Names And Language In Homegoing

The use of names and language are prevelant themes throughout Homegoing, particularily in regard to the characters identity. In H’s chapter of the story, a character briefly mentioned/brought up is “his woman,” Ethe. She is first introduced when H is jailed, a proud, steadfast woman, whom had ceased talking to him ever since he had cheated on her (159). It was revealed at the end of the chapter that her reasoning for leaving was not preeminently the act of him cheating on her, but the act of him calling her by another woman’s name. “‘Ain’t I been through enough? Ain’t just about everything I ever had been taken from me? My freedom. My family. My body. And now I can’t even have my own name?’”(175). Through the course of slavery (and subsequently

Though she did spend time with Esi, and was exposed to her speaking Twi, when she was seperated from Esi she was seperated from her conection to the language, and consequently seperated from that facet of her identity. The slaveowners deliberately punishing Esi any time she spoke Twi cut off almost any relation Ness would later have to the language; she remembers small fragments and words, but she could no longer understand what they meant. Though this severance from her language serves to further isolate Ness from her lineage, a similar tactic is also used by the slavemasters to control the slaves. Ness’s husband had not spoken a single word of English when they had first met, and was whipped daily for his refusal to learn. The slaves are forced to divest themselves of their own language and speak only in English, conforming to the (for many) foreign language at the whim of the American slaveowners; forced conformity of the opressed to the opressors. In this case, very literally, language is used as a tool of subjugation. Referential language is also used to pejorate their placement comparitively to white people; demeaning, animalistic language is frequently used in reference to black people throughout the story, both by the slaveholders and the narration of the story (told through the characters). The first description of Ness’s husband: “His is the large, muscular body of the African beast” (80). He is immediately dehumanized by the use of descriptors that reffer to him as animalistic and monsterous, “beastly.” By reference and insinuation, it implies the expected behavior to be ferine, subhuman; as Ness describes two paragraphs later, “She had spent the night hidden in the left corner of the room, watching this man she’s been told is her husband become the animal he’s been told that he is”(80). In a similar vein, the slaves are kept uneducated; by keeping