Spam Free: Your email is never shared with anyone; opt out any time.

In making the women use English names, the British are inherently robbing  them of their cultural heritage and a sense of self. Abeeku marries two women in preparation for becoming chief, demonstrating that having many wives is an exhibition of power and masculinity. After Fiifi and other men from the village capture Nana Yaa, the daughter of the Asante king, Quey is married to the girl to form a political alliance. Readalikes | The other women grow quiet, as they never speak about the dungeons. He faces many hardships working in the mines, but when he finishes his sentence, he continues working in a mine as a free man. "Elikem married me in absentia; he did not come to our wedding.". The chapters titled "Ness," "Kojo," "H," "Willie," "Sonny," and "Marcus" follow the descendants of Esi. The rituals of courtship play into gender stereotypes: the men are meant to hunt and provide food, while the women try to make themselves more attractive to the men. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Eccoah also says that her husband comes up from the dungeons smelling like feces. This exchange is essentially James asking Abeeku if he can marry Effia or not. Aku takes Kojo to Maryland, where he grows up, gets a job on a boat, marries a woman named Anna, and has eight children. However, after he grows close to his house girl named Esther, he takes her back to his village and reconciles with his mother. Effia’s worry stems again from the gender stereotypes in her society, which asserts that she is not of value if she cannot have a child. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." Marjorie is very close to her grandmother Akua and loves to visit Ghana during the summer; however, she feels that she doesn't fit in fully in either Ghana or in America. Teachers and parents! This revelation finally explains some of Baaba’s cruelty towards Effia, as blood relations are vital in this society. Although it appears that James is attempting to learn about Effia’s culture because he values it and wants to preserve it, later interactions (like when he sends their son to school in England) imply that James believes his own culture is superior. Baaba begins to plot against Effia’s marriage to Abeeku so that she will no longer have to deal with her. Gyasi again relays how easy it is for the women to ignore the people in the dungeons, because they are essentially powerless to stop it. Even though Effia knows that the torture in the dungeon is morally wrong, she is completely powerless to stop it and thus becomes complacent. The continued emphasis on Effia’s ability to be Abeeku’s wife and Cobbe’s scheming to get her over to Abeeku’s compound prove that her primary value to Cobbe lies in her marriage prospects. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. © BookBrowse LLC 1997-2020. Willie has a daughter named Josephine with another man named Eli who is a poet, and she gives up her own dream of becoming a jazz singer. Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control.

Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Why do you think that the author chose the word Homegoing? LitCharts Teacher Editions. Quey and Nana Yaa have a son named James. After a few years of spending all his money on dope, Sonny moves back in with his mother and gets clean. Carson, who likes to be called Sonny from a young age, is a ladies man who has three children with three different women and works as a bartender at a jazz club. The British men maintain this language difference (“wenches” rather than “wives”) despite the fact that they were married in the church. One night, she sets her family's hut on fire while she is asleep, killing her two daughters and burning her own body badly. Do these beliefs seem to have a mostly positive or negative impact on the believer and those around them? Cobbe’s statement highlights the importance of marriage as a political tool for the Fantes. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. Thus, she spends most of her time reading and writing, and dates a white boy named Graham before his father puts an end to their relationship. This revelation illuminates how the British continue to believe their culture is superior. The novel begins with the stories of two African half-sisters of the Fante and Asante tribes: Effia and Esi. Baaba’s harsh scolding also introduces a recurring idea that children should not question their parents. Effia feels comforted by Adwoa’s advice, knowing that the two women share a cultural background and can speak freely with each other. Struggling with distance learning? The foreigners, mostly Portuguese, were initially most interested in the gold ore — hence the subsequent name, Gold Coast. Baaba’s scowl suggests that she disagrees with this plan, foreshadowing her later involvement in Effia’s marriage. The Ashanti Nation was a loose group of fiefdoms, an ethnic subgroup that was formed in 17th century Ghana as a trading coalition with the Europeans. Abeeku’s answer is dangerously innocuous, considering the fact that he is “trading” human beings. Effia is said to be born of that fire because, as is ultimately revealed, she is actually the daughter of Cobbe’s servant Maame, whom he had raped. Although Effia doesn’t yet know it, her biological mother, Maame (whose name means mother), left her the stone. However, as the novel will later show, colonization ultimately destroyed the village’s culture and their autonomy. Jun 2016, 320 pages The withholding of information from the women because trade is supposed to belong to the men also becomes dangerous for Effia, as she only finds out what is happening at the Castle after she has already married a British officer.