The Theme of Identity Shown Throughout Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

As the transatlantic slave trade began, many Africans were being displaced into the Americas while some of their counterparts remained in Africa. Throughout this process, many of the people were having trouble distinguishing their identities and discovering the place they truly belonged. This was a problem with the people figuring out where they belong in society. Problems arose in African and in American society and that is a major issue portrayed in Yaa Gyasi’s novel “Homegoing”. Through the novel Gyasi uses varying generations and the theme of identity, to describe the different times and help readers understand the work.

The connection that exists between people from the same nation is often hindered by conflicting identities and dissimilar homes. In the novel, Quey, son of Effia and James, was one of few half-caste children living in the Cape Coast Castle, which he said prevented him from claiming either of his identities-from his Ghanaian mother or his English father. Gyasi wrote “Quey had wanted to cry but that desire embarrassed him. He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father's whiteness nor his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast”. (Gyasi, p.25). Although he lived there comfortably with the British men, the basement of the castle housed thousands of imprisoned African slaves. In a similar way, his son “James questioned his Ghanaian identity when an Asante girl refused to shake his hand because he was part of the Fantes, who traded slaves to the British. It got to the point where James had to fake his own death in order to marry the woman he loves and make his own decisions”. While Quey and James were both associated with Africa, with Ghana, and with the Fantes, neither of them felt that they could truly identify with these groups. This is a struggle that many Africans have experienced over centuries, and still today, which Gyasi demonstrates through the issues that plague the extended family in her novel. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes these difficulties in her speech “The Danger of a Single Story,” which details her experience with the conflicting identities of being Nigerian and living in the U.S. Like Quey and James, and every other character in the novel, Adichie is made up of many stories-these stories contribute to one’s identity and they ultimately define where a person feels most at home. However, people tend to accept a single story about a person because it is more convenient for them, which is one of the reasons why people make wrongful assumptions and judgments about African Americans. Despite the fact that Gyasi’s characters all come from the same place, they are faced with oppression from each other, and from people who think they are superior because they subscribe to a single story about Africa. They are all humans, and yet there were eight generations of humans that were treated as less than, whether they lived in Ghana or the U.S., because of their conflicting identities. This continued even to Marjorie and Marcus when they revisited Ghana together and felt like tourists in a place where their family once called home.

For those in American society, a big issue they were faced with was double consciousness: whether they were Africans or Americans. With the African Americans dealing with these feelings, they could not figure out whether they were true Americans or if they were Africans even though they had not seen Africa. This was a big issue depicted in “Homegoing”. For example, even though Gyasi’s character of H is free, he is still arrested because he looks at a white woman for too long (Gyasi, p.158). With the African Americans getting arrested for such minuscule things, the African Americans are bound to question whether they are American or not. In other words, the double consciousness “is also part of a more complex feeling of two-ness” (Pittman). This means that the African Americans in the story did not feel as if the parts of their identity were collaborating, rather they felt as if they had two identities to work with, the African identity and the American identity.

In the story, the characters also dealt with racism, which is a relevant issue happening today in America. In Gyasi’s novel, Sonny, descendant of Esi, explained that there were riots in Harlem after the NYPD shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy without reason. These riots were being portrayed as black violence against police, much like the media misrepresentation that exists today because the media has the power to sway the public’s opinion and understanding of a situation. Sonny accurately proclaimed that “in America the worst thing you could be was a black man … you were a dead man walking” (Gyasi, p.260) which relates back to what Adichie explained about identity politics in America. Regardless of the interconnectivity between people who share a similar background, this abuse of power has made it difficult for African-Americans to feel a sense of belonging when it comes to their identities because, as Adichie stated, the story of racism is not simple and it continues to ignore the many stories of an oppressive history. Today we can see similar issues with violence against others. This began forming the “Black Lives Matter” which is a movement swelled in popularity, particularly after several incidents of police brutality involving African Americans began permeating national news.

The adversity that comes with an African heritage is more complex than just racism, and these hardships continue in society, not just because of ignorance, but because of a system that is deeply rooted in oppression based on identity. Marjorie is the last descendant of Effia to have her story told, and she was still a victim of hostility towards her identity even though she lived centuries after the abuse, imprisoning, and enslaving of her ancestors. The girls at her school made her feel like a foreigner in her own home, not simply because of her skin color and her accent, but also because of years and years of white men in power carrying on that same systematic racism. Marjorie’s teacher explained to her that “it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now, and here black is black is black” and this feeling of foreignness followed her even when she visited Ghana, which further emphasizes the complexity of racial identity and belongingness. Marjorie’s poem at the end of the novel made this identity struggle clear-she wrote “The waters seem different but are the same. Our same. Sister skin. Who knew? Not me. Not you”. This captures the feelings rooted from her family’s history at the castle and for its slavery and the lost sister her ancestor, Effia, was separated from.

The theme of identity is shown in many novels and movies. One novel it is shown in is in the book, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In English 102 we had a presentation on the story and though there are many themes portrayed I see identity as a big one. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is the story of a man who is born old and ages backwards. The story explores the way that age dictates identity and how we see that our age characterizes us. And not just where physical appearance is concerned. By being born old, Benjamin is born not just with the body and face of an old man, but with the mind and emotions of an old man. Even though he’s a newborn, then, he enjoys the company of old men. “As he gets younger physically, his personality changes accordingly: he becomes healthier and happier”. 'Benjamin Button' reminds us that age is not, after all, just a number and his growth into truly identifying the person he is and who he will be at an “older” age helps us to understand the novel and see it in aspects of our lives.

Throughout the book “Homegoing”, we read a theme of identity. Yaa Gyasi uses this theme and the generations of characters to help readers understand the story.

Works Cited

1. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
2. Girvin, Tim. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button | Designing Identity in Story for Film.” Girvin, www.girvin.com/blog/the-curious-case-of-benjamin-button-designing-identity-in-story-for-film/.
3. Leilataibi. “An Archetypal Perspective on Homegoing.” The English Blog, 12 July 2018, theenglishbloggrade12.wordpress.com/2018/07/12/homegoing/.
4. Pittman, John P. “Double Consciousness.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 21 Mar. 2016, plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-consciousness/.
5. Ruth, Michael. 'Black Lives Matter.' Civil Disobedience, Social Justice, Nationalism & Populism, Violent Demonstrations and Race Relations, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem, 2017. Salem Online, https://online-salempress-com.ccbcmd.idm.oclc.org