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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
As it does with Esi and Effia, Homegoing makes siblings of history and fiction. Gyasi’s sprawling novel follows the two half-sisters and their seven generations of descendants from the dawn of the slave trade to the present. What results is a lush family tree and complex accounting of more than 200 years of history.
The personal is inseparable from the historical as private romances, tragedies, and jealousies get swept up in larger, cosmic currents. When the British slave traders first arrive, a marriage for power decides the course of an entire lineage; in the years just before the Civil War, a single oversight causes a tragic separation. Moments of contingency and chance build upon each other, and their consequences cascade over centuries. Placed in the fabric of civil wars and independence movements, the novel’s characters reckon with their forebears' decisions even as they make their own.
Homegoing’s engagement with history shows how its characters can be both products of their time and windows into them. Each of the novel’s chapters is narrated from a different character’s perspective, and their respective stories offer vignette-like slices of an era. The sense of fantasy that underlies Esi’s Africa gives way to weariness in Sonny’s account, just as the days of the slave trade fast-forward to an age of urban redlining. The narrative of intergenerational continuity shows moments of change. Gyasi fills her work with voices that speak to each other and—at times, literally—reach out across time.
Related Themes:
