In today’s tumultuous political climate, it is easy to gravitate towards building walls instead of focusing energy on tearing them down. Just like the first chapter of Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 Homegoing reads, “The need to call this thing ‘good’ and this thing ‘bad’, and this thing ‘white’ and this thing ‘black’ was an impulse that Effia did not understand”.

Homegoing traces the family tree of two-half sisters: one who works in the slave trade, and the other who is enslaved. Changing perspectives between both families, the pages travel through Africa and the United States during the events such as the lesser known Anglo-Asante Wars or the convict labor camps and coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama.

Reminiscent of Nicole Dennis Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, parents fight to give their children a shot at life, a custom that seems to have traveled with us through time. They will risk everything in the sliver of hope that their actions will give their children a chance at a new life. Sound familiar? Immigrants today are often given a bad reputation for “taking away jobs from Americans” or “not paying taxes”. From this, it is obvious that the harboring of prejudices based on the uncontrollable elements of a person’s identity is passed down. Although in many other novels water can come to represent renewal or purity, in Homegoing, it represents the pain and suffering that these prejudices result in. This begins in the beginning chapters when people jump off their ships bound for America rather than continue to be enslaved. Water and boats continue to serve as a symbol for the horrors of slavery. At the end of the novel, a descendant of slaves is still fearful of water, showing how institutional racism can also be passed down through generations. [Spoiler alert: the bridge between the two groups is gapped by the end of the novel.]

A major theme throughout the novel seemed to be the oppression of black people. In order for one to have power, it has to be assumed that someone else did not. Superiority implies inferiority. True enough, how often had I felt confined by my identity? To be brushed off as passive for being Asian-American? Hmm...In this way, it was as if Gyasi were sitting next to me as I read, staring me down until I was forced to acknowledge one horrendous conclusion: we are not equal. We cannot pretend that racism does not exist. Being complacent to racism that seems to be growing, though perhaps subtly, is like as James says, “Everyone was responsible...We all were...We all are”. So no, this book was not a “page-turner” for me, but the weight of the journey Africans have gone through stick with me even weeks after finishing the novel. The damage is still being repaired today, and many forget about it because it has been around for so long.

In the final chapter of the novel, Marcus, a student at Stanford University working towards a Ph. D., finds himself delving deeper and deeper into the history of blacks in America. He quickly finds himself overwhelmed with the continual social and economic gap between blacks and whites and how injustices against them would only, “be different too, less obvious than it once was”. I distinctly remember setting the book down at this point, my thoughts racing. Emmett Till was lynched at the age of fourteen for supposedly making advances at a white woman in the 1950s. Trayvon Martin was fatally shot at the age of seventeen for looking suspicious to a police officer while walking down the street in 2012. More than fifty years apart, but these events seem to have too many similarities to be merely a coincidence. How far had we really come from the days of slavery? Even more, how far do we still have ahead of us in the fight against oppression? Perhaps a lot farther than I had initially believed.