Despite its modest 300 pages, this book covers a huge scope, covering three hundred years over two continents: Africa and America. It opens in Ghana in the mid 18th century, with two half-sisters who are unknown to each other. One sister Effia, of Fante tribal heritage, is coerced into marrying a white British officer sent to oversee Cape Coast Castle, a staging post for enslaved Africans prior to being shipped across the Middle Passage. Living in luxury at the Castle, she is oblivious to her half-sister Esi, of Asante tribal heritage, imprisoned as “cargo” in the basement holding pens, before being shipped to America. The two family trees bifurcate at this point as Effia’s line stays mainly based in Ghana, with the ongoing effects of colonization affecting the life events of generation after generation. Esi’s line is based in America, spanning slavery, Jim Crow legislation, the Harlem Renaissance and drug-fuelled urban life.
The opening pages of the book have a time line, tracing the generations in two distinct branches. The narrative alternates between the two branches, in a series of fourteen separate but linked short stories. They could be read separately because each one in effect starts again in its opening paragraphs, although there are small familial references that allow the reader to place the character within their familial context. In many ways this disjointed narrative reflects the dislocation of slavery and the rootlessness of not knowing where you come from. It was a rather jarring reading experience: you would come to be invested in a character, only to have the narrative whisk you across the ocean and time into a new story.
Running through the book is the theme of betrayal and complicity. The coastal Fante tribe capture and sell the Asante people to white slavers. In Harlem Renaissance New York, a black man who ‘passes’ as white leaves his wife to marry a white woman. Step-mothers are cruel to their step-children; families shun their gay children. There is also the theme of severance: two half-sisters growing up on different sides of the globe; and particularly in the American part of the narrative, severance between parents and children, one of the tools of enslavement, but which recurs from generation to generation. This severance lies at the heart of identity and reflects the title of the book: one of the characters, speaking of the Back to Africa movement says “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore.”
A rather heavy-handed motif of the book was a pair of gold-flecked stones, one each given to the two half-sisters by their mother Maame. Esi’s stone was soon lost, buried in the mud of the holding cell at Cape Coast Castle, while the other stone was handed from generation to generation. I was dreading a rather mawkish resolution of the two stones at the end of the book but fortunately Gyasi was an astute enough writer not to fall to such an easy trope.
I enjoyed the book, with the equal weight given to the Ghanan and American experience, a weight judiciously and scrupulously meted out. I did find myself thinking of Alex Haley’s Roots which took a similar generational approach but from memory, there was not the bifocal approach of both African and American stories in that book.
It is particularly impressive that this is a debut novel, as the author has such control of a tightly structured dual narrative. The structure did feel a bit like a straitjacket at times, and not all characters were as fully developed as others. But it is a good exploration of slavery, colonialism, inter-generational trauma and the intersection of colour, class and gender- in many ways a book of its time, despite its historical focus.
My rating: 8/10
Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection. I wish that I had written this review soon after reading the book, instead of waiting weeks. You’d think that I’d know by now.
Sourced from: Readings paperback.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 