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Similes
Part 1: Esi
Explanation and Analysis—Training a Slave:
Esi witnesses a moment of situational irony when Big Man punishes Abronoma for her clumsiness. The village beauty watches as the slave girl—who has spilled oil and failed to tell good stories—patiently awaits her doom:
They were all outside, basking under the warm midday sun. Big Man tilted his head back and let out a laugh that rumbled like thunder in the rainy season. "Take her back where? Odo, there's only one way to train a slave." He turned to Esi, who was trying to climb a palm tree the way she'd seen the other kids do it, but her arms were too small to reach around. "Esi, go and get me my switch."
Big Man’s brutal treatment of Abronoma raises an almost textbook instance of irony. Here, the Asante—the very same people who will lose hundreds of thousands to slavery, their King Pempeh I, and political autonomy—violently abuse their own slaves. The victims of history’s most inhumane institution are, in this moment, also active participants in it. After his order of whipping comes the humiliation; the next day, mothers and children all watch as Big Man commands Abronoma to carry water without spilling and whips her himself when she does.
Big Man’s abusive treatment reflects the reciprocity of violence and power. He hurts Abronoma, just as James Collins smothers Effia and unnamed soldiers will do to his own daughter. He inflicts pain in the same way Cobbe does to Baaba and Baaba to Effia. Through one relationship after another, Homegoing depicts perpetrator and victim equally blindsided by their own privileges and status. “Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves,” Maame tells Esi. As his switch descends, Big Man seems to confirm this truth.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Little Dove:
Like the enemy warriors, situational irony descends upon Esi’s village in the middle of the night. Once Abronoma’s message comes around to her father, he summons an army that marches into Big Man’s village. His daughter revels in the destruction:
Abronoma came in from the slave quarters, her laugh echoing through the hut. "My father is here!" she said, dancing this way and that. "I told you he would come to find me, and he has come!"
The girl scurried away, and Esi didn't know what would become of her. Outside, people were screaming and running. Children were crying.
Abronoma’s celebration is strangely ironic for a girl named “Little Dove.” As intertribal violence breaks out, the novel brings Esi and the reader to face the reality of warfare. The house slave named after the bird of peace, it turns out, comes with no olive branches. Just as Esi followed along with Big Man’s violent performance, Abronoma retaliates in kind.
This moment of retribution affirms the equivalence between the two girls. “We are equal,” Abronoma assures Esi earlier, and the scene of violence seemingly delivers on that promise. The “Little Dove” happens to be no different from her enslaver and, in her act of taking an eye for an eye, the novel explores some of the conditions that enable slavery. Hate builds upon hate, trapping its victims—like Abronoma—in a cycle of never-ending violence. Decades later, Akosua puts a name to Abronoma’s kind of revenge: the senselessness of “[avenging] lost lives by taking more.”
Related Themes:
Part 1: Ness
Explanation and Analysis—Goodness and Ness:
Situational irony and idiom converge in Ness’s memories. Thinking back to her mother’s Twi, she remembers Esi’s beatings at the hands of their master and the unlikely origins of her name:
Before the lashes, her mother had called her Maame, after her own mother, but the master had whipped Esi for that too, whipped her until she cried out "My goodness!" —the words escaping her without thought, no doubt picked up from the cook, who used to say it to punctuate every sentence. And because those had been the only English words to escape Esi's mouth without her struggling to find them, she believed that what she was saying must have been something divine, like the gift of her daughter, and so that goodness had turned into, simply, Ness.
Esi’s cries break down a proverbial saying and creates a sense of unexpected irony in the process. “My goodness” is an expression of pain and surprise, the substitute for an oath—borrowed from the cook, it helps her endure the unbearable shock of the whipping. But Esi’s own misinterpretation of the phrase adds further irony to it. What is a euphemistic response to a harrowing experience gets mistakenly understood to mean “something divine.” An anguished exclamation ends up celebrating grace and goodness, offering unexpected inspiration for the name for her daughter. Not originally intended to be such, “my goodness” comes to represent goodness.
Related Themes:
