Forgive Your Mother? Memory, Redemption, and the Sense of an Ending

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‎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 release from prison, or Sonny’s battle against addiction. In line with many critical race theorists and political commentators, the novel proposes that historical change is cursory and futile as long as it unfolds under the same social symbolic. As Hortense Spillers writes in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”:
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‎Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated”, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither tie nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again, by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. (2003: 208)
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‎Through its painful notion of time, Homegoing effectively conveys the afterlife of that limit event that unmistakably shaped the modern world, but it doesn’t paint an entirely glum or hopeless scenario. The fact that Zadie Smith, for example, can endorse the novel as a “beautiful and healing read” speaks to the fact that Gyasi’s novel somehow defies the “unflinching paradigmatic analysis” of US-American Afro-pessimism and its deep-seated mistrust of the reparative or recuperative as a mere lifeline of the dominant order. 101 While the notion of linear historical progress is questioned, if not
‎thwarted, by the novel’s temporal representations of Black history’s longue durée as marked by predetermination, belatedness, waiting, or erasure, it still manages to generate future-oriented moments of hope and potentiality.
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‎Homegoing represents history as a painfully realist form of tragedy, and it also utilizes the epistemological possibilities behind a genre like romance. As Goyal notes, romance “as a form that can harmonize seemingly irreconcilable opposites – helps black Atlantic writers collapse distances of time and space to imagine a simultaneity of experience” (2010: 9). By connecting two family lines not merely though naturalized essence and genealogy but supernaturally through a curse that is of course also a bond, the novel’s parallel focus enables a sense of Black diasporic simultaneity not unlike the “meanwhile” of Benedict Anderson’s imagined community. Yet where, as in Anderson’s model, this community adheres to the delimitations and assumed sovereignty of the nation, Homegoing’s temporal configurations are better defined by a sense of historical heteronomy, temporal haunting, or the “prefiguring and fulfillment” inherent in Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time, than by the kind of simultaneity that is “transverse, cross-time […] and measured by clock and calendar” (Anderson 1991: 24). Rather than realizing the imagined community of Africa and its diaspora in a narrative that, “in keeping with the scale and diversity of the modern nation, works like the plot of a realist novel,” Homegoing engenders to create continuity and unity with and through a fragmented, alternative temporality (Bhabha 2004: 226). It is precisely the impossible desire for unequivocal belonging and rootedness that motivates and connects the narrative strands. By querying the correlation between its imagined community and the teleological narratives of national history, the novel projects a sense of hope and redemption outside of those dominant temporal and narrative frameworks. Unlike the temporal and spatial confinement of Anderson’s “meanwhile” and somewhat analogous to Gilroy’s notion of the slave sublime, Homegoing’s hopeful openings are atopical, atemporal, and ateleological.
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‎As Gilroy writes in The Black Atlantic, the slave sublime is marked both by the desire to express the “unsayable” truths of slavery (2002: 37) and the eschatological or revolutionary concept of the Jubilee, which emerges “in black Atlantic culture to mark a special break or rupture in the conception of time defined and enforced by the regimes that sanctioned bondage” (ibid. 212). Like Gilroy’s tentatively utopian notion of the politics of transformation, these moments abandon the representational constrains of “occidental rationality” that characterizes the demands of the “politics of fulfillment.” The utopian promise of a politics of transformation is instead “magically” made audible through music, song, and dance, revealing “the hidden fissures of the concept of modernity” by conjuring and enacting “the new modes of friendship, happiness, and solidarity that are consequent on the
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‎overcoming of the racial oppression on which modernity and its antinomy of rational, western progress as excessive barbarity relied” (2002: 37-38).
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‎Some of Homegoing’s minor redemptive moments likewise occur through music, explicitly imagined as both antidote to and result of racial oppression and indexing a vision of liberated Black life after the Jubilee. Yet the distinctly otherworldly nature of this vision not only unfolds in a theological context. It is also imagined as potentially enacted, concrete utopia. While arguably carrying an element of the eschatological, the non-directedness of these openings in Homegoing also occurs through what in Benjaminian terms could be described as the messianic pull toward a profane order “erected on the idea of happiness” (2003: 305).
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‎Willie’s voice, for example, is described as “one of the wonders of the world,” stirring in her grandson Marcus “all the hope and love and faith that he would ever possess” (290). Willie’s attempts at becoming a jazz singer in 1920s Harlem remain unsuccessful. After a series of tragic events, she dares to sing again only in the context of her local church, channeling the happy memory of her father “coming home every night” (221). After her husband Robert decides to pass for white and deserts her and Sonny, Willie eventually meets the poet Eli, who fathers her second child, writes poems called “Jazz” or “Flight,” and, as a partner, is just as volatile and restless. In the final scene of her chapter, the profane and ever evanescent notion of home and belonging is juxtaposed with the novel’s recurring tropes of disjunctiveness, instability, and fugitivity, highlighting the precarity of these momentary recourses into the homely against the backdrop of what Orlando -. Patterson has described as “natal alienation” (1982: 5). The “hope and love and faith” of Willie’s voice, however, derives both from memory and a promised utopian elsewhere, and it is also described as the kind of beauty that is extracted from pressure. As a child, singing at her father H’s union meetings, she imagines “that the sound came from a cave at the very bottom of her gut, that like her father and all the men in front of her, she was a miner reaching deep down inside of her to pull something valuable out” (201). Further marking the secularism inherent in that indexical utopian relation, Willie’s son Sonny later states that “his mother didn’t have to wait for Heaven for her reward. He could see it; she was already wearing her crown” (251).
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‎Here, Homegoing employs familiar tropes of American Black life defined by social death and an aesthetic of sublimity conditioned by unimaginable hardship – most popularly embodied by the mythical “vibranium” in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and described by Teju Cole as “that obdurate and versatile substance formed by tremendous pressure,” an “embodied riposte to anti-blackness, a quintessence of mystery, resilience, self-containedness, and irreducibility” (2018: para. 51). A somewhat similar notion can be found in the writings of Fred Moten, a theorist who equally examines Black
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‎aesthetics in and through the legacies of slavery. Moten’s Black Optimist stance is therefore often cast, not necessarily as an antagonist to Afro-pessimist theories, but as something of a middle ground between a guileless celebration of Black culture and an Afro-pessimist avowal of Black culture’s ontological relation to slavery and social death. Moten examines this contradictory stance in “The Case of Blackness,” where he asks: “How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality?” (2008: 188). Like Gilroy’s notion of the revolutionary potential of the slave sublime, the knowledge of freedom is thus derived from the condition of absolute unfreedom. Or, as Moten writes, it becomes intelligible only through this condition: “This is the knowledge of freedom that is not only before wage-labor but before slavery as well, though the forms it takes are possible only by way of the crucible of the experience of slavery (as forced and stolen labor and sexuality, as wounded kinship and imposed exile)” (2003: 227).
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‎This dual concept of a freedom both anticipated and remembered may also be conveyed in the temporal and spatial coordinates locating Africa in the diasporic imaginary. Reviewing the prevalent notion of death and suicide in Black literature, Gilroy notes how the “turn towards an African home […] may also be a turn towards death” (2002: 208). This aspect speaks to the forced dislocations of Black Atlantic modernity and fundamentally affects its notions of temporality and futurity, as Simon Gikandi observes in Slavery and The Culture of Taste. While, for “philosophers of modernity from Hegel to Habermas, modernity has been conceptualized as an ‘an epochal concept’, one that marks a break with a previous period and thus privileges the future as the site of fulfillment,” the “African slave’s trajectory in the temporality of modernity and the forms of social identity associated with it” were “dominated by fear of the future […] an acute sense of regressive time” (2011b: 87). The “slaves’ notion of the future,” Gikandi writes, “was that of a space of death” (ibid.). In this particular epistemic coupling, Black Atlantic temporalities do not only frame the future as unsure or fatally scripted, but Africa itself comes to signify either the realm of a lost past or a future after death.
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‎Homegoing clearly strains at this narrow mapping of the Black Atlantic. Despite the mythical content of its title, Africa is imagined and historicized as an active presence instead of a living memory. In its mobilizing of a return narrative however, the novel comes dangerously close to reiterating the romanticized redemption narrative that diaspora theorists such as Gilroy and Hartman have argued against, and that has also been repudiated by literary responses such as Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River. Drawing on the analogous framing of Africa as static and archetypal and its irrevocable abandonment as the diaspora’s originary moment in both Gilroy’s Black
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‎Atlantic and Philips’ novel, Goyal observes how those influential diasporic discourses that center hybrid and anti-essentialist models of diaspora often tend to reify and essentialize the African continent in turn (2003: 5-38). While Homegoing obviously differs from these models by providing rich insights into the history of the Gold Coast, a crucial difference also lies in its particular vantage point regarding notions of redemption and agency. Whereas both Gilroy’s slave sublime and the story line of Crossing the River allocate the possibility for redemption in the New World, Homegoing allows for a much more balanced and indeed more complicated view. Both narrative threads, in the US and on the Gold Coast, incorporate the above-mentioned openings for historical and personal change. If anything, the Gold Coast provides a less tragically fated notion of futurity. This sense of a redeemed past and future, however, does not simply occur through the familiar tropes of a return narrative that casts Africa in the role of a lost and regained homeland. There are three scenes in the novel that most notably employ the theme of redemption, and it is worth considering them in more detail.
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‎The first is the scene of forgiveness between Yaw and his mother Akua that may in an exemplary way stand in for the larger notion of guilt and forgiveness in the African diaspora. Akua suffers from the family curse through Maame’s vivid nightmares but also most violently acts out this trauma by somnambulantly setting fire to her hut, killing two of her children and scarring Yaw. The pain and pent-up rage characterizing Yaw’s estranged relationship to his mother can be framed in the familiar diasporic narrative of Africa and her diaspora and its addressing of Africa’s historical guilt and complicity in the slave trade. In this sense, Akua’s words spoken to Yaw are clearly directed to another context and another time:
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‎”There is evil in our lineage. There are people who have done wrong because they could not see the result of the wrong. They did not have these burned hands as warning.”
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‎She held her hand out to him, and he looked at them carefully. He recognized her skin in his own. “What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have […]. When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Golf Coast or the white man […]. No one forgets they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.” (241)
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‎While there is a certain universalized notion of guilt established here, a tendency Goyal also detects in the multiple perspectives of Crossing the River, it does make a difference that Akua is represented not only as repenting. Her recognition of guilt, her reckoning with the past and its consequences, also renders her an active agent of change and enabler of a radically different future. Right before Yaw meets his mother, he begrudgingly considers the danger of exacting forgiveness without the recognition of guilt, here in relation to the colonial instrumentalization of Christianity:
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‎Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn’t certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man’s church […] and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. […] Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present. (237-238)
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‎It matters that the novel’s most explicit moment of redemption, or at least its signaled willingness to work through historical trauma, occurs in the context of the Gold Coast and between the descendants of former slavers. Even if one were to frame the exchange as the more traditional one between Africa and her enslaved children – a reading surely possible considering its pronounced anachronisms – it differs from those accounts in the active role it provides for Akua. It is she who initiates the redemptive moment, “running her fingers along the ruined skin that [Yaw] alone had touched for nearly half a century.” Undeterred “by the anger in his voice,” she touches “all of it,” fully taking in the consequences of her acting out the family trauma (239). In Phillips’s novel, the voice of the African father who has sold his children into slavery remains fixed and unchanging, such that the “novel cannot imagine a productive or dynamic role for Africa beyond that of celebrating the determined survival of its descendants in the New World” (Goyal 2003: 22). Instead, the novel presumes “the never-ending guilt of the African father and his one and only role as passive witness” (ibid.).
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‎Homegoing’s focus on the moral entanglements between Africa and her diasporas marks a distinct discursive position in the moment of Afropolitanism. While the novel’s efforts may be read as continuation of the cultural work of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, it is also a significant intervention into those contemporary diasporic discourses unfolding under the sign of Afropolitanism that are engaged in
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‎‎disentangling Blackness and Africanity. If anything, Homegoing can be credited with reckoning with the question of unity and kinship in a way that does not bypass the question of guilt. In fact, as an inquiry into ‘what it means to be Black,’ the novel suggests that – even though the racial category of Blackness does not apply or at least unfolds differently on the continent -Africa cannot or should not disavow its role in the genesis of racial slavery and thus divest itself from historical and contemporary agency. Regardless of whether one reads the novel as an Afropolitan intervention or a Pan-African continuation, it highlights the crucial significance of African voices in the ongoing and globalized construction of racial formations.
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‎In the diasporic model centered by Philips or Gilroy, Africa must recede into a monolithic and mythical past in order to make sense of Black modernity and double consciousness. But Homegoing not only places an African history teacher at the core of the narrative. It also renders Yaw and Marjorie the characters who, through different modes, shoulder the responsibility of writing a joint history of slavery and colonialism and who can even begin to imagine it. Marcus, in contrast, is so overdetermined by the particular emplotment of Black Western modernity and overwhelmed with surviving and thriving in a racist society that he does not even know where to begin.
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‎The telling of global and American Black history through an African point of view – in the manner of a self-inscribing, participating observer of the Afropolitan moment – corresponds with a larger epistemological shift within the Black Diaspora. More than 70 years after its completion, Zora Neale –Hurston’s ethnographic account Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in May 2018. In the late 1920s, Hurston conducted a series of interviews with the last known person to have been brought to the US from Africa, Cudjo Lewis. The fascinating and, as Alice Walker writes in the foreword, often “harrowing” account is mostly told in his own vernacular and details Cudjo’s memories of West Africa, the Middle Passage, the few years he spent on a plantation in Alabama, and his long life after Emancipation (-Hurston 2018: x). Walker’s foreword alludes to the reasons why Hurston’s book could not be published at the time. Through his longing and painful memories of “the Afficy soil” and his unflinching account of the atrocities he had suffered at the hands of other Africans, Walker notes, “[w]e are being shown the wound,” something that may have sat badly with the romanticized notion of Africa espoused by Black Nationalist intellectuals (ibid. x). In a way, and despite its archival discovery being a mere coincidence, the text’s contemporary release thus appears serendipitously timed, as if the present age were better equipped to reckon with the historical complexity of diasporic entanglements told from the perspective of an African in America.
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‎Those “who love us never leave us alone with our grief,” Walker writes. “At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the
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‎medicine” (ibid. ix). And the healing balm, in the case of Cudjo’s eventful life, is that “though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going” (xxii). Homegoing’s examination of guilt, love, and kinship in the Black Diaspora works in a similar way. In facing the moral and systemic repercussions of historical wrongs, it details the painful course of a story foretold, but it counters this fatal script by providing momentary openings of profane happiness, exploding the continuum of history. The medicine it offers may also be found in the rich and detailed history of the Gold Coast, not because it is embellished for mythical effect, but because it ascribes agency – then and now. The novel is particularly hopeful in its rendering of strong female characters like Akua or Akosua, who repeatedly want to “make new,” regardless of the tenacious structures into which they are thrust. In fact, every chapter includes at least one moment in which a central character is faced with the possibility of defying the heteronomous burden of history, despite being unable to actively undo it. The tension that arises from these opposing forces corresponds with what Tina Campt in Listening to Images calls the “quotidian practice of refusal”:
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‎The quotidian practice of refusal I am describing is defined less by opposition or “resistance,” and more by a refusal of the very premises that have reduced the lived experience of blackness to pathology and irreconcilability in the logic of white supremacy. Like the concept of fugitivity, practicing refusal highlights the tense relations between acts of flight and escape, and creative practices of refusal – nimble and strategic practices that undermine the categories of the dominant. (2017: 32)
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‎Homegoing’s history of Africa and the diaspora is viewed in constellation with today’s bleak assessment of the future, structures of feeling that cannot but maintain their pessimism regarding the state of the world. But Homegoing’s ability to “heal” and “make whole” springs from illustrating a historical moment with that very same pessimist yet hopeful urgency. Tragically fated as these characters ambitions might be, they are rooted in the desire to “make new,” to change the reified structures of oppression and with them the tragic course of history. This view is in line with the melancholic yet defiant position of Benjamin’s historian. As Sami Kathib describes it in “The Messianic Without Messianism”: “The paradoxical hope of the hopeless ones is derived and discontinuously transferred from the past. And it is only this openness to the past that can give rise to a future, which is not the mere continuation of the past” (2013: 3). By turning toward these historical moments of weak messianic potentiality, Homegoing limns possibilities for new futures, but it also highlights the limits of its own imaginary.
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‎Hence, the most traditional narrative of redemption in the novel, the story of Marcus’s visit to the slave dungeons, does not provide its anticipated sense of closure and forgiveness. In this scene, the problematic sense of emotional transference noted by Hartman and LaCapra does not occur. Despite the sense of fulfilled family destiny that it evokes, an identification with the dead is hindered in the same way in which Marcus’s return itself is not framed as a progress narrative per se, at least not one that culminates in the visit to the dungeons. Instead of identifying Elmina castle as the site of healing, the final chapter of the novel represents this locale through a set of troubling, unresolved questions, particularly for Ghanaians themselves. Marjorie reluctantly takes Marcus to the dungeons, telling him that this is “what the black tourists do when they come here” (297). While this highlights their different positions, it also points toward the lack of Ghanaian memory culture regarding the slave trade. The chapter is told from Marcus’s point of view, but he can sense Marjorie’s uneasiness about the “dirty skeleton of a long-past shame” they encounter in the dungeons of the Castle (298). When the guide tells them about the fact that British soldiers often married local women who then lived above the enslaved – an image Gyasi credits for sparking the idea for the novel -Marjorie shifts uncomfortably and Marcus avoids her gaze: “It was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath” (298). Referencing the heavily classed reality of contemporary Ghana, its colonial origins, and the role that elites played in the slave trade, the dungeons seem to take on a larger significance for Marjorie than they do for Marcus. Similar to Aidoo’s play Anowa, the novel’s addressing of Ghanaian amnesia around the slave trade is also a critique of the social stratification that made both the trade and the ignorance surrounding it possible.
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‎Querying notions of kinship, moral debt, and tradition becomes particularly significant in a novel that largely operates in a genealogical logic.
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‎Its underlying critique of national memorial culture on both sides of the Atlantic also translates into a subtle critique of the national imaginary in general as an inherited and unquestioned structure of norms and traditions. 102 Akosua, the girl who initially refuses to “shake the hand of a slaver” and who pledges that she “will be her own nation,” most notably wants to transcend the traditions of a society that renders her either complicit or one of the “expendable and defeated” that made up the historical fodder for the trade (Hartman 2007: 2). Akosua wants to undo the nightmare of the ancestral order, not only because she is someone who, in James’s eyes, “had nothing, and […] came from nothing,” but because she decides that imagining beyond nations is the only way to end the cycle of violence (99). The fact that James reiterates and then acts upon her notion of becoming “one’s own nation” – that together they cultivate their own “small-
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‎small” version of happiness (104) – highlights the performativity and fictitiousness behind any notion of kinship. As Ruha Benjamin writes in “Black AfterLives Matter”:
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‎All kinship, in the end, is imaginary. Not faux, false, or inferior, but […] a creative process of fashioning care and reciprocity. Is it any wonder that black people, whose meta-kinship threatens the biological myth of white supremacy, have had to innovate bonds that can withstand the many forms of bondage that attempt to suffocate black life? Cultivating kinfulness is cultivating life. (2018: para. 51)
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‎Homegoing, despite its focus on family ties and genealogy, equally develops a notion of extended or meta-kinship across space and time – or what → Dimock calls “an alchemical overcoming of distance” (2007: 144) – and subtly questions the limitations of biological or national lineages as vehicles for diasporic imagining. The novel thus creatively mobilizes the “racial myth, what-Mitchell calls the “temporal dimension of the racial medium” (2012: 25) or what I call race in/as history. Plying the strands of racial myth as “a real force in history” ( Mitchell 2012: 22), the novel also provides an understanding of how bloodlines “are not drawn with syringes but with stories, portraits, and family trees” (ibid. 26). That being said, the ambivalent project of transposing the novel’s major symbols – two lineages, two nations – into the image of one family and its shared destiny is also encapsulated by how the novel strains against the conventions of a historical novel, nationally emplotted as it is, by writing about the history of a transnational community characterized by a reciprocal and ongoing process.
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‎The novel chooses to look at the past in order to redeem or undo the conventions of national time standing in for a dubious sense of progress. Its narrative progression into the near present nevertheless poses a problem for its sense of an ending and further confronts it with the national emplotment of History. While, particularly from an Afro-pessimist viewpoint, it might be easier to envision the end of the (nationally ordered) world than the end of anti-Blackness, the difficulty to plot history outside of the nation affects all kinds of diasporic narratives. As Bennett contends, the study of the African Diaspora, via its focus on mobility, transnationalism, and dispersal, may offer an attractive “new lexicon,” but it should not delude itself concerning the pervasiveness of the established historiographical script (2000: 106).
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‎The final scene of the novel thus reiterates the notion of feeling beyond the nation and envisions a redemptive moment as atopical as it is atemporal. No sense of healing occurs as Marjorie and Marcus are touring the dungeon. Marcus feels sick and realizes that he does not want to be there, that the dead remain inaccessible for identification – not least because “[n]o one
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‎called them by name” (Homegoing 299). What he feels, instead, is the desire “to be somewhere else, anywhere else” (ibid.). Pushing through the Door of No Return, Marcus faces his lifelong fear of open water:
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‎Marcus started running to the beach. Outside were hundreds of fishermen tending their bright turquoise nets. There were long handcrafted rowboats as far as the eye could see. Each boat had a flag of no nationality, of every nationality. There was a purple polka dotted one beside a British one, a blood-orange one beside a French one, a Ghanaian one next to an American one. (299)
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‎In a final scene both exuberant and profane, the novel’s sense of closing and its anticipated sense of redemption occur on the shores of a possible cosmopolitan future, a literally colorful diaspora, with an image of ships as beacons of transnational diasporic difference, connected through an ocean bed littered with Black bodies. By somewhat redeeming the barred sense of healing evoked by the dungeons as a “site of injury,” one could certainly put the novel to task for intimating a rather sickly-sweet sense of closure in the Atlantic Ocean (Hartman 2002: 767). Apart from seeking the reasons behind this in the “embarrassment of plot” that haunts all historical narrative, there is of course much to be read into the symbolic significance of the Atlantic (Onega 1999: 282).
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‎Similar to what Dimock notes in Through Other Continents, oceanic kinship is imagined as “anything but straightforward,” but instead as “oblique, centrifugal, laterally extended, taking the form of arcs, loops, curves of various sorts,” and revealing that it is in fact non-adjacency that provides an “unexpected ground for kinship” (2007: 145). What Dimock asserts in reference to creolization also befits the ending of Homegoing. Here, the novel finally abandons even its own abandonment of patrilineal clanship in the form of matrilineal cultural transmission across a transnational imaginary, in favor of something even less landlocked and genealogical. As Dimock writes:
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‎Since it is these far-flung arcs that integrate the globe, that turn distant populations into distant cousins, we might want to rethink the meaning of “ancestry” itself. Rather than being land-based, patrilineal, and clannish, it is here oceanic, flotational, a large-scale and largely exogenous process of “drifting.” […] Ancestry here has less to do with origins than with processes. (2007: 145).
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‎Yet instead of proposing this diasporic image as an entirely rootless, free-floating model of atomized becoming, one could also interpret the novel’s ending as a move similar to Glissant’s notion of transversality that renders diasporic history a “subterranean site of convergence” (1996: 66). Here, the
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‎legacies of this fateful ocean render its depths “not only the abyss of neurosis but primarily the site of multiple converging paths” (ibid.). Responding to E. Kamau Brathwaite’s assertion that “The unity is submarine,” Glissant writes:
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‎To my mind, this expression can only evoke all those Africans weighed down with ball and chain and thrown overboard whenever a slave ship was pursued by enemy vessels and felt too weak to put up a fight. They sowed in the depths the seeds of an invisible presence. And so transversality, and not the universal transcendence of the sublime, has come to light. It took us a long time to learn this. We are the roots of a cross-cultural relationship. (1996: 66-67)
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‎Glissant proposes a sense of diversion – in his case via the métissage of the Caribbean – and conversion that allows a rhizomatic understanding of diaspora constantly creating its own point of origin. Similarly, instead of centering the slave hold as the only site of origin, thus irrevocably cutting ties and eclipsing African agency and history, Homegoing’s ending proposes a diasporic imaginary sustained by “[s]ubmarine roots, that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions of our world through its network of branches” (1996: 67).
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‎In Glissant’s theorizing of a poetics of relation, the singular linearity of filiation is replaced by a multiplicity of rhizomatically arranged roots. With reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Glissant writes: “The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (2010: 11). This play on, or alteration of, the concept of ‘roots’ or rooted identity is not quite analogous to Gilroy’s, and subsequently to Clifford’s, supplementing the term with “routes” as a move away from monolithic genealogies and fixed origins toward a more fluid, active mode of movement and becoming. In her reading of Glissant, Goyal describes the notion of free-floating roots as a “fitting alternative to the rootlessness advocated by Gilroy and others insofar as Glissant’s image retains subterranean connections even as it eschews fixed origins” (2003: 29). Goyal also emphasizes the concretely political, material dimension of Glissant’s image. For Glissant, the subaltern “struggle against a single History” is not only mobilized by the desire to understand itself and its own history, but also by an acute awareness that this struggle proposes “in an unprecedented way a reevaluation of power” (1996: 93).
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‎Like race, history literally matters; it may be a fantasy, yet one that is “highly functional” (1996: 64). In many ways, Homegoing is the kind of historical fiction that provides an anchor in what British-Ghanaian artist and
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‎director John Akomfrah has called the “sea of amnesia” that constantly surrounds us. In an interview about his 2015 film Vertigo Sea, he explores why history indeed matters, as the very ballast that prevents the mental slippage of a dangerous surplus of fiction:
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‎I was compelled […] to make Vertigo Sea because you’re sitting there, listening to someone referring to quote/unquote migrants as cockroaches. […] How do people migrate from being human beings to cockroaches? What do you have to forget? What’s the process of amnesia that allows the kinds of forgetting that builds into hierarchies in which there are beings and non-beings? (00:06:07 – 00:06:44 min)
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‎In many ways, the struggle against race in/as history counters its fatal myth-making powers by composing other myths and writing other stories. Yet, in grappling with that legacy, this endeavor often expresses itself in the paradoxical desire to render both real and transient, constantly writing that into existence what it wants to surpass. Like Glissant’s notion of transversality as the kind of multiplicity that supplants hegemonic or totalitarian roots by cutting across linear routes with a rhizomatic structure, Homegoing’s ending proposes ‘no nationality’ through the sign of ‘every nationality.’ While the novel may anticipate or promise transcendence, what it really provides is a (renewed) sense of cross-cultural communication, a model for diaspora that focuses on points of entanglement rather than rifts and fissures. In its juxtaposing of Ghanaian and US-American history, Homegoing endeavors to not only understand, but also to enrich and expand the meaning of Blackness and the diasporic imaginary in the 21st century. Similar to what Akomfrah describes as his search for a third meaning through the techniques of fragmentation and montage, the novel explores this dialectic exchange as a form of movement. It is precisely that friction conducted through nodal points of connection, or décalage, that allows the diaspora to move forward.
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