‘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.’
History is alive in all‘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.’
History is alive in all of us, charting a timeline into the future with each breath we take and moving to the rhythm of our actions. Like a relay race, the past passes us the baton and we must make do with it while we can before passing it off to the next generation. We also pass along our stories to remind those of where we have been and hope they can serve as guidance in the future. This all truly comes alive in Yaa Gyasi’s staggeringly impressive debut novel, Homegoing where we see how ‘history is storytelling’ and generations inform upon one another. The novel charts family lineages of two half-sisters in Ghana from the fracture point—one is sold into the slave trade and sent to the United States while the other remains in Ghana—to the present day with the sin of slavery casting a horrific ripple through all of history as we encounter Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement, or dealing with the effects of colonialism and fighting towards Ghanaian independence. Homegoing is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, told in a series of short stories that proceed across the generations and show the scars of history and trauma in both its immediate and inherited forms. While the paths separate, there is always a subtle pull towards home, towards Ghana, towards family, that is felt in every chapter. Gyasi crafts a brilliant tale rife with symbolism and yearning, and one I was lucky enough this evening to hear her speak about in my hometown.
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I’m late to the party on this one—Homegoing arrived on the scene in 2016 to immediate accolades—and there is likely little left to say about this gem of a novel that hasn’t been said far more eloquently before, but I really enjoyed reading this as part of our community Big Read and hearing Gyasi talk about it. The novel, she explained, was inspired by her own trip to Ghana during her college years (Gyasi was born in Ghana but grew up in Alabama) and was her attempt to examine the ‘liminal identity’ she felt due to her heritage and current home. She told us that Willie was the character she admired most, yet it was H. who was her favorite to write, drawing from vast research on the Reconstruction Era in the United States where ‘no one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free,’ and the creeping realization that while free, they were still very much captive. H. finds himself forced to work the mines where 'the convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again.' These sorts of realizations permeates the novel on both sides of the ocean as the effects of slavery, capitalism, and colonialism reverberate in each branch of the family tree.
‘They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.’
Scars are highly symbolic in this novel, both physical and emotional, and we see how the ripples through history are always threatening to wash even the surest of personal journeys out to sea. Generational trauma plays a large part in Homegoing, being just one of many aspects of the family legacies as they deal with complicity in the slave trade, racism, poverty and all the while fight to keep afloat and hope the next generation can benefit from their struggles.
‘We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.’
The collective narrative here is quite powerful and certainly more than the sum of its parts. Each chapter is both another leg in the legacy journey yet also feels self contained enough to have appeared as a stand-alone story. This keeps the book moving at a rather rapid pace with tension continuously rising and falling to pull you along. With each character we get a better depiction of the effects of slavery and racism, and even those left in Ghana feel it. Gyasi confronts the legacy of the slave trade in how an aspect of colonialism was to turn people against each other and sell each other for a short term gain and a larger benefit of the colonizers who would continuously keep them oppressed for generations to come. ‘Evil begets evil. It grows,’ Gyasi writes, ‘it transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.’
An aspect I found particularly admirable was how, despite the short stay you have with each character, Gyasi manages to craft them in a way that displays how nuanced people really are. There are no flat characters here and we often see them struggling with conflicting ideas. Faith, for instance, is a large theme with many of these characters. Religion is shown as being an arm of colonialism, yet we also have Willie for whom her conviction in her faith is part of her strength. The conflicting messages of symbols serves to show how nothing in life is ever truly simple and everything is tainted in the sins of the past in some way, shape or form. It really captures the idea of the liminal identity that Gyasi speaks of.
‘There's more at stake here than just slavery, my brother. It's a question of who will own the land, the people, the power. You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.’
Each character must deal with the past, but also the present and as the novel progresses we see that for each way things may be improving (Marcus and Marjorie, for instance, are able to attend Stanford) in many ways things have remained the same or mutated into new forms of oppression. Misogynoir—the intersection of racism and misogyny—is largely felt into the present, as are moments of homophobia. History is an endless battle and often the characters become quite beleaguered by it all. This is often a rather brutal novel, not fading away from violence, and just when you think something good might happen, Gyasi pulls the rug out from under you. Yet, collectively, this becomes a very beautiful and moving story. The moments on the beach in Ghana with Marjorie and Marcus are fleetingly felt by the characters, but the reader sees the connection and significance of the stone in ways that say sometimes this is enough. Sometimes things bend towards beauty even in the harshest of worlds.
‘This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.’
Gyasi’s Homegoing is quite the achievement of fiction, making history into a brilliant and multi-faceted tapestry that probes at great evils but also champions the human spirit of endurance. A moving novel that will not likely ever be forgotten.
5/5
‘Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.’...more
‘Death was a communal process even if you wanted to experience it alone.’
When returning to a familiar place, the comfort of recognition always arrives‘Death was a communal process even if you wanted to experience it alone.’
When returning to a familiar place, the comfort of recognition always arrives in tandem with the acute awareness of anything that has altered. Facades change, as do the people within them and it becomes like a sort of geographical ship of Theseus while we, too, have changed in our mutual time apart. This dissonance is both thematic and tonal to Maya Binyam’s brilliant debut novel, Hangman, amplified by the state of separation having been one of political exile and the return shrouded in a bit of mystery that seems to only portend the news of death. It is a story made up of smaller stories all cascading at the narrator, each registering with a near-mythic property to them as we hear life stories of politics, family, traditions, exorcisms or simply two grad students arguing ideology. Binyam’s writing is utterly captivating, crafting a surreal and sardonic tale of an émigré finding themselves a stranger in a strange land that happens to be his home country now as unfamiliar to him as he is to it. Moving with a steady drip of existential dread through a labyrinth of conversations, the narrator seems stubbornly disinterested in assembling a sense of meaning or self-reflection and instead allows himself to be pulled through events as if ‘waiting for my life to happen’ in a way that makes everything feel threateningly disjointed and disorienting. Wryly humorous and deeply ponderous, Hangman reads like an existential fable on exile, homecomings, culture and the ways each shape and are shaped by political history all wrapped up in the narrator’s surreal journey back into Africa.
‘Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and at other times they rearranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did make sense to other people, they made no discernible sense to you.’
This is an astonishingly accomplished debut with sharp writing that pulls off stylistic flair and is entirely engrossing. The opening chapter had me completely enthralled, opening with death and a body transported on a return trip home, and it keeps you turning pages with a growing tension and dread as we guess as to what is occurring and getting tiny pieces of clarity along the way—not unlike the stick-figure game that is the novel’s namesake. It is a rather enigmatic novel, one where the events feel akin to having bit off more than one could chew and trying to make sense of it all, though the writing manages to create this effect while still having confident control over all the elements. We are at the mercy of Binyam’s narration through a man who, through his refusal of a deeper meaning to anything, will not read between the lines for symbolism, and it whisks us through the story shrouded in a sort of acerbic ambiguity. There are almost no proper nouns, making room for rather humorously cumbersome flourishes like repeatedly addressing someone as “my son’s mother’s brother” but it also establishes an atmosphere of distance and detachment. Locations are never named, though through the whiffs of clues we can assume it is somewhere in a post-revolution country of Africa and the narrator had been a political refugee in the US (there are references to drones and a President who “looks like us” as his brother writes). It all seems rather cacophonous at times, seemingly leading somewhere we don’t quite grasp which is often reflected in the cities themselves—’viaducts cast the city in shadow, enticing its inhabitants to ascend staircases that led to nowhere’—or homes such as the narrator’s cousin’s that seems to be made up ‘entirely of hallways.’
In many ways it feels adjacent to Franz Kafka, though shorn of the Europeanness, but here it isn’t that the logic is impenetrable or simply meaningless, it’s that we are outside of being able to even grasp the meaning while the narrator insists on it’s meaninglessness that keeps us feeling small in the mechanisms of some threatening and surreal story.
‘Some situations in life really were confusing and couldn’t be appreciated without prior knowledge about local customs, current events, and other people’s personal lives. However, that information was usually discernible, even if it wasn’t explained in a straightforward manner. Even invisible histories had their physical manifestations.’
This addresses issues on two fronts in the novel, being both his feeling outside the country of his birth but also seen in the ways the country in which one takes refuge might resist any efforts to understand their cultural differences and ‘People just choose to ignore those manifestations, because being ignorant gave them an excuse to do whatever they wanted.’ The home he has left is no longer his own it seems, and feels ‘only partially accessible to me, given that tie, geography and my changing legal status as a citizen, refugee, tourist, etc., had conspired to dislocate me from it.’ He feels distressed by the dichotomy of re-emerging in a society of more collectivist traditions after having been shaped by the mold of individualism rampant in US culture yet seems uninterested in examining it beyond the surface despite having, we briefly learn, been jailed for being a political revolutionary.
‘He could either be like everyone and help no one, or be an individual and help the world.’
Politics, it seems, is constantly invading and morphing everything and everyone under it. It lingers over every conversation and many of the mordant situations read like parables, such as being required to have a cart to get your baggage at the airport and having to pay someone in order to obtain a cart but having to way of accessing money, or his cousin asking to invest in the completion of a home that has already been finished. The narrator’s own former home is now occupied by missionaries who presumably purchased the house from the government, making for a quick yet devastating jab at the legacies of missionaries colonizing Africa. As for US aid programs to Africa, Hangman addresses aid as something that often exists more for the benefit of the giver to feel they’ve done something than for the recipient, ‘Sending them in lieu of things the local government had asked for, and which might have sustained its constituents forever.’We see this in the used clothing a man forces upon our narrator, or the phone’s the President gives to those who lost their homes in a disaster when what they really needed was a home. But we feel good because someone was selected as ‘a stand-in for the gratitude of all’ and we can turn our heads again.
‘That was how people, living people, dealt with the new of people who were suffering: pretending to summon the experience of dying…Pretending that it could be controlled was just something that living people did in order to convince themselves that the real experience was something that happened only to others.’
Our narrator sees much of the way people process grief and tragedy as a ‘performance,’ and it is one he isn’t inclined to participate in. Even the potential death of his own brother doesn’t spark anything in him (though his emails do seem to mimic the scam emails of the early 2000s and perhaps he suspects his brother of just trying to get money). It’s all the same to him either way:
‘Most of the things that happened in life had no meaning, but eventually all the meaningless things combined to produce an emotion so strong that people felt the need to find an explanation for it. So, at the end of their lives, they described the events of their lives through the lens of happiness, or sadness, or resentment, even though the same things happened to basically all of us.’
Of course we can see how he might be jaded from time in prison and the US, which he finds less the land of possibility and freedom and more just another way to be oppressed, this time largely by racism and his Otherness marking him as suspicious and not worth bridging cultural barriers to understand.
Hangman is often quite bleak, particularly with a narrator we see being pushed along as if he weren’t even in control of himself (‘and then my body went away’ he says to describe his getting on the flight to Africa), and slowly being transformed by his experiences without any attempt at consent. Yet for all the bleakness, the surreal humor keeps it afloat and it refuses to be bogged down. The ending is a knockout, one that I found excellently executed despite not usually thinking twists actually work beyond initial shock. It arrives as a two-fold twist and while I think we can get caught up in all the foreshadowing of the main twist, doing so allows the second part of it to catch us off guard. Binyam is not only good at crafting the writing of a novel, but shows a brilliant understanding of the mechanics of how a reader reads and processes a text and uses that to help pull off her conclusion.
I really loved this one. It’s elusive and sly, surreal and sinister, yet rather goofy and fun even in the face of otherwise unbearable bleakness. Hangman is a unique look at the exile narrative, one that turns its own gaze inward, as well as the ideas of our own understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Witty and wild, Hangman is an extraordinary debut and this is a strong promise to start a career I can’t wait to watch.
4.5/5
‘It didn’t matter that we had been political prisoners, neglectful fathers, exiles, and so on, because now we were just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might as well have been any country in the world. That was how insignificant our personal experience was, even if that personal experience had derailed the events of everyday life.’...more
When a war comes to an Nigerian village, a young boy and his brother must flee into the African wilderness and begin a surreal journey through the reaWhen a war comes to an Nigerian village, a young boy and his brother must flee into the African wilderness and begin a surreal journey through the realm of ghosts in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Tutuola’s second novel, this follow-up to The Palm-Wine Drinkard reads in a very similar fashion of meanderingly episodic tales that infuses Yoruba folklore and culture with that of European and Christian colonialism and brings us face to face with the trickery and treachery of ghosts and beasts. Bewilderingly imaginative, this surreal odyssey even inspired David Byrne (of the Talking Heads) and Brian Eno to collaborate on an album of the same name (though Byrne admits neither of them have actually ever read the book and just felt the title ‘seemed to encapsulate what this record was about’). A fun and mind-bending look at traditional folklore all told in a unique voice, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is an entertaining read, if a bit cumbersome at times, that is surprise after surprise and worth the journey.
‘I was too young to know that it was a dreadful bush or it was banned to be entered by any earthly person’
Entering the “bush” is no small undertaking in this novel, and across these pages we watch the narrator go from ghost town to ghost town, always having to quickly adapt to the expectations of each place and navigating the oddities therein. Tutuola delivers a cavalcade of creepy, ghostly characters that seem almost if Miyazaki told of a terrifying fever dream. We have ghosts that enter a womb to be born sickly in order to steal the parent’s money they will offer to the gods for the child’s health, ghosts with televisions for hands, bloodthirsty spider beasts, ghostly kings and more in this book where having a multitude of heads or eyes is just something you’ll get used to. Our narrator travels the bush in a sort-of bildungsroman, going through multiple marriages, jobs in various ghost towns, and even having to overthrow his own slave-holding brother.
The story and construction of it is very similar to The Palm-Wine Drinkard, with non-traditional phrasing and poetic license with words that add to the surreal nature and destabilize you in Tutuola’s ethereal realm. I found this one to benefit from being more structured than Palm-Wine had been (though it is still more a collection of tales threaded together, and not always in chronological order) though having read this perhaps too soon after I found the former to give off more imaginative enthrallment while this felt like much of the same as I had read already there. Which isn’t a bad thing, and this is still so imaginative and magical but I was thankful it isn’t altogether very long.
One thing I really appreciated was the emphasis on music here. There is a lovely notion that music was able to reach a inner memories of childhood wonder that breaks down his brother, but there is also mention of how beautiful music of the ghost realm turns out to actually be a lost boy stuck in a log hunted by a snake. Suffering turned into beauty sort of idea, and how for the realm of ghosts the ideas of right and wrong just does not exist. Something else that I felt really works is the nearly timeless feel to the narrative where often you assume it must be set way in the past but then there are nods to modern (well of the 1950s) technology like phones and televisions. Tutuola is good at destabilizing all your senses as a reader.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is an eerie, surreal tale that feels much like listening to a collection of stories in the oral tradition, threading an epic odyssey in order to tell multiple stories of different ghosts and other folklore. It is a fascinating look at a realm of the dead, and also confronts issues of christian colonialism and the way it tries to erase indigenous culture and impose conformity. Often violently. It is not the easiest of reads, with rather circuitous storytelling that often feels like overly long lists, but it is also thought provoking and fascinating. Of the two novellas, I think I preferred his first though this was certainly a worthwhile read.
An epic quest brings us through the ‘bush’ across mythical lands full of nightmares and deadly kingdoms in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. FollAn epic quest brings us through the ‘bush’ across mythical lands full of nightmares and deadly kingdoms in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Following the dangerous adventures of a sort of trickster god—the ‘ father of gods who could do anything in the world’—who drinks palm-wine ‘‘from morning till night and from night till morning’ and seeks to return his deceased and beloved tapster, The Palm-Wine Drinkard reads much like a collection of short stories drawing from African Yoruba folktales, threaded together as stages of the quest much like oral-tradition storytelling. We see the world as fearsome and fantastical, with horrific beasts and unthinkable violence that can strike at any moment, and through a look at the good and evils that can lurk inside anyone, it becomes a story on survival at all costs. The most beautiful man alive is reduced to a moving skull, there are many-eyed beasts that devour you whole, tyrant babies, Written in a unique style with unfamiliar grammar that was much lauded by poets such as Dylan Thomas, Tutuola dazzles with language (and some knockout chapter titles) that destabilizes our grip on reality and plunges the reader headlong into the hellish realms of monsters, mayhem and imperialism. A haunting novel yet, for all the destruction and struggle against the acceptance of death, The Palm-Wine Drinkard captures a spirit of survival showing that even when death is arbitrary and can come in large numbers the community of humanity will find ways to adapt and live on.
‘We did not care about death and we did not fear again.’
Published in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard was the first African novel to be published in English outside Africa and drew both heavy praise and criticisms. Dylan Thomas was quick to applaud the novel in his review which called it a ‘grisly and bewitching story…nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put down in this tall, devilish story.’ Yet Nigerian readers were concerned by the Western praise, worried it would embolden European racists to view them as drunks with absurd superstitions and noted that the use of language is not how people actually spoke. This has stood the test of time, however, and negative receptions calling Tutuola a good storyteller but lacking literary merit have been brushed aside to see him as a pioneer of form to tell traditional folktales in exciting ways. ‘"I wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard for the people of the other countries to read the Yoruba folklores,’ Tutuola said, ‘my purpose of writing is to make other people to understand more about Yoruba people and in fact they have already understood more than ever before.’ It is, admittedly, a bit of a difficult novel that more jumps from tale to tale with the loose connection of simply being encounters on a multi-year journey than a straightforward narrative but it is also imaginative and wondrous when you sink into the groove of the storytelling.
It exists in a frightening realm where monsters are everywhere and death is around every corner. We see the dangers of traveling where any territory can be hostile: the “bush” and roads between cities are full of lurking menace and each city has its own set of rules and leaders that are often quite hostile to outsiders. One can be killed at any moment, but luckily for our narrator and his wife they have ‘sold our death’ and ‘lent our fear’—the magical realism elements are delightful in this short book—so they can proceed without worry of dying. Which is good because death is everywhere and one thing they must learn is to constantly adapt to fit the needs of each new place. Quite often we see entire villages destroyed and everyone killed, with the narrator realizing staying in the devastation is untenable and moving on. He must always be quick to adapt to the whims of vengeful rulers or thieves (or giant murderous babies) and his ability to shapeshift feels much like a metaphor for this. But when he turns into a bird don’t go down the Lord of the Rings discourse on why didn’t they just ride the giant eagles to Mordor, just sit back and enjoy the story.
Chinua Achebe, another Nigerian author, once described the novel as a commentary on Western consumerism. This crops up often in the story and we see some of the frightening territories functioning as criticisms of colonialism and capitalism. Most notably is the character Give and Take, who certainly takes far more than he gives. When hired to work the fields, Give and Take steals the townspeople's land, much to their annoyance. When the people build an army to defend their land, Give and Take kills everyone in the village and keeps the land. Which, yea, that's a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for colonialism.
Tutuola is able to work in the broad metaphors of folktales by also removing any specific era from the novel, making it feel a blend of past and present all at once. Cowrie shells are the primary currency and the novel mostly appears to be prior to much technological use, yet there are also references to various forms of paper currency and bombs and telephones get brief mentions. Such as in my favorite of the tales of a man who is said to be so beautiful ‘if bombers saw him in a town which was to be bombed, they would not throw bombs on his presence, and if they did throw it, the bomb itself would not explode.’ After running off with an important person’s daughter this man is reduced to a skull that hops around, its great fun. Oh also giant murderous babies. Don’t ever forget about the giant murderous babies. I SURE WON’T!
Overall, community seems to be a large theme in this narrative. While the epic journey is more or less all for nothing in a way that reminds me of how I (unpopular opinion) actually really enjoyed that aspect in The Last Jedi, we do see that the town is saved at the end and that community will always live on in some form. Even the dead have their own community in Dead Town, where there is a mixture of races living in what I guess is ghostly harmony which feels like a cool jab at racism in the land of the living. This is a tale of survival and ultimately we see that humans will survive in some form enough to live on. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a bizarre, haunting and surreal (and darkly funny or am I just twisted?) short novel that threads elements of Yoruba folklore into an epic journey narrative. A bit cumbersome but rather linguistically awesome for all its oddities, I will certainly return to read more Tutuola.
s.penkevich
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