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Slavery In Homegoing By Yaa Gyasi

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Have you ever thought it was you against the world? Out of control? No purpose? This is nothing compared to the force and horror the African slaves in both Ghana and America felt. Gyasi’s characters James, Abena, and Ness were forced and manipulated into situations they never intended to be in. In Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi uses characterization to depict how the terrors of slavery can make one feel separated in their community.

Esi’s daughter Ness was enslaved on a plantation and desperately wanted to leave to give her family a better life. When Ness gets to Hell, she was forced to become married because it would be better for her owner, the Devil, for political reasons. She is introduced to a man named Sam. He refused to learn English. This …show more content…

They would never see Kojo again. When the Devil asked about him, they lied and told him he had died along their journey. The Devil “marched Ness and Same back to Hell...He stripped them both bare, tied Sam so tight he couldn’t even wiggle his fingers, and made him watch as NEss earned the striped that would make her too ugly to work in a house ever again...She could not lift her head, so the Devil lifted it for her. He made her watch. He made them all watch: the rope come out, the tree branch bend, the head snap free from the body” (87). The Devil never let them escape their past of slavery. All they wanted was a better life, but that was not their decision to make. They were slaves and therefore had no control of their own actions. They had no rights, no words, no ideas of their own. Gyasi displays the Devils’ cruelty to his property to explain how slaves had no control of their lives. They were forced on the plantation, forced to marry, and forced to watch the death of their forced loved ones. Sam and Ness never felt like they belonged to their community because of the Devil. He made torturous conditions for his slaves, the …show more content…

Abena’s father James moved to their village to be with her mother, Akusua. He escaped because he never agreed with their family’s ways back home. Marrying someone for politics and shipping slaves away to misery was not the life he wanted to live. When he moved to marry his love Akusua, he fell in love with the community and atmosphere. However, they did not fall in love with him. James could not get his crops to grow, giving their foreign family a bad reputation. Abena was a “unmarried twenty-five-year-old-woman...There were only a few men in her village, and none of them wanted to take a chance with Unluckey’s daughter” (133). Abena never did anything to deserve to be disregarded in her village. She deserved to be treated the same as all the other young women in her village, but her father’s reputation affected her own. James left because of slavery, and this continued to affect his daughter. Even her childhood best friend, Ohene, would not marry her because of the lack of crops. He claimed, “to get the cocoa plants, I had to promise a man in Osu that I would marry his daughter. I will have to use all of the leftover goods from my cocoa trade to pay her bride price. I cannot marry Abena this season. She will have to wait” (152). In Ghana, the men treat the women like they are property. They cannot make their own decisions. Ohene had to be the one to decide if they were to get

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