However, deep down, she craves for the company of Obinze her childhood sweetheart who never got a green card to immigrate to America. Obinze’s life is not as straight as he’d hoped when he illegally settles in London and has a fake marriage in an attempt to get citizenship. However, he is busted and disgracefully deported. However, his life back home starts to look up unlike his life abroad. Soon after, Ifemelu returns to Nigeria with new perceptions about her country and wiser about the American dream. The blog posts are especially riveting and will give the reader a candid review of the African American life and a must read for one who wants to understand African-American culture and the place of African culture in America.
Yaa Gyasi – HOMEGOING
This riveting story set in Ghana and the US successfully reconciles the African and the African American in an intricate weaving of histories and individuals. The characters are human and encompass a wide range of emotions from loss, pride and oppression. We sympathize and empathize with them in equal measure due to their utter vulnerability and humanness. The lives of two sisters in different continents; US and Africa are intertwined as they explore problems created by slavery and race relations in America.
Gyasi confronts the hand Africans played in enslaving their own people and shares the guilt among Africans and the white slavers about this gruesome ordeal. Through her book, the reader is confronted with the reality of how tangled the chains of moral responsibility are and how easily we forget the facts about our history. Beginning in coastal Fanteland/Ghana, in the 1700s about two half-sisters who do not know each other, the story goes on to show two distinct aspects of slavery. Effia is sold by her father to a British governor for 30 pounds and leads a nice life in the governor’s mansion. On the other hand, Esi, Effia’s sister is in a dungeon underground awaiting transportation to the New World.
Gyasi enthralls us with painful story that follows the lives of the two sisters and eventually leads us down generations always keeping up pace with characters in both continents. It creates a kind of time-lapse of the decades between black lives in America and the motherland. This is a must read for anyone desiring to go back in history and revisit the contrasting views of slavery and learn the multifaceted relationships between African Americans and Africans on the continent today.
Conclusion
The above are only a few of the African diaspora books out there today. There are many young and budding Africans writing new and exciting stories about Africans and the African diaspora issues today in the age of technology, social media and multi-ethnic relationships. I would encourage one to read other authors like Teju Cole’s Every Day for The Thief, Chinelo Okparanta’s Happiness Like Water and Chibundu Onuzo’s ‘The Spider King’s daughter’.
Dickon Soire
Afrikagora Magazine
