Lasting Impact Of Slavery In Yaa Gyasi's 'Homegoing'

Cam Colbert

Minjung Kim

Honors English C Block

31 March 2023

Slavery’s Lasting Impact

What does it feel like to be imprisoned for centuries? The lengthy novel Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi details the generational impact of one family's participation in the Transatlantic Slave trade. The narration is from the perspective of a new family member in each chapter. Esi's family was uprooted and sent on ships to slavery enslaved in America. At the same time, Effia was married to the British governor of the Cape Coast Castle and reaped the benefits of the slave trade and labor of the Fante and Asante tribes. The British slave traders stole African land, deteriorated African culture, and caused divisions between the tribes. The article "The Scramble for Africa"

The family strife depicted in Homegoing directly results from Africans being forcibly removed from their families and culture and becoming enslaved. Each family member still endures the pain inflicted by the impact of slavery. Additionally, the character's exit from slavery in the United States was just as brutal as the institution, as detailed in the article "Abolishing Slavery: The Efforts fo Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln" by CommonLit.org. While each side of the family has experiences with racism and trauma, they are embedded in the participation of the slave trade. In the novel Homegoing, Gyassi shows how both sides of the family suffer the enduring trauma caused by slavery through the symbolism of fire, the characters' struggles after slavery is

Fires plague the family on the Gold Coast because of their involvement in the slave trade. Akua, a descendant of Maame, experiences psychological damage from the curse of fire. At a young age, she has dreams of a fire woman burning two children, “In her dreams the fire was shaped like a woman holding two babies to her heart. The firewoman would carry these two little girls with her all the way to the woods of the Inland and then the babies would vanish, and the firewoman’s sadness would send orange and red and hints of blue swarming every tree and every bush in sight” (Homegoing). When Akua becomes pregnant, these dreams manifest into her reality, and she becomes obsessed with fire, and the villagers call her a crazy woman. One night she dreams of burning herself and her children and wakes up realizing she had carried out killing her children, and is punished by the village. Akua was indirectly affected by her ancestor's participation in the slave trade. The long-lasting impacts of slavery have left African American families in strife and created a colossal amount of emotional damage. In his novel, author James Baldwin stated, “The curse of African American slavery cannot be underestimated; the trauma of enslavement has been carried by African Americans through the ages and generations” (London School of Economics and Political Science). Participation in slavery