I WASN’T READY TO look through the rest of the house, so I settled down at the table to write. As usual, the blank document stared accusingly at me, refusing to fill itself with words or characters, no matter how long I stared back. Here’s the thing about writing Happily Ever Afters: it helps if […]
The Ferlin’s Secret Read More »
I HAVE A FATAL flaw.I like to think we all do. Or at least that makes it easier for me when I’mwriting—building my heroines and heroes up around this one selfsabotaging trait, hinging everything that happens to them on a specificcharacteristic: the thing they learned to do to protect themselves and can’tlet go of, even
The Sceptic and the Sweetheart(beach read) Read More »
Homegoing exemplifies how the history of institutionalized racism scripts Black American lives like a preordained fate similar, but also crucially different, from a religious narrative structured around collective enslavement, emancipation, and redemption. 100 Yet its structural emplotment is impossible to undo through an individual liberation narrative, as in Kojo’s successful flight to the North, H’s
Forgive Your Mother? Memory, Redemption, and the Sense of an Ending Read More »
In 1913, W.E.B. Du Bois commissioned the artist Meta Fuller to produce a sculpture in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The sculpture, today located on Harriet Tubman Square in Boston, carries the title Emancipation and is inscribed with the following sentence: “Humanity weeping over her suddenly freed children, who, beneath
“The Gnarled Fingers of Fate”: Curse Temporalities and the Question of Agency Read More »
Homegoing is not primarily invested in aptly conveying the horrors of chattel slavery. Instead, the novel aims to capture a fuller image of the transatlantic slave trade and its resultant diaspora, tracing its ruptured lines of kinship and its forgone responsibilities, fateful entanglements, and temporal consequences. In doing this, the novel also self-referentially foregrounds its
“An Accumulation of Time”: Writing Time as History Read More »
As Dalley states in his study of the postcolonial historical novel, “just as contests over the meaning of history forced historians to reconceptualize their discipline as a form of interpretative realism, so the contested nature of postcolonial pasts prompts novelists to frame their work vis-à-vis norms of plausibility, verifiability, and the dialogue with archives and
The Other Problem of History: What Cannot Be Represented
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Two-thirds into Gyasi’s debut novel, a middle-aged history teacher named Yaw finds himself questioned by a class of schoolboys. The young boys, hailing from rural parts of what is still called the Gold Coast, have already heard of this teacher and his heavily scarred face. The teacher, who is working on a manuscript titled Let
The Problem of History: Historiography’s Imperial Legacies Read More »
Listing Yaa Gyasi, Yvonne Owuor, Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Adichie, and Peter Kimani as examples, historian Dan Magaziner notes in an article on Africa Is a Country that historical fiction “has been having a bit of a moment recently, especially among authors from the African continent and its diaspora” (2017: para. 1). Confirming this, Lizzy Attree
Historical Fiction Is “Having a Moment” Read More »
“History clings to our skin. Somehow we must remember that we remember differently.”Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi”One must return to the site. Detour is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by return: not a return to the dream of origin […] but a return to the point of entanglement [point d’intrication], from which one was
A Painful Notion of Time Conveying Black Temporality in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing Read More »
Americanah is a diasporic novel that explicitly negotiates different Black epistemologies. While acceding to the constitutive force of an afterlife of slavery, the novel also investigates other moments of race in/as history, and it proffers other forms of Blackness: communal, diverse, Pan-African. At times, we can detect a strained but nevertheless existent notion of a
This Shared Space of Africanness”: The Hair Salon as Afropolitan Heterotopia Read More »