‎ A Painful Notion of Time Conveying Black Temporality in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

“History clings to our skin. Somehow we must remember that we remember differently.”
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‎Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
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‎”One must return to the site. Detour is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by return: not a return to the dream of origin […] but a return to the point of entanglement [point d’intrication], from which one was forcefully turned away.”
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‎Édouard Glissant
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‎Writing Diaspora Across the Middle Passage
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‎In “The Time of Slavery,” an analysis of US-American ‘roots tourism’ in Ghana, Saidiya Hartman notes that “the origin identified is the site of rupture and, ironically, the fort and castles built by Europeans come to approximate home” (2002: 766). Hartman takes issue with the “facile representations of the horrors of the slave trade” that are offered by heritage tourism. She particularly faults the assumed redemption and closure facilitated by the tourist “who acts as a vessel for the ancestor” and questions that curious conflation on behalf of African Americans visiting the west coast of Africa, who act “as if the location of the wound was itself the cure, or as if the weight of dead generations could alone ensure our progress” (2002: 767-768). The metaphor of return becomes for her not only a convenient vehicle for economy-boosting ‘roots tourism,’ but also a fundamentally doomed concept, a mere placeholder for the irreconcilable desire to “mend the irreparable” (759). Hartman does not exempt herself from this impossible desire, neither in this article nor in its extended examination in Lose Your Mother. Regarding the inscription of a memorial plaque at Elmina castle, its call for remembering the dead by mending “ruptured lines of descent and filiation,” Hartman argues that “grief is a central term in the political vocabulary of the diaspora” (2002: 758). Yet she also concedes that, from a perspective where the “the identification with Africa is always already after the break,” Africa is seen, if at all, then only “through the backward glance or
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‎hindsight (763). By asking “to what end,” then, the ghost of slavery is conjured up, Hartman highlights the epistemic interstice that Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) aims to fill.
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‎Homegoing also mobilizes the tropes of displacement and return as both organizing principles and fundamental problems to diasporic identity. The novel traces eight generations of a family separated through the transatlantic slave trade and their disparate positions within it, episodically juxtaposing US-American and Ghanaian Black lives. In part, Homegoing follows what – Ferguson has called “the hegemonic mode of plotting African American racial formations,” from “transatlantic slavery, to Jim Crow, to civil rights, Black Power, and on to integration” (2011: 114). The vital difference to these forms of historical plotting, however, lies in the novel’s bifocal perspective. In that sense, Homegoing performs the same Afropolitan gesture as Americanah, lateralizing the Black Atlantic by foregrounding Africa. Rather than highlighting diasporic alienation or promising the transcendence of race, it offers a sense of kinship, solidarity, and historical redemption.
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‎The novel’s positive or redemptive tone, however, is not achieved through the usual means, including those criticized by Hartman. The novel does not develop a soothing notion of African continuity or conjure the Gold Coast’s rich history as a simple antidote to the damaging effects of slavery.
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‎Neither is it primarily animated by the Afrocentric fantasy of return, culminating in a sense of closure, even though it emphasizes the importance of thinking through the Black Diaspora’s points of entanglement. Through its parallel structure, the novel emphasizes rather than mends the fracturing of kinship, detailing “ruptured lines of descent and filiation” and framing separation and betrayal as the diaspora’s original sin. In its detailing of by and large tragic life stories it also appears to be, in keeping with Hartman’s proposition, mobilized by a certain sense of grief. At the same time, it abounds with momentary or minor redemptive moments that bespeak its overarching diasporic desire to “reckon with the fullness of slavery,” as Gyasi candidly writes in a New York Times opinion piece titled “I’m Ghanaian-American. Am I Black?” Growing up as a Ghanaian American, Gyasi writes, she struggled to make sense of her identity in relation to Black Americans. Only after visiting Cape Coast Castle in Ghana – and learning about the conspicuous lacuna of slavery in Ghana’s national memory – did she develop a way to broach the subject:
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‎I knew I wanted to write about everything I was feeling, to write about diaspora and reckon with the fullness of slavery, not just as it was centuries ago, but what it has left us, Ghanaians and Americans alike, today. I started writing with a vague but important question that I put at
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‎the top of my blank screen: What does it mean to be black in America?
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‎(Gyasi 2016b: para. 15)
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‎Answering Hartman’s question in the moment of Afropolitanism, the novel conjures the ghost of slavery in order to (re-)install an active African role in the making of the Black Diaspora, one that reckons with the guilt of betrayal without being paralyzed by it. As such, the novel not only inquires into Black American identity, plotted through the disastrous route of the Middle Passage, but it strives to create a sense of diasporic Black identity that re-inscribes the mutual historical imbrications between West African and American Black subjects. Gyasi’s investigation of Black identity seems to resonate with Hall’s definition of diasporic identifications as “the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (1994: 394). It also resonates with Clifford’s definition of diasporic traditions as “a network of partially connected histories, a persistently displaced and reinvented time/space of crossings” (1994: 321). Accordingly, the questions motivating this historical novel are not exhausted by the complex node of ‘how to write about slavery?’ but also include ‘how to write the diaspora,’ meaning: ‘how to write a historical novel about a transnational and ever evolving structure?’
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‎In the context of this book, the novel is not only the latest, but also the most obvious intervention into the bleak assessment of Afropolitanism’s inability to reckon “with the agency of Africans in the dispersion of diaspora: the betrayal at the heart of the symbol ‘Black'” (Balakrishnan 2018: 581). Rather than indicating the repudiation of racial solidarity that Chude-Sokei identifies with newly Black American fictions, the novel is written from a position that aims to bridge the abyss of the transatlantic slave trade and adequately represent the rippling effect of this traumatic process. It signals an engagement with these themes not merely as truce but as a sign of active solidarity. As such, Homegoing is firmly grounded within contemporary diasporic discourses. In its emphasis on a particular ‘feeling’ toward history, it offers a very interesting riff on what Best has called an “axiom” of contemporary writing about slavery, fictional and historiographical. In Homegoing, too, the past is not really past but continues to haunt future generations by way of a family curse. As an investigation into 21st-century US-American Blackness, Gyasi’s novel appears to trade in that very same melancholic historicism that Best argues against, Hartman employs, and Morrison has either perfected or abandoned (depending on who you ask).
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‎On the other hand, the novel clearly defies at least some of the representational conventions that Afro-pessimist-leaning scholars like Markus Nehl declare the litmus test of writing about slavery. For – Nehl, proper accounts of slavery refuse “to offer a reconciliatory interpretation of the past” (2016: 194) and instead help to “deconstruct the naïve idea of
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‎history as progress” (2016: 12). Narratives that present some form of positive closure or merely emphasize the “liberating power of the act of narration,” he posits, ultimately run “the risk of playing down and trivializing the true implications and the horrors of American chattel slavery” (2016: 36). Yet Homegoing’s diasporic desire operates on a different level. Rather than merely revolving around the question of trivializing or foregrounding the devastating effects of slavery, the novel shifts the singular burden of ‘appropriately’ representing this history and focuses instead on the “liberating power” of narrating diaspora, of finding new stories and pushing toward new ways of writing in the African Atlantic.
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‎In doing so, the novel finds itself in the forcefield of various discourses, skillfully engaging the contents of various forms. As a sprawling family saga that projects a sense of hope and solidarity with and through the destruction of traditional kinship ties, Homegoing negotiates the narrative strategies of the Afro-pessimist neo-slave narrative, as well as the conventions of the ‘classical’ historical novel à la Lukács. Signaling also the self-referentiality of postmodern metafiction or the postcolonial historical novel, Homegoing also foregrounds the limits of this genre, particularly the ways in which the historical novel relates to the nationalist, totalizing, and teleological demands intrinsic to the project of history and the nation state. In order to provide the history of an imagined community that is not only transnational, but also outside or adjacent to linear progressive temporalities, the novel relies less on the established narrative conventions of historical fiction than on the mediation of temporality. Consequently, Homegoing is a historical novel that aims to provide not merely the feeling for a time, but the feeling for a feeling of time. This specific sense of Black temporality is primarily conveyed through a distinctly discontinuous structure imparting a distinctly continuous reading experience. On that view, the novel’s sense of linear historical progression – provided by the through-line of a literal genealogy -is compromised by what Édouard – Glissant calls a “painful notion of time and its full projection into the future” (1996: 64).
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‎Each of the novel’s fourteen chapters opens and ends in medias res and somewhat impressionistically indicates its respective historical canvas.
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‎Hence, in its progression through over two centuries, the general effect is one of fragmentation and disjuncture. Moreover, the absence of central and recurring characters not only limits its potential for readerly empathy but actually evokes a sense of what Dominick LaCapra, in Writing History, Writing Trauma, has described as “empathic unsettlement” (2001: 41). Rather than fueling a sense of intimacy with a cast of familiarized characters, the chapters provide only that level of identification that is responsive to the traumatic experiences of others, without entirely appropriating their experience for the sake of narrative continuity. Regarding the novel’s specifically traumatic historical subject matter, this kind of unsettlement
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‎then “poses a barrier to closure”; it doesn’t reconcile the past as distinct and distant and “places in jeopardy harmonizing or spiritually uplifting accounts of extreme events from which we attempt to derive reassurance” (LaCapra 2011: 41-42).
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‎The narrative nevertheless operates with elements of continuity. The urgency and temporal suspension derived from the novel’s method of fragmentation accentuates this carefully crafted continuity as the constant interplay of stasis and event. Every chapter is set apart from the preceding one by a radical jump in either time or place. At the same time, the sense of historical and narrative progression is not entirely suspended. Time, on the contrary, is relentlessly moving forward. As each character and period recedes, nothing lasts while everything still remains the same. Homegoing’s unusual structure is certainly noteworthy if one contextualizes it as one of the widely popular fictions emerging in the moment of Afropolitanism. As scholar John Murillo III. notes, both critics and lay audiences have perceived the lack of constant narrative threads and characters as the novel’s major weakness, describing its effect as “distancing” (2017: para.3). However, he claims, these readings are unable to “grasp the essential genius of what Gyasi has accomplished here” (para. 4). For Murillo, it is precisely her “suturing of the dispersed fragments of Black life scattered across time and space into the single, if necessarily disjointed, ‘whole’ of Homegoing that makes this work so profound” (ibid.). Indeed, if one interprets the novel as an affective meditation on Blackness and temporality, its formal constrains align with what it wants to accomplish: a dizzying sense of progression counteracted by a tragic sense of temporality, recursiveness, and gridlock.
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‎In this sense, the novel’s retrospective long view of history resembles that of Benjamin’s angel of history: history as a single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage. While the novel’s historical gaze is turned toward the past and its amassing of tragedy, the narrative cannot stay with the dead because the pronounced prolepsis of its episodic structure hurls it forward, or backward, in the simulation of progress that we have come to know as Black history. At the same time, and in keeping with Benjamin, the novel insists on redemptive openings, enabled by this very same tragic sense of history. Only by recognizing the way in which an oppressive history implicates all, in this case a reckoning with the fullness of slavery, can the desire to “blast open the continuum of history” transmute into agency (Benjamin 2003: 396).
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‎The next section of this chapter contextualizes the novel within its particular moment, asking how the historical novel appears particularly pertinent to the 21st-century Black Diaspora. The subsequent section will examine the multifaceted “Problem of History,”‘ from notions of literariness and 19th-century imperialist plotting illustrated by 20th-century theorists like Hayden White and Georg Lukács, to the representation of traumatic limit
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‎events as problematized by Dominick LaCapra and Saidiya Hartman. I then explore how the novel foregrounds its own epistemological status in relation to diasporic history, followed by a more detailed discussion of how diasporic notions of temporality are laid out. The last section will try to integrate the problems of history and disjunctive temporality in a discussion of the novel’s transmission of agency and redemption.