“That juxtaposition of the majesty upstairs with the awfulness and despair downstairs really struck me,” she says. On her tour, Gyasi saw those two worlds up close for the first time. Others were kept in dungeons before being shipped of to the New World. She then discussed how Aish, a character in the novel born after the Civil War, was essentially treated as a slave while working as a sharecropper because of the deficiencies of Reconstruction and the unjustifiable implementation of Jim Crow laws in the south.At the castle, some of the local women married the British soldiers stationed there. “In many ways, this novel felt to me like a response to people who say things like, ‘Slavery happened a million years ago,’” Gyasi explained.

Gyasi said she used the structure to emphasize the effects of slavery, and that slavery continued long past the civil war. Therefore, she decided to write about the family over the course of eight generations, showing how successive generations were affected by the experiences of their ancestors. While Gyasi said she initially intended on highlighting the experiences of four people in two different generations, she ultimately realized the importance of time and wanted to emphasize it in her writing. “It was structured as this intergenerational family tree.” “What really resonates for me was the structure of the novel itself,” she said. Levy-Hussen said she was captivated by the structure of the novel. The experience stuck with her, and ultimately motivated her to begin her project. “Where I felt like something is happening here that I wanted to explore further.” “It’s the only time, I think, in my life where I felt like this space might be haunted,” Gyasi explained. She detailed visiting a British castle in Ghana, and how its prominent structure hid its dark history of British officers abuse of their Ghanaian wives and other local people. In their discussion, Gyasi explained how she traveled to Ghana to conduct research after receiving a grant from her alma mater, Stanford University. She then transitioned to the discussion with Desai and Levy-Hussen, as they discussed the novel’s origins and several of its central themes. She opened the discussion by reading a powerful excerpt from her novel, detailing the life of her character “Afiyah” and the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. To begin the event, Yaa Gyasi, sat down with English professors Gaurav Desai and Aida Levy-Hussen. It also highlights illuminating themes of racism, family and unity. “Homegoing” highlights the story of two half sisters and their descendants through eight generations, going over two hundred years of Ghanaian and American history.

Homegoing author