Homegoing By Yaa Gyasi

The novel Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a story about the lineage of two sisters, Esi and Effia. Throughout the book the generations after the two tell their stories of their upbringings and hardships they had to face with each a chapter of their own. Gyasi uses the motif of scars to show how some characters may relate to one another in a way we as readers may not have thought of and share similarities over generations. Ness is not physically free because she is enslaved on a plantation. Akua is physically and psychologically free but, her environment Edweso is not exactly okay with her being free physically due to certain events. Both characters sacrifice their children for their own well being, they share a similar connection by carrying the

She had been at other plantations before the Stockham plantation so, when she arrived and they wanted to see how pretty she was to be able to work in the house, they immediately put her back in the field because of her scars. Ness wasn’t really the type to display too many emotions. Her mother Esi’s hadn’t displayed any emotion when she had been sold away so since then Ness had “associated real love with a hardness of spirit.”(68, PDF) She was sold and separated from her mother, Esi. Forced to marry a man named Sam while on the plantation, they had a son named Kojo. Kojo had to be taken away by Aku the day his father and mother had hid in a tree to get away from the “Devil” and once they had come down from the tree they were stripped and on full display to everyone. Sam had been lynched, and Ness had been whipped so badly she could barely hold her head

“She felt the sound of her name in the growing pit of her stomach, the weight like worry.” This feeling sort of indicates that the fire woman has taken her children. Gyasi describes Akua’s worry and loss of control as something growing in her stomach. This connects back to Esi and Effia with Maame because like Effia was born in the Fanteland fire, Akuas two children passed in the fire womans fire “They were locked into either arm, head resting on either breast.”(179, PDF) Maame is the firewoman and Abee and Ama Serwah are Esi and Akua as children. Then as Akua tries to reach out for her children the reason why she feels the heat is because her hands and feet were burned, indicating that she has caused a fire in Edweso. “..looked down to see her burned hands and feet.”(180, PDF) The scars are embedded as she came to her senses to what was going on in the moment. Akua was about to be burned just like her mother had been by the