will not summarise the book for I feel it would be spoiling it and it is one of those books you need to read putting the pieces together, as if it was a puzzle you have to complete. It deals with topics I had not yet read in African writing: homosexuality, impotence, explicit raping, explicit cruelty in the household, etc. Thus, it is a novel you need to digest, but this didn't slow me down: I was so caught up I could not put it down and I needed to understand the connection among the characters as if they were my own dysfunctional family.

The novel tells the story of a different character every chapter (a narrative option I had never seen, and which I found strikingly well-composed). Once the chapter about that character is finished, he/she might be mentioned again in the following ones but never directly). It also shifts between the two sides of the family (the descendants of Effia, then the descendants of Esi, and again). It is extremely interesting to see how these litte insights into the life of the characters build up an enormous narrative about the many ways in which something can go wrong. Effia and Esi have two very different destinies: one is sold into slavery by their own family; the other becomes the wife of a white slaveowner. Like the mirror and the reflection, they cannot exist without the other. Being involved into trafficking with human lives will prove to be a mistake, and someone has to pay.

A part of this broken family will end up living in the USA, barely remembering where they come from. But a turn of fate will join Marjorie and Marcus together, and they will go back where everything started, at the Asante region, feeling home without actually being aware that IT IS HOME.

Gyasi's fabulous writing makes everything easier: it captures the magic of some moments and the pain of some others. It gives voice to suppresed realities and allows the reader to go deep into the minds and wishes of the characters. In the end you are left with some kind of relief because they have found home, but the wounds along the way are not yet healed so the circle is never complete. When I finished it, I wished there was more to it, I wished there was a novel about every single one of the characters, for I am sure Gyasi would be able to exploit them to the maximum. But perhaps this is what makes this book special; that they are only fragments with enough power to make you envision a whole and complete reality.

"This is how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured."

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"We can't go back, can we? (...) We can't go back to something we ain't never been to in the first place. It ain't ours anymore."

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"Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strenght is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves."

Rating: 10/10