H = Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.” ― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

SPOILER ALERT! 

I couldn't make myself cut down my review to avoid them.

I feel like this book should be taught in schools. It's basically about the birth of racism in America. It starts in Africa, where villagers on the Gold Coast strike a deal with the Europeans. The locals are willing to facilitate the trade of other Africans from other villages in exchange for payment. Effia and Esi, two sisters who will never meet, are unfortunately worlds apart. Effia will marry into a life of luxury, while Esi will be sold into slavery. I couldn't really figure out how to review this book, without giving spoilers.

I had a US History teacher lecture once on slavery: He said during the days of slave trade, a black woman had more value to a plantation owner than a black man because a woman could be used to make more slaves. When Esi's daughter fails to escape with her family, her and her husband must be punished. She's severely beaten while her husband is forced to watch. Her husband is executed. They've both committed the crime but only one of them has to die for it. And later when The Fugitive Slave Act is renewed, a pregnant free woman is abducted off the street and spirited back to the South. Yaa Gyasi doesn't shy away from the horrifying truth of what slavery was to the people who had to live it.

As slavery ends and Jim Crow begins you begin to witness the loss of cultural identity. People are left with language whose words they no longer understand. A distant memory of a homeland that they can never return to, while the home that they do have rejects them. A black man who can pass as white is discriminated against for having a black wife. He realizes he can have it so much easier, if he just pretends to be someone else, while his wife gets left behind. Marjorie, whose parents moved to America looking for a better life, finds herself torn between to worlds as she grows up. She's too African to be African American, and too American to go back to Africa.

So the slaves are free, but how long will they stay that way? A newly freed slave is arrested and sent to work off a prison sentence, re-shackled in a coal mine. Systemic Racism. We hear that phrase a lot on the news now. It's when a society's education, economy, healthcare, and penal system thrives on bias. Carson's dad abandoned him and his mother to go live life as a white man. Him and his mother and sister live in poverty. They can't get a loan because they're poor. He can't be transferred into a decent school because he's black. His lack of education leads him to make poor life choices like fathering children he can't care for and an eventual drug addiction.

The author also includes treatment of black woman in a patriarchal society. In the villages, girls are raised to be sister wives and to produce more children for their husband. In the event of a raid by another village, they may become slaves either for the conquering village or for the Europeans, or they might be forced into a political marriage. This is their normal, to be a wife or the spoils of war. In America, the men continue to create multiple families with multiple partners, but now pick and choose which kids they want to be responsible for. The women must raise the children and protect them.

As Ghana is freed from its European colonists, the same problems that plague America begin to rise there. A white man napping in the shade, is murdered for being white. An African woman, pregnant out of wedlock, looks for a sanctuary never to find it.

My last thought on this book is based on an imaginary book title inside of the real thing: "The Ruin of a Nation Begins in the Homes of Its People." We are all a part of what is happening in the world. We all have the power to change it, and we all run the risk of being hurt by it. We can start by making better choices today than we did yesterday.