Homegoing

"Heimkehren" von Yaa Gyasi hat mich von Anfang bis zum Ende in seinen Bann gezogen. Die Verästelung der Geschichten von zwei Halbschwestern, die aus den gleichen Wurzeln entspringen, aber völlig verschiedene Leben führen, ist faszinierend. Die Art und Weise, wie die Autorin die verschiedenen Zweige dieses komplexen Stammbaums miteinander verknüpft, ist beeindruckend.

Die Geschichte war durchweg spannend, und ich konnte kaum aufhören zu lesen. Es stimmt, dass es gelegentlich verwirrend sein kann, auf welchem Ast des Stammbaums man sich gerade befindet. Doch diese Verwirrung trägt auf gewisse Weise zur Tiefe und Komplexität der Erzählung bei.

Die erste Geschichte hat mir bereits gut gefallen, und ich finde den Schreibstil von Yaa Gyasi äußerst ansprechend. Sie versteht es, die Emotionen und die Tiefe der Charaktere auf eindrucksvolle Weise darzustellen. Insgesamt hat sich die Lektüre von "Heimkehren" definitiv gelohnt, und ich bin beeindruckt davon, wie die Autorin die Leben dieser beiden Halbschwestern so meisterhaft miteinander verwebt hat.

Die Tatsache, dass diese Geschichten über so viele Jahrhunderte hinweg gelebt wurden, ist großartig. Es hat mir ermöglicht, tiefer in die Geschichte schwarzer Menschen einzutauchen und viele wichtige Einblicke zu gewinnen. Diese Buch hat mir gezeigt, wie wichtig es ist, die vielfältigen Erzählungen und Erfahrungen von PoC (People of Color) zu hören und zu verstehen.

Nach der Lektüre von "Heimkehren" bin ich definitiv motiviert, mehr Bücher von PoC-Autoren zu lesen. Es ist von großer Bedeutung, verschiedene Perspektiven zu erkunden und von den Geschichten und Erfahrungen anderer zu lernen. Dieses Buch hat mir die Augen geöffnet und mich dazu inspiriert, weiterhin nach Büchern zu suchen, die diese wichtige Vielfalt widerspiegeln.

I will never walk a mile or even one step in their shoes. I’ll never feel a whip shredding my flesh; never be condemned to hard labor in a coal mine or fear being abducted into such a life. I have, I suspect, had job applications tossed out because of my name but I’ve never had entire career possibilities closed off. I’ve never been hauled to prison for smoking a joint while nearby anglos, doing the same, look on. This is privilege, and it makes my reading experience both uncomfortable and so rewarding.

Damn, what a book. Gyasi offers a visceral feel for the crushing inescapable suffering of one subset of humanity at the hands of another subset. It’s impossible for most of us to really feel what those lives were like, but Gyasi lets us come close to imagining it. The book follows two parallel timelines, the (mostly mis)fortunes of two Ghanaian sisters and their progeny across two centuries: one sister taken—involuntarily, and you know what I mean—to the American colonies, the other remaining in Ghana; each one, and each descendant, suffering cruelties we just can’t really fathom. The glimpses Gyasi coolly gives us are stomach-turning, often more so because we know we will never in our armchair lives feel anything close to those horrors, and certainly not every day for the entire duration of our lives. My privilege humbles me.

The suffering isn’t just in the West: none of the characters in the Ghana storyline leads a charmed life either. The evils, though, are different in scope and kind and scale and intention; theirs are by and large the everyday ills of humankind. The contrast with the lives of those in the US is stark and sobering. I could go on at great length, but have already blathered too much. Beautiful language, deeply moving stories, perspectives that may stay with you. Just read it.

One recommendation: read it in hardcopy, not ebook or audio. There’s a family tree diagram in the front that is invaluable; I flipped back to it at least once per chapter, sometimes more.

For me this is a remarkable novel for two reasons in particular:
1. It gives the reader a deep understanding of the mechanisms of slavery and colonialism.
2. The book shows how decisions in history determines our live. The reason most of us live in a free world, have a right to vote, human rights. Things generations and millions of people fought and died for.

Yaa Gyasi tells the story of two family trees beginning with two sisters that were seperated at the start of the 18th century. The reader joins the story at the gold coast (eastern africa, ghana), where colonialism by the british people is on its peek. Effia, one of the sisters, become married to a british officeri, living in a castle built by the british. Under the castle the daily horror of slavery takes place. Effias folk. the fantes, had sealed a pact with the british bringing them slaves. Mostly people of the folk Asante, the captured in their fights against them. Esi, the other sister is one of those. She lives with 200 hundred other women in a prison below the castle under terrifying conditions, until she get eventually sold to america.
Esis ancestors went through the hell of slavery. Working on plantages, owned by some white people. No rights at all. Their master could do whatever they want to them. For instances, Esis daughter Ness got nearly flogged to death for a bagatelle. Yaa Gyasi is really good in telling the historian context while focusing on the characters. When we join Kojo, Ness Son, who lives as a free man because he was able to run away with his surrogate mother, a new law is passed the allows to bring them back to south and under slavery when they are runaways. The law is never explained in its details, but the implication of it in the daily live of black people. The story continues to the life of people in the coal mine, the beginning of civil rights movements like the NAACP and ends up in the present, where your destiny of live in america is still partly determined by your color.
Effias ancestors keep on living at the gold coast. For me the story of the Fantes and Assantes is a great example of how 'divide-and-conquer' works. The british can keep up the slave trades or rather rip off the country so easily, because they use the conflicts between the folks in their favour. Although everybody of the Fantes knows whats going on, they arrange with it because they profit and its much easier. When Effias son, who even stayed in england for visiting a school, comes back he mainly does paper work. Mostly reading some numbers which abstract very well from the real people behind them (reminded me at people like Eichmann). Effias grandson James finally decides to stop this living and starting a new live far away from his parents, overcoming this injustices of slavery. Later on, when no more slaves where sold to other countries, the white people came again with their christianity, another tool to enslave people, telling them how to live. Furthermore, this part of the story has many interesting insights in the african culture and the role of men and women. It is much about living and overcome traditions, asking about the own heritage and history of your land. I think the review is already long enough, so I come to my conclusion:
This book really touched me, I have to say. It's only about 300 sides but in its own it has a history of 300 years. Many times, for instance when i was reading in the train, i was near to crying. Reading about these injustices that occured to these persons. Reading about the live as a slave, the rapes the occured to women. At some point I just needed to stop reading. But the book is worthwile reading it, believe me.

In the 1700s, two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born in the west coast of Africa, in what is now Ghana. The first Effia, is given to marriage to the British colonist governor of Cape Coast Castle, one of the slave castles built on the Gold Coast of West Africa. She lives in luxury while in the dungeons of the castle, in a dark room packed with more than a thousand slaves and littered with human waste, her half-sister Esi, who was sold into slavery by a rival African tribe waits, starved, beaten and raped, to be stacked on a ship that would transfer her to the Southern States of America.

By following the two lines of the family, Yaa Gyasi explores how slavery is hunting each generation across continents and across time, for seven generations. Each subsequent chapter of the Homegoing is told from the point of view of their descendants switching from the African side to the American side of the family unfolding down to the family tree to the present day. It is a rough and intense book.

One of the tragedies of the slavery trade is that it cut off the connection with their home countries and families. The history of many African American became unrestorable, they cannot trace back their history, they don’t know the country they are coming from, they lost their routes. Yaa Gyasi plays with feelings and sensations, and several other things, such as the fire, the water and the castle, in order to make her characters connected or rather hunted by traumatic experiences that happened in the past. Feelings and sensations seem to be imprinted in each character as we move along time.

Homegoing is a huge undertaking of a book with significant challenges to overcome. Characters come and pass never to appear again, each chapter starts with a different character in a different place and a different timeframe. It is an interesting and unusual structure; it holds so much time in such a little space. But despite the multi-perceptiveness of the story, it is beautiful and light, and it manages to arrest the reader’s attention as it reads as a continuous narrative.

There is a lot of cruelty and violence in the story but Yaa Gyasi has done an amazing job in managing it by making it feel as real as possible without distancing the reader. Homegoing is rough and intense, deeply political and emotional.