Homegoing is not primarily invested in aptly conveying the horrors of chattel slavery. Instead, the novel aims to capture a fuller image of the transatlantic slave trade and its resultant diaspora, tracing its ruptured lines of kinship and its forgone responsibilities, fateful entanglements, and temporal consequences. In doing this, the novel also self-referentially foregrounds its poetic potential, highlighting the ways in which only literature may be able to make this kind of history. In line with the Aristotelian dictum that “poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal, while history relates particulars” (Aristoteles 1995: 59), Homegoing contrasts several modes of writing history, subtly favoring the poetic world making of literature.
The difficulty of writing diasporic or Black history is embodied by the figures of Yaw and Marcus, who are struggling to write a book in the book, as well as the figure of Marjorie, who writes the kind of poem which unwittingly ‘gets it right,’ by exposing not only the ‘open wound’ of her family’s history, but also her desire ‘to make whole.’ Socially isolated and confused about her cultural identity, Yaw’s US-born daughter Marjorie finds solace in the books she receives from her teacher Mrs. Pinkston, who not only tells her that “in this country […] black is black is black” but is also the only person she knows who has read her father’s publication (273). It is Mrs. Pinkston who encourages Marjorie to write and perform at her school’s Black cultural event. The end result is a poem that clairvoyantly alludes to various aspects of her family’s history and moves from the notion of two sisters being “split” and separate to being “kin” and “same” despite their vastly different experiences (282).
Yaw’s book, on the other hand, his vexed and vexing project, may at first glance represent the mise en abyme of the novel. His historical book project is finally completed after many years, either right before or after he and his wife Esther move to the United States. In the chapter on Marjorie, the reader
is told that his “lifework” is now titled The Ruin of a Nation Begins in the Homes of Its People: “He’d taken the title from an old Asante proverb and used it to discuss slavery and colonialism” (270). The parallels to the novel itself are fairly obvious. While the title, Homegoing, alludes to the African American belief that a person’s spirit will return home after death, its epigraph is an Akan proverb: “The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.” In terms of scope and subject matter, Homegoing strives to accomplish what Yaw’s historical work has done, at least for himself and the Pan-Africanist teacher who has read it. Initially wrestling to articulate or represent the unrepresentable, Yaw’s turning point most likely occurs when he starts investigating the source of his personal anguish and, most importantly, makes peace with his mother. When his daughter Marjorie admits that she doesn’t understand his complex historical treatise, he points toward another factor: time. Marjorie remembers her father telling her “that it was something she wouldn’t understand until she was much older. He said that people need time in order to see things clearly” (270).
Time is precisely the crux of the other book project depicted in Homegoing, the completion of which remains unsure. Marcus, Marjorie’s African American contemporary, has grown up in the shadow of his absent mother’s lifelong and his father’s precariously contained heroin addiction, yet he has also received the critical consciousness of his father Sonny’s “alternative history lessons,” himself a former NAACP member and activist of the 1960s (284). Around the year 2000, Marcus is in his 20s and on the way to obtain a PhD in sociology, but his research is stalling. Marcus is painfully aware of historical injustices, the complex workings of racism, and the complicity of his nation’s prime institutions, embodied also by the “beautiful but deadly silent” reading room of a Stanford library (289). The anger he feels marks him as an outsider and makes it impossible to subject his book project to the neat periodization and progressive arc of mainstream historiography or the methodical structure of a self-sufficient research paradigm:
How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem […]. And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’s be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world […] he’d get so angry that he’d slam his research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all
they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was. When Marcus started to think this way, he couldn’t get himself to open even one book. (289-290)
In a way, Marcus is so deeply ‘inside’ the US-American forest that all he sees is the way that racism has positioned himself and his family. At the same time, the formal constraints of his dissertation do not allow him to draw out the universal, the bigger picture of racism, but rather force him to “[relate] particulars” (Aristoteles 1995: 59). Because Homegoing is a contemporary novel about race that, like the other novels discussed in this study, is always at risk to be read (only) sociologically, Marcus’s book project performs quite a few things. For one, it allows Gyasi to indeed comment on the history of US-American race relations in a ‘realistic’ or ‘factual’ manner. On the other hand, and not unlike Ifemelu’s blog in Americanah or Julius’s historical digressions in Open City, these insights are qualified by their intradiegetic function within the novel, if not in content then in form. Marcus is unable to express the “true implications and the horrors” of the Black experience in a sociological text (Nehl 2016: 12), just as Yaw was unable to write his history book about the Gold Coast in the masculinist rhetoric of Black Nationalism. What finally enabled Yaw – introspection, recognizance, expansion, and, above all, time – is either not applicable or as yet unavailable to Marcus.
Particularly in the context of the US, Marcus cannot insert his experience into what Bhabha, following Bakhtin, describes as the “representative authority” of a national narrative unfolding in the “fullness of time” (2004: 206). Marcus’s experience is instead marked by an impossible split, a disjunctive temporality that not only troubles “the homogeneous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s imagined community” (Bhabha 2004: 206) but also fundamentally motivates this inquiry, this “posing of a question, rather than imitation of a form of being” that Jared -. Sexton describes as the epitome of Black study (2011: 9). Because Homegoing is precisely such an inquiry, motivated by the “vague but important” question “What does it mean to be black in America?” (Gyasi 2016: para. 15), the following passage about Marcus’s desire to represent the unspeakable discloses the novel’s own modus operandi and fundamental conflict:
How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it – not apart from it, but
inside of it. How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. (295-296, emphasis added)
Homegoing’s fictionalization of the intertwined histories of slavery, colonialism, and institutionalized racism is not necessarily about telling but rather about showing a different kind of history and about adopting a distinctly metahistoricist ‘feel’ for history. And it claims to do so, as the reflection on failed or complicated book projects suggests, ultimately more successfully than either the historical treatise or the sociological dissertation. While emphasizing the general value of literary imagination, the novel also distinguishes between its own labor and that of poetry. While Marjorie’s poem is shown to capture the essence of this story in both vivid and transient imagery, Homegoing is able to provide more than the elevated world making of metaphor and mimesis. In its narrative progression, it also provides a sense of this world in its unfolding over time. In its effort to capture the feeling for a feeling of time, Homegoing draws on the crucial significance of temporality in the making of the Black Diaspora.
In “Afro-Modernity,” Michael Hanchard affirms the central role of Afro-Modern counterhistories, distinguishing between the metahistorical positionalities of tabula rasa and tabula blanca. For the former, African history simply needed to be unearthed and reconstructed, often in accordance with the Herskovitzean model. The latter approach conceived the history of African-New World peoples as fundamentally severed from Africa and instead often systematized around issues of resistance and mobilization. 88 The reconstruction of a usable past often formed the “first pedagogical project” undertaken by Afro-Modern thinkers and activists, yet even those suggesting a more radical epistemological break with Africa had to reckon with a shared notion of temporal disjuncture imposed by the twin histories of slavery and imperialism (Hanchard 1999: 251-252). The reason behind this, Hanchard writes, was the fact that the “temporal consequences of racial inequality were to be experienced and felt across African and Afro-diasporic contexts wherever a person defined by their phenotypic proximity to the indigenous peoples of sub-Saharan Africa inhabited the same territorial realm with whites” (ibid. 252).
Adopting an analytical lens that allows one to view racial politics outside of essentializing or phenotypic terms, Hanchard therefore suggest the notion of racial time, because time, “when linked to relations of dominance and subordination, is another social construct that marks inequality between various social groups” (1999: 253). Hanchard lists several instances of racial time that mark the imposed time structures experienced by the slave or the disparate colonial time relations affecting African nation states, and that also apply to the temporal configurations in Homegoing. 89
There is, for example, the notion of sameness and repetition that overrides the temporal experiences of numerous characters in the novel and that Hanchard links to the temporal constraints of slave labor in the Americas. Because, theoretically, “no time belonged solely to the slave,” time becomes utterly devoid of meaning, locking protagonists in feelings of eternal stasis, repetition, or endless waiting (Hanchard 1999: 256). The sentiment of Ness, the first family member born into slavery who, when asked how her day went, rhetorically replies, “Ain’t all days the same?” (Homegoing 71), is echoed by the Harlem jazz singer and future mother to Marcus, Amani, who answers Sonny’s “Long day?” with: “Ain’t all days long?” (250). Sonny, in turn, quits his job with the NAACP housing team after the futility of his work is exposed by a young boy who, after reporting his family’s dire living conditions, confronts him with another rhetorical question: “You can’t do a single thing, can you?” (246). The realization that this boy and his family might wait forever, that in the most ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’ city of the world they would receive decent housing “only after those same services were provided for whites” (Hanchard 1999: 263), accentuates Sonny’s prior doubts that even if his political work will ever affect any change in America, this change might not be much different but “mostly the same” (Homegoing 244).
Several passages in the novel refer to this paradoxical experience of time the return of the ever same – and signal Hartman’s notion of the “incomplete project of freedom,” where each ostensibly progressive historical event fails to undo the afterlife of slavery (2008: 4). One character in Homegoing also speaks of the Civil War as a war that “may be over but it ain’t ended” (158); a father contemplates his young daughter’s night terrors, fighting in her sleep against “Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness” and has a sense of “where it started, but when, where, did it end” (210). Here, the continuity of racism appears to be the ‘changing same’ that affects Black people’s lives right until the (more or less) contemporary moment. 90 Despite being born in the post-Civil Rights era, it is Marcus who still feels like he is nothing but “an accumulation of these times” (286).
In a political sense, the notion of futility, of ineffectual or insufficient change, translates into what Martin Luther King, criticizing the political doctrine of gradualism, described as the “pain of progress” (qtd. in Hanchard 265). Knowing well that the time spent and lost in waiting for freedom could never be regained, King nevertheless suggested that Black people should receive some form of compensation, similar to military veterans, for lost time (ibid.). The most literal instance of lost time in Homegoing is experienced by the character of H, who is “doing time” in a chapter detailing one of novel’s lesser known episodes of American history -the convict leasing system in Alabama. Around the 1880s, H is sentenced to 10 years of grueling work in the coalmines for an offense as petty as it is
fictitious. While H nevertheless manages to somewhat ‘make up’ for his lost time by finally reconnecting with his girlfriend, starting a family and working the mines on his own accord, it is not only his ultimately fatal case of the black lung that reveals how deeply this unjust experience has been etched into his body.
The chapter on H is an interesting meditation on materiality and embodiment that could be related to Fanon’s Black intervention into a purportedly universal model of subjectivity, such as his observation that the “Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (2008: 106).91 For Fanon, the process of racialization substitutes Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema with a “racial epidermal schema” and prevents the Black man from suffering in and as a lived body, because awareness of his body is only ever gained in a third, objectifying perspective that conflates his identity, “at the same time,” with his body, race, and ancestors (2008: 84). However, this emphasis on collective identity should not obscure Fanon’s explicitly gendered position, who self-admittedly “[knew] nothing about” the “woman of color” (2008: 138).92 In this sense, the literal imprisonment of H also signifies the metaphorical imprisonment of the racially objectified and gendered body, and this intersectional position severely affects the way H not only suffers but perceives (in) his body.
Exemplifying the ways in which the social discourses of race, gender, and time intersect and affect the Black male body, the story of H highlights the particular vulnerability of Black American masculinity. This vulnerability becomes especially evident if we relate this character to his ancestor Sam and his descendant Marcus. Exceptionally strong and huge, H has unwittingly inherited the genetic disposition of his grandfather and the gendered stereotypes that conscript Kojo from the very moment he is brought into the symbolic system of racial slavery: “He is the large, muscular body of the African beast, and he refuses to be caged” (80). Coming “straight from the Continent,” Sam is commanded to “marry” Ness and, railing against his circumstances, his rage turns him into “the animal he’s been told that he is” (ibid.). In the historico-biological system of racism, H does not simply resemble his grandfather in stature. He also bears the mark of the ‘Black Buck’ stereotype. Predictably, H is falsely accused for “studyin’ a white woman” (158).
An extremely strong and tireless worker, H accomplishes almost superhuman feats in the mines, earning him the nickname Two-Shovel H. But of course, as he two-handedly shovels his and another man’s quota of coal, the shovels extending from his body only make it more apparent that despite his exceptional gift for mining, he is far from being superhuman, or human for that matter, but a mere tool and thus both exploitable and fungible. After that experience, H has his first emotional break down because he cannot “feel his arms” (163). This sense of thingification and alienation, blurring the
boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, also extends to the way H imagines his body in relation to others: “Sometimes as he slept the chains would rub against his ankles in such a way that he would remember the feeling of Ethe’s hands there, which always surprised him since metal was nothing like skin” (162). When H is released, he showers and tries to scrub away the ‘mark’ of his experience, but it has already seeped into his skin, determining not only how the world perceives him but affecting his own perception of the world. Soon, H realizes that he will never be able to “go back to the free world, marked as he was” (167). Because he has only known sharecropping and coal mining in his life, he is unable to conceive of his Blackness outside of the material conditions that have produced it. Remembering Ethe, all “he could think was that her skin was the color of cotton stems. And he missed that blackness, having only known the true blackness of coal for nearly ten years” (166). When H finally reconnects with Ethe, embracing the “full weight of her body” that was “not the same weight as coal,” the fact that Ethe’s body reacts differently to the material he has “spent nearly a third of his life lifting,” anticipates his return to a world populated by bodies not things, as precarious and momentary as this family idyll may be (176).
Deprived of a decade of his life, his body irreparably damaged and his future as an ex-con narrowly predetermined, H nevertheless experiences a brief moment of temporal contingency following his release. He muses on how “easy it was for a life to go one way instead of another” (171) and wonders whether he could now become “a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind” (168). Referenced, here, is the notion of the “New Negro,” an expression that, as Hanchard points out, circulated within the Harlem Renaissance and constitutes a temporal discourse adopted by the political vanguard of almost every Black post-emancipation movement in the New World. This discourse centered on the desire “to rid themselves and their communities of any vestiges of enslavement” (Hanchard 1999: 260).
While H, after being rendered pure material and ruined for any other professional path, will never lead a “life of the mind,” Homegoing’s particular mode of “rhyming” historical periods gives a fairly definitive answer as to whether newness may also signify freedom. The hopeful notion attached to the passing of time is countered by H’s great-grandson Marcus, whose life chances, despite being a Ph.D. student at Stanford, are still predetermined by a racial imaginary manifesting itself as “legends, stories, history, and above all historicity”
(Fanon 2008: 84). The same deadly fiction that put H in jail for “studyin’ a white woman” (158) can still decide over his fate if he, studying the injustices of the convict leasing system, expresses his anger in a public outburst. Despite being admitted into the highest ranks of that which constitutes the public sphere, Marcus is always precariously perched on the
margins of it – like a distinguished Harvard professor who, perching on his own front porch, is arrested for attempted burglary. 93 As Marcus muses, the fact of “his skin and his anger” would lead “everyone in the room” to “think they knew something about him,” and that “something” would be the same “that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison” (290). Obviously, the through-line connecting H and Marcus is more than their genetic makeup. It is that makeup’s very real vulnerability toward what Claudia Rankine has described as the paranoia, rage, and violence of the white imagination.94
Despite his disadvantaged childhood, Marcus may have escaped the school-to-prison-pipeline but, qua skin color and just like “nearly half of the black men he grew up with,” he could still be conscripted into the prison-industrial complex (189). Marcus is struggling to fully describe the future repercussions of the convict leasing system – his family history and the object of his study. But he is fully aware that the history of “what had become the harshest prison system in the world” is rooted in slavery (289). As H is drawn into the early beginnings of the prison industrial complex, his sentence is only a barely disguised attempt at further extracting slave labor under Jim Crow laws. In exposing these historical links, Homegoing reiterates what scholars like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Michelle Alexander have extensively documented and critiqued, and what Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary The 13th (2016) has brought to the big screen.95 Named after the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery “except as a punishment for a crime,” the film details the enormous legal, cultural, political, and economic efforts that went into maintaining and even exacerbating the fact that certain human beings are continuously made into exceptions. It is noteworthy that DuVernay, who is most known for the historical drama Selma (2014), departs from a historicist position that views American history, and particularly the latter half of the 20th century, as marked by some form of teleological progress. Instead, her more recent documentary seems to emphasize how many cards are indeed stacked against this progress, both collectively as a nation and individually, as an inheritor of that nation’s history. When DuVernay poses in a T-shirt inscribed with the words “I am my ancestor’s wildest dream,” one can hear this sentiment echoed by Homegoing’s final chapter on Marcus, who wonders “how [he] could explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here. Alive. Free” (296).96 If, following Hayden White’s reading of Auerbach, all history is an act of redemption, emplotted through reverse causation, what happens to a people who, in the words of Audre Lorde, “were never meant to survive” (1995: 109)? Or to frame the question differently: If, as White asserts elsewhere, “in choosing our past, we choose a present,” what kind of past would a people claim to arrive at what many Black Americans see as a
catastrophic present? And how, to reiterate Marcus’s question, could one ever explain how that feels?
Interesting
So much to ponder here.