We sense that the rupture in the book’s opening chapters will be closed, if not healed. That’s something of a spoiler, but a hint of it is there in Gyasi’s title, which refers to a funeral ritual performed by slaves in the Americas to return the souls of the dead back to Africa. The novel concludes somewhere near the present day, when two distant cousins from these lines have met in California and together return to the castle on the Gold Coast, unaware of their distant family connection. Parallel chapters follow members of each generation on either continent. The saying, later recalled as a curse, becomes literal in Homegoing’s elaborately realized structure: Effia’s descendents remain in Africa Esi is sold into bondage in the American South. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. “You are not your mother’s first daughter. She was raped by her master because he too was a Big Man and big men can do what they please, lest they appear weak, eh?” Esi looked away, and Abronoma continued in a whisper. “Your mother was once a slave for a Fante family.

Before she is taken Esi is told a secret by one of her own family’s slaves: Esi, the half sister Effia never knows, is captured and for a time dwells as a prisoner in the ghastly dungeon of the same castle. One daughter, Effia, marries a white slave trader and colonial governor (the active verb is misleading here more accurate to say she is married off to) and lives in a castle by the coast. They share the same mother, but their fathers are leaders of two peoples, the Fante and Asante, who are both victims of, and complicit partners with, the English in the slave trade. Yaa Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, opens with a family tree tracing seven generations descended from two half sisters born in Ghana around 1750.

Homegoing by yaa gyasi