Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into the Fante and Asante tribes of 18th century Ghana. The structure looms like a curse over Gyasi's sprawling epic of African families exploited by - and at times exploiting - the traffic in human chattel, tracing the 300-year-long repercussions of an original sin. In Homegoing, a first novel that brims with compassion, writer Yaa Gyasi begins where the horrific Middle Passage began for so many, at the "glowing white" Castle, one of about forty commercial fortresses erected by Europeans on the Gold Coast. Contemporary pilgrims - Barack Obama among them - venture there for sobering lessons on man's inhumanity to man the dungeons where the enslaved lay shackled together, awaiting their fate, to exit via the "Door of No Return." Burning white hot would be a singular landmark in west Africa: Cape Coast Castle, a notorious entrepĂ´t for the cross-Atlantic slave trade. Picture a globe glowing with places of particular misery, pain or evil: Auschwitz, Nanking, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Homegoing Author Yaa Gyasi
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |