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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Homegoing spans as many countries as it does centuries. Effia and Esi’s narratives begin in Fante and Asante land, respectively—Gyasi sets the novel in what is now modern-day Ghana. But the booming slave-trading economy soon scatters them: Esi boards one among thousands of ships that cross the Atlantic, while Effia’s lineage stays behind in continental Africa. Sons rebel and daughters leave packing, sometimes for love, survival and, at other points, new lives. Over generations and decades, the story that had started within a few tribes’ distance expands throughout entire continents, spilling into Alabama and Harlem. The novel is filled with people on the move, each of whom carries their pasts with them.
History is the novel’s source of movement and its prime subject. The individual characters are caught in world-changing events far beyond their own comprehension. But to the reader, they weave a story that becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. Homegoing covers the slave trade, modern inequality, and everything in between. By doing so, it traces the injustices that endure. The same forces that deliver Esi to America also send H down to the bottom of coal mines and drive Sonny to cocaine dens. The two-century sequence of lives allows the work to show how one historic trend evolves into the other. Together, these separate stories create a sense of the past that feels fuller and deeper.
Related Themes:
