MIDTERM REVIEW

Vocab & Grammar

Dystopia (n.) An imagined world or society in which people lead wretched,
dehumanized, fearful lives
In the book, the society is depicted as a dystopia of violence and death.

Utopia (n.) A place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social
conditions
The town’s founder wanted to create a utopia for his citizens to live in.

Colonize (v.) To establish a colony someplace by taking control of the area and
(sometimes) its original inhabitants
The British colonized the America by taking the majority of land and resources from
its original inhabitants.

Enslaved (adj.) A person who is legally owned as property by another person and is
forced to work for that person without pay
The Underground Railroad was established to help enslaved African Americans
escape to freedom.

Convict (n.) A person who did a crime and was sent to prison
Many convicts who are released from prison have a hard time to integrate back into
society.

Afrofuturism (n.) Afrofuturism is the expression of blackness, black struggles and

black ideas, through the imagining of new, hopeful and advanced futures or worlds
Black Panther is a great example of Afrofuturism, because it combines scientific
technology with powers and pride of African culture.

Intersectionality: (n.) An analytical framework to understand how aspects of a

person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of
discrimination and privilege
The focus of his writing is the intersectionality of sexuality, mass media, and
feminism.

Colorism (n.) Prejudice or discrimination within a racial group favoring people with
lighter skin over those with darker skin
Colorism persists to this day, with the mindset of lighter or whiter meaning better or
more opportunities.

Premonition (n.) A feeling or belief that something is going to happen when there is
no definite reason to believe it will
Ginny had a premonition that she might fail the English midterm.

Dissolution (n.) The process of making something slowly end or disappear

He stayed on until the dissolution of the firm in 1948.

Congregation (n.) A gathering of people, often for the purpose of worship

I attended a meeting yesterday, and a large congregation was there.

Somber (adj.) Very sad or serious

After the unexpected pop quiz, the class was very somber because most students were
unprepared.

Abolish (v.) To completely end something

After many meetings with students, the school administration decided to abolish some
unfair policies around cell phone use.

Unfathomable: (adj.) incapable of being fully explored or understood

According to the critics, the movie’s plot is unfathomable and will leave audiences
confused.

Boisterous: (adj.) noisy, energetic, and cheerful

It’s a challenge to keep ten boisterous seven-year-olds amused.

Missionary (n.) A person who is sent to a foreign country to do religious work

The missionary spent much time to hand out religious pamphlets to the local people.

Futile: (adj.) Incapable of producing any useful result

It would be futile for me to argue with my mother about anything.

Ruthless: (adj.) Having no pity

From his ruthless behavior, it’s easy to tell that he has no morality.

Impotent: (adj.) Lacking in power or strength

Without the manager’s support, the employee is impotent.

Indignant: (adj.) Feeling angry because of something that is unfair

The woman was indignant about the way she had been treated by her cruel husband.

Homegoing Review
PLOT:
Effia is born on the night of a raging fire in Fanteland. As she grows up, her mother,
Baaba, is cruel to her and abuses her, while her father, Cobbe, is kind. When Effia
turns twelve, she begins to blossom into a young woman. She hopes to marry the next
chief of the village, but Baaba has other plans for her. She tells Effia to hide her
blood, and then contrives to have her marry a British man named James Collins who
is the newly appointed governor of the Cape Coast Castle. Before Effia is married,
Baaba gives her a black stone pendant—a piece of her mother. Effia and James
Collins are then married and develop sincere affection for each other when she moves
into the Castle. However, she quickly discovers that there are women in the dungeons
being traded as slaves. Though she is horrified, she knows she cannot go back to her
village, and only returns years later when she hears her father is dying. When Effia is
at her father’s deathbed, her brother, Fiifi, reveals that she is not actually Baaba’s
daughter. Her real mother, Maame, had been a house girl for Cobbe, and ran away the
night Effia was born. The black stone from Baaba is really from Maame.

Meanwhile, Esi is trapped in the women’s dungeon in the Cape Coast Castle. Soldiers
come and go, groping the women and taking away their children. Esi was born in
Asanteland to a respected warrior, Kwame Asare. The Asantes had been raiding other
villages for years, capturing prisoners and taking them as slaves and servants. Her
mother, Maame, took one of these prisoners as a house girl, but the girl (Abronoma)
was not very skilled at housework and was often beaten. Esi felt bad for her, and
agreed to send a message to her father, telling him where she was. One night,
Abronoma’s father and other warriors attacked the village, but Maame was too afraid
to run. She gave Esi a black stone, and Esi ran away. She was quickly captured and
taken to the Castle, made to walk for days with little water and food. Back in the
dungeon, a soldier pulls her out and rapes her before returning her to the prison. Days
later, Esi and the other women are taken onto a ship, but she loses her stone in the
dungeon.

Quey, Effia’s son, is back in his mother’s village in order to make a deal regarding
slave prices. Quey had been a lonely child, always feeling that he wasn’t white or
black. He made friends with a boy named Cudjo from another village, but when his
father, James Collins, saw how close the two boys were, he sent Quey to school in
London. Quey returned after his father’s death, but still felt his father’s
disappointment. Quey doesn’t want to participate in the slave trade but also doesn’t
want to be seen as weak. When his Uncle Fiifi captures Nana Yaa, the daughter of an
Asante king, to strengthen their political union, Quey agrees to marry her.

Ness, Esi’s daughter, is working on Thomas Allan Stockham’s Alabama plantation.

She doesn’t speak to her fellow slaves much, as her mother had been a solid, quiet
woman with a hard heart. However, Ness does find a soft spot for a young, motherless
girl named Pinky, who refuses to speak. One day, the master’s son tries to get Pinky to
speak and threatens to beat her, but Ness stops him. As Ness awaits her punishment
for speaking out, she thinks about how she ended up there. At her prior plantation, she
and another slave named Sam had been married. After the birth of their son, Kojo,
they tried to escape with a woman named Aku. One night, when Ness gave Kojo to
Aku to hold, Ness and Sam were caught by their former master (whom they refer to as
the Devil), but Aku and Kojo were able to escape. Ness had then been whipped until
she couldn’t stand, and Sam had been hanged. Back in the present, Ness only hopes
that her son is okay.

James (Quey’s son), Quey, and Nana Yaa travel to Asanteland for her father’s funeral,
where James meets a girl named Akosua who refuses to shake his hand because his
family takes part in the slave trade. He finds her fascinating but knows that he would
never be able to marry her. Still, he promises that if she waits for him, he will come
back for her. When he returns to Fanteland, he is married to another woman but
refuses to consummate their marriage while he plots to get back to Akosua. He fakes
his death in a battle and walks back to Asanteland, where Akosua is waiting for him.

Jo (Kojo), Ness’s son, works in Baltimore on ships, having escaped with Ma Aku
from slavery as a baby. He and his wife, Anna, who is also free, have six children and
a seventh (whom they call H) on the way. Jo is afraid of the law enforcement in the
city and constantly worried that he will be re-enslaved. On the day of his daughter’s
wedding, the Fugitive Slave Act passes, meaning that if Jo is found out as a runaway,
he can be sent back to the South to work on a plantation. One day, his wife does not
return home. He looks for her for days, to no avail, until a young boy says that he saw
a white man take her into his carriage. Ten years pass, and Jo moves up to New York
as more states start to secede, and the Civil War brews.

Abena, James’s daughter, is twenty-five years old and still unmarried. She is in love
with a man named Ohene Nyarko, who cannot marry her until the harvest is good, but
they still begin an affair. When the harvests in the village continue to be bad, they
blame Abena for witchcraft. Ohene travels to another city and acquires a cocoa plant,
which grows well, but he promises the man he buys it from that he will marry his
daughter in return. Abena, now pregnant, refuses to wait any longer for him and
travels back to the heart of Asanteland to seek out the missionary church there.

Jo and Anna’s son, H, was born on a plantation. His mother killed herself before he
was born, so he had to be cut out of her stomach. Although he was freed after the war,
he is quickly imprisoned for looking at a white woman and sold to the mining system.
He works in brutal conditions for nine years before obtaining freedom again and then
works in the mines as a free laborer. He joins a union, strikes for better conditions,
and reunites with his woman, Ethe.

Akua, Abena’s daughter, grows up in the missionary church, where she’s made to feel
like a sinner and a heathen. She leaves the church to marry Asamoah, but visions of a
firewoman with two children plague her. She cannot sleep, and one night she sets their
hut on fire, killing two of her daughters and scarring her infant son, Yaw.
Willie, H’s daughter, marries a light-skinned boy named Robert Clifton when she is
young, and the two move up to Harlem with their son, Carson. Robert has an easier
time getting jobs, but he often loses them when people find out that he is not white.
Willie cleans houses, but at night she works at a jazz club. While cleaning the
bathroom at the club one night, she runs into Robert, who is with two of his white co-
workers. Realizing that they are married, the two white men force Robert to violate
Willie for their own enjoyment. Robert leaves that night, and Willie tries to restart her
life with another man named Eli.

Yaw, Akua’s son, teaches history at an all-boys Roman Catholic high school. He is
passionate about securing Ghanaian independence and resents his mother, because her
actions left him with a severe facial burn. He gets a house girl named Esther, who
convinces him to go to see his mother. The two are able to reconcile as Akua explains
the evil that plagues their family history and that haunted her.

Sonny (Carson’s nickname) grows up resentful of Willie because she refuses to speak
about Robert. He joins the Civil Rights movement and finds himself in and out of jail
for marching. One day, he goes to a jazz club and becomes taken with a singer named
Amani. Amani introduces him to dope, and Sonny quickly becomes addicted. His
mother stops speaking to him until he resolves to get clean.

Marjorie, Yaw and Esther’s daughter, is born in Ghana but grows up in Alabama. She
has trouble making friends in high school because the white students think she is
black, while the black students think she sounds and acts like a white girl. Thus, she
spends most of her time reading and writing, and dates a white boy named Graham
before his father puts an end to their relationship. She goes back to Ghana every
summer to visit her grandmother Akua, with whom she is very close.

The final chapter in the novel focuses on Marcus, Sonny and Amani’s son. Marcus is
getting his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford. He focuses his studies on the convict
leasing system that condemned his great grandfather H, but he quickly realizes that
there are many more subjects surrounding systematic oppression in America that he
wants to discuss. While at Stanford, he meets Marjorie, who is also a graduate
student. The two become friends, taking a trip to Birmingham together and then a trip
to Ghana. In Ghana, Marcus and Marjorie are both struck by their mutual history at
the Cape Coast Castle. They run into the water together on the beach, and Marjorie
gives him the stone necklace that she inherited from her grandmother. She welcomes
him home in a final act of reconciliation between the two families.

SYMBOLS:
STONE: In Homegoing, the black stones that Maame gives to each of her two
daughters, Effia and Esi, symbolize a person’s connection to his or her heritage. Effia
remains on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), and her stone is passed down
through seven generations of her descendants, ending with Marjorie. Esi, on the other
hand, is sold into slavery, and right before she is shipped from the Gold Coast to
America, she loses the stone in the women’s dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle. Thus,
for the characters who remain in Ghana, the stone becomes a symbol of their
connection to the culture, and is also a haunting reminder of their family’s
participation in the slave trade. In contrast, for the characters in America, the stone
symbolizes lost culture, as many of those characters become disconnected from their
parents or the rest of their family and feel detached from their Ghanaian heritage due
to American slavery. At the end of the novel, when the two final characters from each
branch of the family, Marjorie and Marcus, unknowingly meet and travel to Ghana
together, Marjorie gives Marcus the stone and welcomes him home to Ghana, thus
acknowledging his lost culture and attempting to make amends to help him to regain
his connection to the country.

FIRE: Fire represents the pain that plagues the characters on the Gold Coast
(modern-day Ghana) due to their family’s participation in the slave trade. Many of the
characters are afraid of fire or are haunted by it. For example, Maame abandons her
daughter Effia in the Fante village on the night she is born because of a raging fire,
catalyzing a series of events that allows Effia to remain on the Gold Coast and
eventually participate in the slave trade, while her sister, Esi, is eventually sold into
slavery. Later in the novel, spurred by watching a white man tied to a tree and burned,
Akua dreams of a woman made of fire holding two children. This dream ties back to
Maame and her two daughters, representing how the slave trade destroyed one line of
the family tree and cursed the other line. In her madness, Akua sets fire to her own
hut, killing two of her children and permanently scarring her son, Yaw. At the end of
the novel, Marjorie (Akua’s granddaughter) is also afraid of fire, but overcomes this
fear with Marcus’s help, while she in turn helps him overcome his fear of water. The
inheritance of this fear of fire mirrors the guilt and pain that the family passes down to
each generation due to their participation in the slave trade.

WATER / BOAT: In Homegoing, water symbolizes the pain and suffering of slavery
and racism, and specifically how slavery violently uproots people from their homes.
This association begins when Esi is sent from the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) on
a ship to America, and many people on the boats throw themselves into the water
rather than submit to slavery. Ma Aku, Kojo, and other characters in America, water
and ships become associated with the slave trade and the systems that brought them to
America in the first place. At the end of the novel, Marcus is terrified of the water and
refuses to learn to swim, causing him to forgo many pool parties with friends. Thus,
this fear of water, passed down from generation to generation, represents how
institutional racism can affect people even several generations later. In the final pages,
however, there is hope for progress, as Marjorie and Marcus travel back to Ghana
together. She invites him to swim in the ocean with her and welcomes him home to
Ghana, helping Marcus to overcome his fear and simultaneously attempting to bridge
the gap between their two families and make amends for the injustice that his family
had faced.

THEMES:
HERITAGE & IDENTITY
Homegoing’s premise explores African and African-American heritage and culture
through a period of several centuries, as the book follows the descendants of Effia and
Esi, two daughters of an Asante woman (from the Ashanti region of Ghana) named
Maame. Each woman represents one of these two cultures, and how the disastrous
consequences of European colonialism and American slavery changed and defined
them. Effia marries a colonial British official named James Collins and stays on the
Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana); Esi is captured and sold into slavery in America.
This chance difference between their fates leads to a stark contrast in the lives of six
generations of their descendants. Over the book’s fourteen chapters, each of which
focuses on a different descendant of these two women, Gyasi shows how cultural
heritage is the crux of a person’s identity as each of the characters must grapple with
their place inside the culture of their parents and the society around them.

Effia and James Collins’ descendants largely remain on the Gold Coast, but their
mixed heritage causes many generations to be haunted by European culture and
colonization as they try to remain true to their African cultural heritage. Quey, Effia
and James Collins’ son, struggles with the fact that he is biracial. Although Effia has
taught him her native language, Quey is schooled in England, which makes him feel
as though he lives between two worlds. He takes part in his father’s slave trading even
though he does not approve of it because he wants to make his father proud, and he
wants to be seen as strong. However, this leads to an identity crisis for many of his
family members. James, Quey’s son, has the opposite path. He rejects the work of his
father and grandfather and aims to reclaim his African cultural heritage by faking his
death in a battle and going to live in a different village that does not participate in the
slave trade. Thus, his desire to stay true to his African heritage defines his morality
and his identity. James’s descendants continue to work to maintain their independence
from the British because they feel it is necessary to reject that part of their history.
James’s granddaughter, Akua, is plagued by this legacy to the point that she tries to
kill her own children by setting her hut on fire in madness. This act then leads her son
and his daughter, Yaw and Marjorie, to move to the United States in an attempt to
escape this rigid cycle of guilt. Yet in the United States, Marjorie sees how her
blackness is defined very differently because she does not have the same cultural
inheritance of African-Americans who have lived in America for generations. When
she returns to Ghana at the end of the novel, she feels at home again because doesn’t
have to define herself against the African-American experience or white experience.
Being back in Ghana makes her feel at ease because the culture is so integral to her
sense of identity.
Esi’s family in America is also haunted by the effects of colonialism when she is
shipped to America. However, instead of trying to regain their African culture, they
are forced to forge a new kind of cultural heritage because so much of it has been
taken away due to slavery. Esi, who is sent on a slave ship to Alabama, begins a cycle
in which many of her descendants are ripped away from their parents and lose any
connection to their heritage. This is symbolized by Esi’s loss of the black stone that
her mother gave her. Esi’s daughter, Ness, then starts to lose her mother’s language.
By the time Ness has her own child, Kojo, his family history is all but lost because his
parents send him away with another woman to try and escape slavery when he is a
baby. Kojo’s son, known only as H, becomes even more removed from his culture, as
Kojo’s wife is kidnapped and re-enslaved when she is pregnant with H, and he never
knows his father. At this point in the novel, a shift starts to happen: when H’s daughter
Willie moves to Harlem, she begins to see how black people in America are creating
their own communities and new forms of culture through jazz and art. This culture is
created less from a shared African heritage and more by a shared heritage of being
black in the United States. When the novel reaches Willie’s grandson, Marcus, he is
deeply rooted in America and invested in learning about his own history when he
pursues higher education at Stanford. However, even though his deepest roots lie in
Ghana, he knows that he is as much a product of American institutions: the slave
trade, sharecropping, the convict-leasing system that had ruined H’s life. He sees
through his studies how this collective cultural struggle has shaped his identity and
the identity of those around him.

Ultimately, Homegoing examines the many differences between the two branches of a
single family tree. Even though Effia and Esi come from the same background, the
differences in how their heritage has been shaped comes to define them and their
descendants. While one side of the family attempts to separate itself from European
culture, the other is forced to confront a lack of heritage and forge a new culture of its
own. Yet, in reuniting Marcus and Marjorie (the last descendants of each branch) in
Ghana at the end of the book, Gyasi provides a bit of hope for some kind of future
union between African and African-American heritage. Even if their experiences have
differed greatly, Marcus and Marjorie recognize that they do have an intertwined
history and a shared foundation.

RACISM, SLAVERY & SYSTEMATIC OPPRESSION

Racism plays a major role in Homegoing for both sides of the book’s family tree, but
it most strongly affects Esi’s descendants as they are subjected to a series of racist
institutions in America. At the beginning of the novel, racism serves as the backbone
of (and one of the many justifications for) slavery in America, but when slavery is
abolished, racism continues to fester. One of the main goals of the novel is to illustrate
the brutal lineage of American racism, and how it becomes codified in both political
and social structures like job access and the prison system.

The chapters involving Esi and her daughter, Ness, demonstrate how racism is used to
justify brutal acts of violence and enslavement. Esi is captured on the heels of a battle
between her village and another village that is working with the British, and she is
placed in a woman’s prison. There, Esi and the other women are treated as subhuman
because of their race: she describes how a soldier who rapes her looks at her in disgust
afterward as if “her body was his shame.” This disgust is amplified in America: Esi’s
daughter, Ness, and the other slaves at the Stockham family’s plantation are treated
like objects rather than people. She is beaten and forced to “marry” another slave
named Sam, being treated almost like an animal. When she and Sam are caught trying
to escape this brutal treatment, she is whipped until she cannot move and forced to
watch as Sam is hanged. White plantation owners view their slaves as disposable, a
view based solely on skin color.

Even after slavery, racism infiltrates other American institutions, which allows the
oppression of African-Americans to continue. Kojo, Ness’s son, escapes slavery, but
still lives in constant fear that he and his children will be recaptured and re-enslaved
as the Civil War brews in America and the Fugitive Slave Act passes. The Great
Migration begins, as people feel so unsafe as to need to move north in order to
continue to feel free. But before Kojo and his family can leave, his pregnant wife,
Anna, is kidnapped. Their son, known only as H, also endures a version of modified
slavery known as the convict-lease system. H is imprisoned for nine years for
“studyin’ a white woman” and is leased to work in a coal mine while carrying out his
sentence, where he faces a constant fear of death or brutal beatings. His daughter,
Willie, and her son, Sonny, also bear the brunt of racist systems, even after they travel
north to live in Harlem. Willie’s first husband, Robert, is only able to get a job
because he is light-skinned, but he eventually leaves her for a white woman. Willie is
left with very few job prospects as a black woman, and she eventually takes to
cleaning houses. Sonny, grows up in and out of a bad school system, and eventually
comes to believe that he can’t make something of himself. When he works at a jazz
club, he becomes addicted to heroin, forcing him even deeper into a downward spiral.
Racism thus serves as a constant weight, dragging the characters down and preventing
them from gaining opportunity.

At the end of the novel, Sonny’s son, Marcus, is able to look back at this history and
trace this thread of oppression, and how it had affected him and his family in large
and small ways. Marcus is writing his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford, which had originally
focused on the convict-lease system. However, Marcus feels he can’t properly grapple
with the convict-lease system without also exploring the consequences on the Great
Migration, the cities like Harlem to which black people flocked, and the drug
addictions borne in those cities like the one his father had—and also how in the
present, his white peers can smoke marijuana openly every day while many of his
black friends are serving five-year-sentences for the same crime. As Marcus describes
how angry his research makes him, he also notes how his anger would have been used
to justify the very racism that caused all of these issues in the first place. Marcus sees
some of his own experiences as products of the racism that affected his family. He
relates his fear of water to his family’s having been shipped over from Ghana for the
slave system. In another example, he is lost at a museum as a young boy when a white
man taps at him with a cane. Without knowing why, he is immediately fearful. These
examples serve as ways in which large forms of oppression have been inherited by
younger generations, even if they don’t necessarily know why—history still informs
their thoughts and feelings.

Because Homegoing spans over several generations, the book is extremely effective
in demonstrating the lasting legacy of racism in the United States. As characters face
near-constant oppression, it becomes clear how the results of obstacles faced by one
character are then passed down to that character’s children. Gyasi uses this
compounded sense of limitation to remind readers that even though slavery ended
centuries ago, the effects of its underlying cause, racism, are still very much a part of
society today.

COLONIZATION
Homegoing begins with the introduction of British colonizers on the Gold Coast
(modern-day Ghana). Though colonialism plays into and is an extension of racism,
the novel also shows it as a means of dividing those who have been colonized in order
to benefit the white colonizers. The book argues that not only is there immense harm
done to those who are enslaved and sent to America (like Esi’s descendants), but also
that colonization serves as a destructive force on those who are both willingly and
unwillingly complicit in it (like Effia’s descendants), because they are taking part in a
system that devalues their culture and positions them as inferior to Europeans.

Effia and her son, Quey, become the first and most direct benefactors of the system of
colonialism, and so it becomes easy for them to accept it, but later descendants realize
the moral cost of enslaving others. Though the Fante village and Asante village
already had a tradition of capturing others in times of war, the British arrive on the
Gold Coast in order to take advantage of this system and create a brutal slave trade.
Effia’s mother plots to have her marry a white man in order to gain money and to
strengthen the relationship between the British and the Fantes. Quey in turn is gifted
with an easier life away from slavery, logging numbers so that he can pretend his
work doesn’t have to do with people being bought, sold, and brutalized. He had gone
to school in England, where he learned English and to read and write. Yet he still feels
that he doesn’t belong to either race, inheriting the feeling from his father that he is
inferior to his father’s white family. Thus, his participation in colonization stems from
a desire to please his father, which makes it even more insidious. Quey’s son, James,
refuses to play into this system, seeing how it made Quey feel as though he didn’t
belong and that he was complicit in a morally corrupt line of work. A girl in another
village, Akosua, shows him how the British incite wars knowing that the losers of the
war will become goods to trade. This realization indicates to James that the British
believe they can arrive and take whatever or whomever they want, to the detriment of
all of the people on the Gold Coast.
Even when slavery ends, the British and colonization remain. The missionaries and
Christianity serve as a new way of asserting that the systems and religions of the
Europeans are superior. The emphasis on Christianity appears early on. James, Effia’s
husband, tells her not to use a root for fertility because it is “not Christian.” Anything
that is associated with blackness or native religion is viewed as evil, or lesser. Abena,
James’s daughter who becomes pregnant out of wedlock, seeks help from the Church.
But instead of helping her, the Missionary accidentally drowns her while trying to
baptize her. He then condemns her daughter, Akua, to a life of feeling that she is
living in in sin and calling her a “heathen.” He tells her not to go to the fetish priest
even though he is Akua’s only friend. Thus, colonization gives her a life of loneliness
and doubt in her own culture.

The effects of colonization, like the effects of slavery, are also felt long after the
British leave Ghana, because it had been so successful as a means of dividing people.
At the end of the novel, Marjorie, Akua’s granddaughter, grows up in Alabama. In
school, other girls make fun of her accent and liken it to a British accent. She
discovers that whiteness and blackness are just as much about culture in America as
they are about skin color, and other students associate her heritage with a sense of
superiority. Yet at the same time, in the eyes of Marjorie’s white classmates, she
doesn’t belong either. When Marjorie begins dating a blonde boy in her class, the
boy’s friends and even his father constantly pull him away from Marjorie. When he
tries to tell his father that Marjorie is “not like other black girls,” Marjorie feels even
worse. Marjorie’s feelings parallel those of Quey, who felt like he didn’t belong in
either race six generations earlier. Thus, the history of Marjorie’s family and
colonization’s divisions still have resonance in the present.

Just as Gyasi demonstrates the effects of racism on generations of people in America,

she shows how colonization also has its own compounded effect on generations of
people in Ghana. One of the things that is most insidious about colonization in the
book is the fact that the British officers began families with many women on the Gold
Coast (even if the officers already had families in England). This made resistance very
difficult, not only because the women’s lives were largely controlled by men, but then
their children felt that removing themselves from involvement in the slave trade
meant rebelling against their own families and fathers, as Quey and James feel. Thus,
later characters are forced to come to terms with the allegiance their family once had
to racist institutions. Only then can they eventually reconcile with the descendants of
the characters that they betrayed, as Marjorie does with Marcus at the end of the novel
when they travel back to Ghana together.

FAMILY & PROGRESS

The connective tissue of Homegoing’s fourteen chapters lies in a single family tree,
starting with Maame and her two daughters, Effia and Esi. Structuring the story in this
way reveals the importance of family, especially the relationship between parents and
children. Children in the novel allow families to continue and progress, and so for
many families and parents, children provide hope for a future and a better life.

Throughout the novel, parents work so that their children might have a better life,
either emotionally or in having freedoms that their parents were not afforded. Effia
tries to make sure that she has a better emotional relationship with her son, Quey,
because Effia’s own biological mother had abandoned her, and her adoptive mother
had emotionally abused her. Akua, H, and Sonny also yearn to have better emotional
relationships with their children, because their parents had either died before they
were born, or they remember very little of them. For H’s daughter, Willie, and
Sonny’s son, Marcus, the strength of these relationships and the support from their
parents allows them to move to better places and get better educations. Ness shows a
similar resolve to give her son, Kojo, a better life, even though the both of them are
enslaved. As soon as Kojo is born, she works to makes sure that they can survive and
tries to escape slavery. Even though Ness does not manage to escape, Kojo is able to
continue on to freedom with another woman carrying him. Thus, even if she has to
make sacrifices like losing touch with her son, Ness gains hope in knowing that Kojo
will grow up as a free man.

Marriage also serves as a way for families to progress and gain a better standing in
society, and so many of the parents try to orchestrate marriages for political gain. At
the start of the novel, Baaba uses Effia as a way of strengthening the Fante village’s
relationship with the British by marrying her to a British officer. Similarly, Quey
marrying Nana Yaa, the daughter of an Asante king, becomes a way to ensure that the
Fante village will not be attacked. Quey’s son James’s rebellion, then, becomes
particularly upsetting because he both abandons his family and marries someone who
does not, in his parents’ eyes, add anything to their political power.

Though the characters who live in America don’t have a comparable means of using
marriage for political gain, marriage still represents a means of improving their
position. Willie marries Robert Clifton, a very light-skinned man who is often
mistaken for white. Willie benefits from Robert’s ability to get jobs that would never
be open to him and from his ability to earn more money than if people thought he was
black. When they eventually separate, Robert then marries a blonde white woman in
order to shore up his own standing in the society, and thus marriage continues to be a
means of gaining status.

Family is crucial to the characters in Homegoing. Because the book is filled with so
much brutality and abuse, as well as many large sociopolitical concepts, family
becomes instrumental in the book in demonstrating how the characters are affected on
an individual and personal level. Readers can trace family connections and empathize
with the sacrifices that characters make for each other, as they continue to hope that
their children will live in a world filled with less injustice. For many of the characters,
family becomes the only means of achieving a better life.
GENDER INEQUALITY & STEREOTYPE
The primary form of inequality explored in Homegoing is racial inequality, but
throughout the novel, Gyasi also reveals the ways in which racism intersects with
gender. For both men and women, rigid gender stereotypes become a large factor in
the way that they are violently oppressed: for women, the patriarchal societies on both
the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) and in America lead to a lack of autonomy and
sexual violation; for men, assumptions of strength and anger lead to brutal working
conditions and physical degradation.

From the beginning of the book, the men are expected to take on roles that require
physical strength and unemotional demeanors. As a result, the types of struggles they
face stem from that expectation as they are physically tormented. On the Gold Coast,
society is structured in the way that men are expected to be fearsome soldiers and
strong fathers. For men like Quey and James, who are the son and grandson of a
British official and a Fante woman, it is assumed that they can be both emotionally
and physically hardened to the social systems around them, like other men on the
Gold Coast. Quey takes part in the slave trade because he worries that if he does not,
he will look weak. James has the same fear, although he tries to overcome it by
running away from his village, despite the knowledge that his family will judge him
harshly for doing so. In America, Sam is forced to work in brutal conditions on a
plantation and is treated like he is subhuman and an animal. Because of his anger at
his enslavement and his refusal to surrender his culture, he is often whipped until
pools of blood form at his feet. When he tries to escape with wife, Ness, he is hanged.
The slave system initiates a vicious catch-22: men are expected to be strong to work,
but they are also expected to submit to cruel treatment, otherwise they are killed. Two
generations later, H is sentenced to prison and sold in the convict-lease system. He
watches as other men bid on him like goods. H then works in the coal mines alongside
other black prisoners. He is under constant threat of being crushed by the falling rock
or killed if he doesn’t work hard enough.

For the female characters in the book, the opposite assumption is made: the
oppression of women is not in order to make them feel weak, but based on sexist
assumptions of their weakness. Thus, in addition to being brutalized, women are often
unable to find autonomy or jobs, instead being controlled by men and often sexually
violated. From the very beginning of the novel, men control the fates of Maame and
her two daughters: Maame was been raped as a house girl before escaping to her old
village. Her first daughter, Effia, is married off by her father to a British officer named
James Collins. Maame’s other daughter, Esi, is sold by the same officer and sent to
America. Before she leaves, she is subjected to terrible conditions inside the women’s
prison of the Cape Coast Castle. She watches as women are starved, abused, and have
their babies taken away. She, like many others, is also raped by a soldier. Other
characters also endure sexism: on the Gold Coast, women are largely responsible for
watching over the children and cooking, and men control their fates. For example,
Abena cannot marry because her father is not wealthy, and thus she is treated like an
old maid and a mistress. The sexual violation continues into more contemporary time
periods. In the early twentieth-century in Harlem, a white man discovers that Robert
(whom he had thought was white) and Willie are married. He then forces Robert to
kiss and touch her while he watches and masturbates. Even though both of them are
being victimized, it is Robert who still relents to this act.

Gyasi reveals patterns in the novel of how stereotypes and bias based on gender can
greatly affect characters in conjunction with race. Even by the end of the novel,
Marcus describes how easy it is for him to be thought of as an angry, violent black
man, and Marjorie sees how her identity as a black girl makes her unable to date a
white boy in her class while the school won’t even listen to her arguments. Yet even
as they face these issues, Gyasi shows the progress that has been made: both of them
are attending Stanford for graduate school, something that would not have been
possible even one generation earlier. Although gender stereotypes persist, Gyasi
suggests, progress eventually bends toward equality.

Afrofuturism Review
Characteristics of the genre:
-Combine elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism and
magic realism with non-Western cosmologies.
-Ability of Afrofuturist characters to imagine a reality beyond their current
experience.

Why it is created:
-There was a time that African-Americans looked very much like second class
citizens. And, Afrofuturism was a tool that African-Americans could use to imagine a
better future, and the movement continued into the contemporary era.

How it empowers the black community:

-To critique the present-day dilemmas of black people and to interrogate and re-
examine historical events.
-Purpose is to explore the developing intersection of African culture with technology.

+ explain and identify examples