“Since they’d met five years before, Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn’t certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man’s church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick the Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.”

I am beyond late, but WHAT A TIME to read a novel about lineage, generational trauma, and the search to create (or find) a new world for one’s country and one’s family.

In Homecoming, Yaa Gyasi’s worlds are infinite in their scope, and intimate in their glances through eight generations of a single family separated by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (amongst other dividing lines.) As one would imagine, memory is key here, most strikingly so in Gyasi’s connection between memory and forgiveness. In many ways, she positions the act of homegoing as an act of forgiveness—of one’s home, of one’s history, and of the people who comprise both. There are multiple, stunning homegoings in this novel—as unmoored characters return to their childhood villages, as enslaved and leased characters find the love of partners and surrogate children, and as children are led to a deeper understanding of one’s self and their place in a family.

In an earlier “status update” for this book, I was really upset by how quickly the time was passing between generations—mostly because I wanted more of these very obvious “homegoings” on the page. This is still something I feel, as I would have read an 800-page novel if Gyasi would have written one. However, at the end, I am most struck not by how much has been forgotten from the generations before and can never be known or returned to by their descendants, but instead by how much there is for the characters to know about their ancestors right from their parents, their homes, and themselves. Much of this is about having conversations about the living history our older relatives have experienced, but much more is about an innate connection that Gyasi captures so well.

I’ve spoken about this idea with my dad before, but essentially: what I think of as “parts of his personality I stole” are actually traits that he inherited from his parents/grandparents, and traits they likely inherited from theirs. Most literally meaning, the way I am (not just being alive, but like how I behave in the world) is inherently tied to someone I will never meet. Another way of thinking about this is that I have met my ancestors through the way I am in the world, and the way my relatives are. I think this is central to Gyasi’s work, and beautifully rendered by the end of the novel: through their heirlooms, visions, and habits, these characters are deeply aware of the family they cannot directly know. It is this ingrained awareness that gives me hope that there is some connection I have to the strength, healing, and building capacity of my ancestors. It is this connection that gives me hope for future generations in this world.