![]() ![]() ![]() Homegoing begins on the Gold Coast, where the British and the Dutch are buying and kidnapping African men, women and children, shipping them to America and Europe. “I thought I wanted to write about a mother and a daughter, so I went to the central region of Ghana, which is where my own mother is from and where the Asante people are from.” Then she “sort of gratuitously ended up taking a trip to the Cape Coast Castle, which is where the novel began for me.” “At first I thought I wanted to write a very different book,” Gyasi tells City Paper by phone from her home in New York. Born in Ghana, she came to the U.S with her family as a child and had made only one childhood visit since. In African-American religious tradition, a “home going” is also part of a funeral or burial service - a celebration of the life of the deceased, a joyous ceremony observing that person completing his or her journey by returning to the Lord, and a ritual recognizing the fullness of things.Īs a junior at Stanford University, Gyasi herself made a homegoing to research her book. A “homegoing” can be the act of returning home to ancestral lands. In her 2016 book Homegoing (her first), author Yaa Gyasi tells the multi-layered stories of seven generations of two connected family trees. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |