An African Immigrant’s Genealogy

The African side of the narrative begins with the story of Effia the Beauty, an African woman who is married off, as the result of her stepmother’s machinations, to an English officer at the Cape Coast Castle, the point of departure for enslaved Africans being sent to the Western Hemisphere. The story of Effia builds toward the realization that Baaba, the woman whom she had always believed to be her mother and who had both nursed her and treated her with considerable cruelty as she was growing up, was not her biological mother at all. Effia is prevented from marrying the African man she intended to marry by the treachery of Baaba, and as a result, she is married off to James, the British officer who is complicit in the slave trade. At the moment when Effia leaves her father Cobbe and Baaba, Gyasi sketches the following very affecting scene:

The pendant that Effia is given will have an important role in Gyasi’s project of bringing together the African and African American narratives that shape her novel. The mother to whom Baaba refers when she gives the stone to Effia is a girl who had been a captive of Cobbe’s and whose connection to Cobbe was likely a matter of rape rather than a consensual relationship. This moment, then, is crucial to the unfolding of the various African and African American identities that appear throughout the novel, as Effia, the very first character we meet, has had her life shaped by the influence of the slave trade from the start of her life. In one sense, Effia is herself a migrant, as she moves from the village of her youth to the English society at Cape Coast Castle, with its alien constellation of customs and beliefs.

When the novel turns to the next generation on Effia’s side of the family, Gyasi’s emphasis is on the ways in which Africans could become complicit in the very trade that exploited them and enslaved their family members. This vignette is the story of Quey, the son of Effia and the English officer James. Quey develops a close friendship with a young African man named Cudjo, to whom he comes to realize he is physically attracted. He is sent away to England for his education, and when he returns, he initially imagines an idyllic life in Africa with Cudjo. Notably, the story of Quey is the novel’s first story of African immigration and return: Quey has experienced life in London before he returns to the slave-trading Fante village led by Effia’s younger brother, and he initially seems to want to disavow the European side of his identity by uniting with Cudjo. He is drawn into the slave trade by his uncle, however, and his absorption into the slave trade is confirmed when he marries an Asante princess, thus consolidating his own village’s power. Gyasi uses free indirect discourse to summarize Quey’s reasons for his morally questionable decision to forsake his attachment to Cudjo and to take up his family business in the slave trade and the loveless marriage that will enable his success in that trade: “This was how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured. Marry for protection. Quey would never go to Cudjo’s village. He would not be weak. He was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made” (Gyasi, Homegoing 69). Quey denies his own sexuality, his affection for Cudjo, and his moral intuitions in order to carry on his father’s family business: the slave trade.

Quey’s choices are reversed almost completely by Effia’s grandson, James, who is ironically named for his British slave-trading grandfather. If Quey has denied his own desires and conscience in the belief that it was his responsibility to do so, James renounces the idea that participating in the slave trade can ever be a morally acceptable choice, and he does so as a result of his love for an African woman. In a crucial moment, James declares, “I want to leave my family and move to Asanteland. I want to marry Akosua Mensah and work as a farmer or something small-small” (Gyasi, Homegoing 104). Akosua Mensah is a young woman in an Asante village who refuses to greet James because of his family’s ties to the slave trade. Like Quey, James is married off in a politically useful but loveless match; unlike Quey, he renounces this match in order to follow his own moral intuitions and affective connections via his marriage to Akosua Mensah after a battle in which he feigns his own death. James’s choice is the inverse of Quey’s. Quey chooses a corrupted form of manhood when he rejects his erotic and affective connection to Cudjo in favor of what he believes to be his family responsibilities, but James chooses exile and penury rather than engage in further complicity in the slave trade.

There is an American dimension to the opposing choices made by Quey and James: both are responding to a trade that has its African end point in the Middle Passage of enslaved men and women to the Americas, and in this sense, their African identities have a dimension that interacts with the future African immigrant identity of their descendent Marjorie.

If James rejects the economically successful and morally bankrupt choices of his father, his daughter Abena struggles with resentment towards his own legacy of morally upright poverty. Abena never experiences wealth or power as she is growing up, unlike the first three generations, and even her romance with a childhood friend becomes strained by his inability to marry a woman who is impoverished. Ultimately, her lover is able to gain wealth and status by cultivating cocoa, but he is still unable or unwilling to marry her even as she is carrying his child. Like James, Quey, and Effia, she confronts the consequences of her ancestors’ choices, and only when she is preparing to leave her village is she able to recognize her parents’ moral courage, and when James passes the stone he inherited from Effia on to her, she finds that she feels a connection to her father that she had not previously recognized:

Abena’s receipt of the stone continues the novel’s theme of intergenerational continuity and struggle. Once again, as with each previous generation in the family, Abena shapes a new future through migration, this time to the missionary church as a result of her pregnancy, which makes her continued life in the village impossible.

The fifth generation of Effia’s family marks the most significant intergenerational rupture. Akua is Abena’s daughter, but she has vastly less connection to her mother than any member of her family before her has had and no connection at all to her father. Her rupture with the past is defined by her relationship to fire:

Akua grows up as an orphan, cut off from her parents and raised by missionaries. She returns to the Asante heritage of part of her family through her marriage to an Asante man, and she has three children with him. Her dreams of the firewoman are reminiscent of the magical realist tradition in West African fiction, including Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, and it helps to capture the persistence of the past in shaping Effia’s descendants’ lives. In a twist that helps to connect this narrative on the African side of the family with some of the most harrowing stories of slavery in the Americas (including those that inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved), Akua’s confrontation with the past through her dreams results in her inadvertently killing two of her children and badly burning her one surviving child.

Akua’s surviving son, Yaw, provides the connection between the past of the African village and the post-independence African city and, beyond that, the African immigrant experience. Like Akua, Yaw grows up disconnected from his ancestors, in this case because of the fact that Akua has killed his siblings and injured him severely in the fire that she sets. Yaw grows up to be an educator, and he marries only late in life. When he marries his much younger housemaid, his marriage provides an opportunity to reunite with his mother, and she provides one of the most eloquent moments of reflection in the novel: “‘What I know now, my son [Yaw]: Evil begets evil. It grows, it transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered” (Gyasi, Homegoing 242). Akua’s remarks to Yaw point to a central theme in Homegoing: the moral weight of slavery and violence with which all of the characters in the novel must live. They suggest that Akua’s dreams of the firewoman are not just a matter of mental illness, but rather an expression of the continuing historical legacy of her ancestors’ decisions, perhaps even a manifestation of collective trauma.

Yaw is the father of Marjorie, the first character who appears to the reader as an African immigrant in the United States. Yaw and his wife have migrated to the United States in order for Yaw to take up an academic appointment in Alabama, and Marjorie grows up as an immigrant and the child of immigrants who seeks to come to terms with the meaning of her complex identity as a Black woman in the United States who is African but not African American in the usual sense. The story of the African American side of the family that starts with Effia’s and Esi’s mother provides a kind of extended answer to the questions that Marjorie has as an immigrant child who is and is not African, and American, and African American all at once.

The Akata Side of the Story

The way in which Homegoing engages with the African American literary tradition resembles its engagement with the Anglophone literary traditions of West Africa. The first story from the African American side of the family, that of Effia’s half-sister, Esi, presents a story that runs parallel to Effia’s. Esi grows up with a mother who loves her but who is haunted by sadness, and she comes to realize that her mother had herself been enslaved in another village, in part because of her powerful sense of sympathy with a young girl who has been enslaved in Esi’s village. When it becomes clear that Esi and her fellow villagers will be enslaved, Esi’s mother (who, we come to realize, is also Effia’s) chooses death over enslavement, and she passes on a stone to Esi that is the counterpart of the stone that Baaba bestowed upon Effia. Esi is herself abducted and enslaved, and her narrative begins in Cape Coast Castle, where she and other women are raped and abused as they are being held before being transported to the Americas on the Middle Passage. What is most poignant in Esi’s story is the way that both her hope for the future and her memories of the past are destroyed by the inescapable cruelty of slavery: “When she [Esi] wanted to forget the Castle, she thought of these things, but she did not expect joy. Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect” (Gyasi, Homegoing 28). Esi’s situation in her chapter represents a profound moment of rupture: her past is irretrievably tainted by a present that has removed all hope of a better future, and the looming Middle Passage ensures that she will never be able to go back home again. This loss is expressed powerfully by the fact that, despite all her attempts to save it, including swallowing it at one point and digging it out of a pile of excrement, she is ultimately forced to leave the stone behind. This becomes a powerful comment on the difference between twentieth-century African immigration and the forcible enslavement and removal of eighteenth-century Africans: later in the novel, Marjorie has been able to carry the stone that she inherited from her distant ancestor Effia back and forth across the Atlantic, but Esi is unable to retain the only physical item that she was given by her mother.

The brutality of the rupture caused by the Middle Passage is thus at the center of the novel, and at the heart of the dialogue between African and African American identities that Gyasi stages. Gyasi does not attempt to represent the Middle Passage, but a portion of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself can provide a sense of what would follow for Esi:

Equiano here describes the sense of terror that the transatlantic voyage could involve for enslaved persons being transported to the Americas. In eloquent, moving terms, Equiano describes the sense of absolute loss and disconnection from his past life that his abduction from Africa has caused, and at many points in the narration of the Middle Passage in The Interesting Narrative, Equiano contemplates suicide. The fact that whether Equiano’s discussion of the Middle Passage is actually autobiographical has been subject to debate even among his admirers, including his recent biographer Vincent Carretta, only reinforces the difficulty of narrating the stories of those who have been violently stripped of their stories.

Gyasi picks her narrative thread up again years after Esi’s abduction and enslavement. With the appearance of Ness, Esi’s daughter, slavery in the Americas enters the novel. If Esi lost all of her physical possessions and was subjected to horrific violence, including sexual violence, in her portion of the novel, Ness’s dispossession is more extreme still. She has some connection to Africa through the oral stories that Esi has told her, and she reconstructs a connection to Africa through her meeting with Aku, a woman who has been brought from Africa and is able to teach Ness something of the Twi language of her Asante ancestors. One of the most heart-wrenching moments in the entire book comes when Ness realizes she will have to give up her son, Kojo, in order to save him. “In broken Twi, Ness called to Aku, who was further in the distance, holding baby Jo. ‘Don’t come down, whatever you do,’ Ness said” (Gyasi, Homegoing 86). Here Gyasi draws on one of the most compelling aspects of nineteenth-century African American slave narratives and fictional works, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Toni Morrison’s Beloved: the appalling choices that faced women attempting to save their children from enslavement. Ness returns to be tortured and to be forced to witness the murder of her children’s father, and the narrative that Gyasi constructs for her revolves around her memories of these traumatic events and her struggles to give shape to her life even under slavery and even after she has experienced unimaginable horrors.

The third generation of Esi’s family appears in the form of Ness’s escaped son, Kojo, now known as Jo, who has grown up free in Baltimore, but who is still in a precarious position due to fugitive slave laws. He is married to a free black woman, Anna, whose papers stating her free status are valid, unlike his own, which are forged. In an especially bitter irony, it is Anna, pregnant with the couple’s youngest child, not Jo, who is abducted into slavery from Baltimore. There is something particularly brutal about the moment when Jo realizes that he is unlikely ever to see Anna again. He has asked a white police officer if he has seen Anna, showing him her picture. “Then Jo heard the sound of paper tearing. He looked up to see Anna’s nose, and ears, and strands of hair, the shredded bits of paper flying off in the wind” (Gyasi, Homegoing 128). In the economy of nineteenth-century American racism and slavery, Anna’s status as a free woman only counts insofar as white authorities are prepared to let it count, which proves to be not at all. This moment is yet another instance of the ruptures caused by the slave trade, as Anna will not see her older children again, and Jo will never meet his youngest son.

The story of Jo and Anna’s son, H, reveals the ways in which slavery persisted in new forms after the ostensible emancipation of the Civil War. H is the fourth generation of Esi’s descendants, and he, like each of the generations before him, finds himself cut off from his ancestors. He knows only that his mother has died immediately after giving birth to him, and he has no way of accessing the stories of Esi, Ness, or Jo. After Emancipation, moreover, H is almost immediately re-enslaved by the criminal justice system. After emerging from his time as prison labor, yet another rupture, H finds an opportunity for a new sort of identity in the labor movement, working alongside black and white laborers alike for justice. In a climactic moment, H demonstrates his moral development as a character, when he refuses violence in order to pursue justice through solidarity with the members of his union: “H wanted to throw the man down, down to meet the city underneath the earth, but he stopped himself. He was not the con they had told him he was” (Gyasi, Homegoing 174). This moment provides a powerful rebuttal to narratives of Black criminality that, as recent work such as the 2015 documentary 13 has argued, represented the continuation of slavery by other means.

H’s daughter Willie experiences directly what W.E.B. DuBois identified as “the problem of the Twentieth Century”: the “color-line” (5). Willie’s story is also the story of one of the great demographic movements of the first half of the twentieth-century, the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the United States, a movement that has been powerfully described by Isabel Wilkerson in her study The Warmth of Other Suns. Willie’s husband Robert is so light-skinned that he can pass as white, and ultimately he deserts her in order to pass as a white man with a white wife and family, while Willie and her son Carson remain on the opposite side of the color line from him. This is powerfully dramatized when Willie and Carson see Robert on the street in a white neighborhood:

Willie experiences a different sort of disconnection from that experienced by her ancestors: in this case, the color line has divided her from the husband of her youth, and Robert has made the reverse decision from the embrace of solidarity between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans described and advocated by Charles W. Chesnutt in his short story “The Wife of His Youth.” A noteworthy pattern that Gyasi established in her stories from both sides of the Atlantic is her engagement with major literary works in the African and African American literary traditions, and this chapter provides a particularly pronounced instance of that pattern.

When Sonny (the name that Carson prefers) grows up, his early engagement with DuBois has transformed into Black Nationalism. “What Sonny wanted was Africa. Marcus Garvey had been onto something” (Gyasi, Homegoing 244). As Esi’s fifth-generation descendent, Sonny finds that he wishes to recover his connection to his family’s distant past in Africa, even as his relationship to his mother is at times contentious. As with each of his ancestors since Esi, he experiences a profound rupture, as his relationship with the mother of his child is stretched to the breaking point by her heroin addiction. Notably, given his enthusiasm for Garvey, he names his son Marcus. As Isabel Wilkerson has commented in her generally glowing review of Homegoing, this chapter seems less substantial in its evocation of African American culture than many of the other chapters, and perhaps part of the reason for this is Gyasi’s apparent commitment to building a rupture into the experiences of each generation. Nonetheless, this chapter continues a pattern of noting the ways in which the African and African American stories are entangled with each other.

If Sonny never makes it back to Africa, his son Marcus does, albeit by an unlikely route. Marcus, unlike his autodidact father, finds his way into Stanford, a central location for elite higher education in the United States. Like his father, he wrestles with the nature of his heritage and identity, and he finds answers when he comes into contact with a young woman studying at Stanford who turns out to be Marjorie. Marjorie accompanies Marcus on a trip to Ghana, and she takes him for a tour of the Cape Castle, the very site where Effia lived as the spouse of a British officer and Esi was held before being transported to the Americas in the Middle Passage. In a compelling moment at the close of the novel, Marjorie restores to Marcus the physical connection with his ancestors that Marcus’s distant ancestor Esi lost. When Marcus and Marjorie wade in the sea after Marcus has had an historically portentous panic attack in the Cape Castle, they wade into the Atlantic, and Marjorie gives him the stone that is the counterpart of the stone that his distant ancestor Esi lost at Cape Castle: “‘Here,’ Marjorie said, ‘Have it.’ She lifted the stone from her neck and placed it around Marcus’s. ‘Welcome home’” (Gyasi, Homegoing 300). This moment brings the movement of the plot back to the beginning of the novel, when Esi’s and Effia’s mother escapes from Effia’s father, and the contrasting narratives of the families begin.

To return to the initial question that framed this essay, what makes this book a novel of the African immigrant experience? The answer to this question consists in no small part in the rich investment in the connected histories of Africa and the Americas that shapes every aspect of Gyasi’s narrative. On the African side of Effia’s and Esi’s shared family, continuous patterns of migration and displacement within Africa illustrate that Marjorie’s childhood in the United States is in keeping with a broader story of mobility and exile associated with both the slave trade in Africa and British colonialism. Meanwhile, on the African American side of the family, both the experience of slavery, racism, and segregation and the family’s often heroic response to it shape a lineage that is parallel to but distinct from that of their African cousins. The African immigrant experience in the United States, Gyasi implies, cannot and should not be separated from the wider history of colonialism and the slave trade, with profound implications for recent immigrants and historic African American communities in the Americas alike.

Works Cited