Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half-sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.
The novel was selected in 2016 for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017. It received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for 2017, an American Book Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature.
Plot
Effia's line
Effia is raised by her mother, Baaba, who is cruel to her. Nevertheless she works hard to please her mother. Known as a beauty, Effia is intended to be married to the future chief of her village, but when her mother tells her to hide her menstrual cycle, rumours spread that she is barren. As a result, she is married to a British merchant, James Collins, the governor of Cape Coast Castle. He and Effia have a happy marriage. She returns to her family village one time, when her father dies, where her brother tells her that Baaba is not Effia's mother and that Effia is the daughter of an unknown slave.
Effia and James have a son called Quey who is raised in the Cape Coast Castle. His parents, worrying that he is friendless, eventually have him befriend a local boy named Cudjo. When they are teenagers Quey and Cudjo realize that they are attracted to one another. In fear of their relationship James sends Quey to England for awhile. When he returns, Quey is assigned to help to strengthen the ties between his familial village and the British merchants at the Cape Coast Castle. He is frustrated by his uncle Fiifi, who seems evasive about trade relations. Eventually Fiifi, along with Cudjo, raid the village of the Asante people and bring back the daughter of an Asante chief. Realizing that to marry her would join his people, the Fantes, with the Asantes, Quey resolves to forget Cudjo and marry the Asante girl.
Quey's son, James, learns that his Asante grandfather died and returns to Asante land where he meets a farmer woman, Akosua Mensah. Growing up with his parents' dysfunctional political marriage, and promised since childhood to the daughter of the Fante chief, Amma, James longs to run away and marry Akosua. With help from Effia, James runs away from Amma and lives among the Efutu people until they are raided and killed by the Asantes. He is saved by a man who recognizes him though James makes him promise to tell everyone he has died. He then travels to reunite with Akosua.
James's daughter Abena only knows her father as a rural farmer called Unlucky for his inability to grow crops. By the time she is twenty-five she is still unmarried. Her childhood best friend, Ohene, promises to marry her after his next successful season and the two renew an affair which coincides with the start of a famine. The village elders, discovering the affair, tell them that if Abena conceives a child or the famine lasts more than seven years Abena will be cast out. In the sixth year Ohene successfully pioneers the introduction of cocoa plants. Rather than marry Abena he reveals that he promised to marry the daughter of the farmer who gave him the seeds. Abena, now pregnant, decides to leave her village rather than wait for Ohene to marry her.
Akua grows up among white missionaries after her mother dies early in her childhood. When an Asante man proposes, she accepts and marries him and the couple have several children. She is traumatized to learn that her mother died while being baptized, and by seeing her fellow villagers burn a white traveler alive. Before the birth of her third child Akua begins to have nightmares about a woman on fire with burning children. Her nightmares cause her to avoid sleep and enter a trance-like state while awake, and as a result her mother-in-law locks her in the hut to prevent other village people seeing her in her strange state. At the same time the British provoke a third war against them and her husband goes to fight. He, returns missing one leg, in time for the birth of their son, Yaw. The nightmares continue to haunt Akua and, while sleepwalking during a trance at night, she kills her daughters by setting a fire that consumes them. Her husband is able to save Yaw and successfully prevent Akua from being burned herself by the townspeople.