Homegoing Novel | eNotes

Introduction 

It has been said of human history that the main problem lies in the fact that we cannot know for sure which record or tale is the correct one because we were not there when the events took place. It is the same dilemma that faces the events of Homegoing, a novel by Yaa Gyasi recounting the tales of the division of two West African clans, the Fante, and the Asante whose division was brought about by slavery. This essay will focus on slavery and the effects of slavery on both the African and American societies as seen through the eyes of such characters as James who is considered a slaver, and Marcus, a young doctorate student in America of African heritage whose study gives him insight into the slavery that had befallen his people two centuries earlier (Gyasi, 2016). These essay aims to show how history as storytelling can take on so many forms depending on the narrator and the time of narration, and as such establishing the accurate records of the history of a people is tricky. To do this, I will include external sources of information on the effects of retelling a historical event over some time. 

Annotated Bibliography 

William, J. M. (2017). Theory of Mind and the Cinematic Retelling of History. In Cognitive Approaches to German Historical Film (pp. 59-109). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 

Jenifer William builds on the Theory of Mind (ToM) to show how this imagination and vivid description contribute significantly to a film's meaning, the interpretation of the representation on screen as the characters try to figure each other out, and how the viewers try as well, and in most cases fail to understand the characters' motivations and intentions. Although she talks of characters on TV, Jenifer's perception can be equated to the recounting of the historical event in the sense that each narrator tries to create a character to fit in their desired image. This also entails how the listeners, who are acquitted to TV viewers struggle to draw the motivation and intentions of the history being recalled, and how this affects their point of views leading to differing opinions about the phenomenon in question. 

Stephens, J., & McCallum, R. (2013). Retelling stories, framing culture: traditional story and metanarratives in children's literature. Routledge. 

John Stephen and his colleague point out in this article some of the factors that motivate the retelling of a traditional story, which they mainly refer to as oriental tales, and how these stories depict the ambitions of a people. They correctly point out that the function of these stories is to familiarize children to a cultural tradition while at the same time transmitting a body of collective allusions and involvements which express the people's central tenets and conventions. In so doing, however, they point out how these stories modify the cultural tradition through the universal trend of retelling to produce a socially conservative outcome due to androcentric, ethnocentric, and class-based assumptions in the source stories that persist into the retellings. 

Pratt, M. W., Boyes, C., Robins, S., & Manchester, J. (1989). Telling tales: Aging, working memory, and the narrative cohesion of story retellings. Developmental Psychology, 25(4), 628. 

The authors of telling tales point towards such factors as age and memory as being responsible for the modification of historical events. In this article, they point out that since traditional tales rely on memory, the older one gets, the more likely they are to forget some details about the encounter, leading to the omission of what would be considered essential information of the event. As the story is handed down to generations, and as each generation due to age and memory failure omits some details, after a long period of time, say two or three centuries, a lot of critical original information shall have been overlooked, and more false information shall have been filled in to reflect the narrator's desired outcome. This article is particularly important when comparing Gyasi's observations, which are considered more correct and more accurate than her characters, who seem to hold differing opinions about slavery and the slave trade. This is particularly the case when looking at the younger generation of characters, the likes of the girl who refused to shake James' hand calling him a slaver yet she fails to realize that her subtribe was equally responsible for slavery and slave trade. 

Slavery and Slave Trade 

It is based on this ideological and creative difference that the character Marcus, one of Esi's youngest descendants, a slave prefers to travel to what was previously referred to as the Gold Coast (the present-day Ghana) to find out for himself the real oral tradition of their community which generations later has been misplaced through a lot of storytelling and recounting in so many versions. At the same time, a boy, James, greeting a line of mourners at his grandfather's burial is met by a stunning reaction from a girl who refuses to shake his hand since she considers him a slaver. James is Fante, the subtribe known for having traded slaves centuries back. The girl who is from Asante does not realize that her subtribe was famous for capturing slaves. But due to the recounting of the slave story in so many versions, the Fante had been portrayed as the lousy group while her own was praised in the tales. This explains why she considers herself better than James (Gyasi, 2016). But as Gyasi points out, if the girl could not shake James' hand for being a slaver, then surely, she could never touch her own for being a slave captivator. 

As can be seen, so far, Gyasi builds on the central theme of slavery to show how it affected tribal relations, disrupted family ties and influenced racial relationships as well. She mainly does this by recounting the history of two continents in 250 years, before and after slavery. The author does a great job in bringing to light the brutal realities of slavery and the emotional harm that is conveyed across generations from mums to their daughters, and from fathers to their sons. In understanding deeply the effect of slavery on the African continent and the family ties that had existed hitherto, Esi points out that when someone does something wrong, it can be equated to a fisherman who casts his net into the water and after keeping only the one or two fish he wanted, lays the rest back in water with the thought that their lives will return to normal. But the sad reality is the fact that the fish will never forget that they were once locked up, even if currently they have the freedom. This profound analogy serves to show the effect slavery has on the relationship between the slaves and the captivators, long after the real slaves and the captivators have ceased to exist on the face of the earth. This is seen more vividly through the interaction of James and the girl at James' grandfather's funeral (Gyasi, 2016). This interaction comes centuries after slavery, but the girl refuses to shake James' hands because his subtribe had been engaged in selling slaves, according to what the girl has been made to believe. In as much as James' subtribe stopped slave trade centuries ago, and the descendants of slaves are now free people, the sons of the slaves and the slave owners find it hard to forget what happened, and their relationship will for a very long time remained affected and strained. 

References 

Gyasi, Y. (2016). Homegoing. New York: Alfred A. 

Pratt, M. W., Boyes, C., Robins, S., & Manchester, J. (1989). Telling tales: Aging, working memory, and the narrative cohesion of story retellings. Developmental Psychology, 25(4), 628. 

Stephens, J., & McCallum, R. (2013). Retelling stories, framing culture: traditional story and metanarratives in children's literature . Routledge. 

William, J. M. (2017). Theory of Mind and the Cinematic Retelling of History. In Cognitive Approaches to German Historical Film (pp. 59-109). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.