![]() The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father's compound. Fire surrounds Maame's village and signals the cursed birth of her daughter Effia who is estranged/separated from her sister Esi. The importance of fire emerges early in the novel and is both symbolic and foreboding. Ultimately, through a kind of literary ancestor worship, Yaa Gyasi creates a narrative of healing that employs the natural elements of fire, water, and stone as tropes that configure within the themes of motherhood, Diasporic migration, and home in her 2016 novel Homegoing. Each generation is indelibly marked by the insidious, far-reaching horrors of British colonization, the African slave trade, the middle passage, plantation existence, Jim Crow coal mining life, and the socio-economic insecurity in the urban center. ![]() ![]() Through a multi-layered plot that follow the diasporic journeys of seven generations, Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing traces the lineage of two sisters, Effia and Esi, from the Cape Coast castle of 17 th century Ghana to the brutal racism of the 19 th century American South, and 20 th century American North. ![]()
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