In my first attempt of the year I head to my library’s website. My first stop – my lists of saved titles to read. Around the World – my list of books to read from every country – beckons me. After reading many Top Ten lists of 2021, I choose Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I click the button to reserve my copy. In one week, it is in my house.
The story pulls me in immediately. First, we meet Effia, a girl in a village in Ghana. Her father is “a big man” in the village. Her mother beats her often. The chief is set to marry her when she becomes a woman, but her mother tells her to keep that a secret. Instead of earning an honored place in the village as a first wife, Effia is given into marriage with a British officer. When she goes to Cape Coast Castle, she discovers there are people that look like her in the dungeon that will be sold as slaves. She learns quickly that the British will become “mean” when questioned about this.
Next you meet Esi. She is the daughter of “a big man” in a different village. Her mother loves her and is always near her side. It is in this story that you start to hear that people in the North are not human. The Villagers have conducted raids across the country, being known as a strong tribe to be afraid of. Prisoners are held in cages in the village center, with people walking by to spit on them because they are not people. Esi’s mother is forced by her husband to pick a girl to be a house girl. The mother protects her as best she can. It is not until after the girl is whipped by the father for dropping two drops of water, at the urging of the rest of the family, that Esi learns that her mother had been a slave before. As fate has it, it is Esi that ends up in the dungeon below where Effia is. This is when we learn that these are half sisters, each traveling a very different path from the other.
I am very uncomfortable reading this book, which is probably the point. From the first, when I realize that the villagers participated and profited from enslaving their own kind, just from a different village, I am sick. When I realize the animals that are found around those villages become what these people are called in derogatory terms, I am horrified – I knew of the slur, but this put the pieces together of where the slur came from. The way groups of people dismiss others – making it easy to treat them badly by stripping them of any humanity – is way too familiar. This is the tactics that the Nazis took in 1930s Germany against the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and more. These tactics are not just our history.
This history continues to haunt us. The legacy of slavery remains in the systemic structures of our world, including education, economic support for the poor, and access to proper mental and physical health resources. We continue to be faced with the stark realities of continued prejudice: Floyd George’s murder, LGBQT+ being thrown off roofs, and women like Malala being shot. Until we start looking at others as part of us, this will not change. There continue to be people that need to be better at someone’s cost. They lead the way for others to feel better about themselves by putting others down. They strip the belief in the humanity from those they push down. All those that participate in this, or that stand by and let it happen, ultimately lose their own humanity. We need to open oppressor’s eyes to this. Unless we all understand we are in this together, there will be no end.
This is my reaction from the first third of the book. My soul is crying, and I can’t continue. If the rest of the story continues as well written, I can only guess at the depth of feeling and thought it will provoke in its readers. As for me, I am too saddened by the reality of what this represents, and gripped by the fear that we have not learned enough to keep it from happening again.
The Source 4 Books 