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    "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing"""
    "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing"""
    "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing"""
    Ebook59 pages47 minutes

    "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing"""

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateDec 13, 2018
    ISBN9780028665900
    "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing"""

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      Book preview

      "A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi's ""Homegoing""" - Gale

      18

      A Study Guide for Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

      Yaa Gyasi

      2016

      Introduction

      Yaa Gyasi took the literary world by storm with her 2016 debut novel, Homegoing. Born in Ghana and raised in Alabama, Gyasi attended the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop prior to finishing her manuscript and obtaining an agent. Her promise was considered so exceptional that the auction for the rights included ten publishing houses and resulted in a seven-figure contract, extremely rare for a first-time novelist. The book was subsequently met with highly admiring reviews and special compliments from the likes of Zadie Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others.

      Homegoing is nothing less than one of literature's most ambitious attempts to trace the influence of slavery over the course of West African and American history through the centuries and up to the present day. The novel does this by following parallel branches of a family tree, the descendants of two Ghanaian half-sisters, over the course of some eight generations, from small Fante and Asante villages to a Gold Coast castle to southern plantations, antebellum Baltimore, jazz-era Harlem, and modern-day California. What Gyasi's multigenerational journey reveals above all is the extent to which the manifold repercussions of slavery have persisted over time.

      In treating the era's injustices, Gyasi includes some unpleasant depictions of punishments and cruelties, including rape, making the novel best suited to mature readers.

      Author Biography

      Gyasi was born in the small town of Mampong, Ghana, about 170 miles northwest of the capital city of Accra, to an Asante (or Ashanti) father and Fante mother in 1989. When she was two, her father brought the family to the United States so that he could enroll in the doctoral program in French at Ohio State University in Columbus. The family would live temporarily in Illinois and Tennessee before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when Yaa was nine, with Dr. Kwaku Gyasi teaching at the University of Alabama there. His daughter attended schools populated mostly with white students, with almost no other African immigrants in the town.

      Being a shy child, used to interacting almost exclusively with her brothers, and having an academic father as a role model, Gyasi became an insatiable reader. The first story she wrote was one she submitted to the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest, which earned her an achievement certificate signed by star LeVar Burton. By the end of high school, after years of writing poetry and keeping a journal, she had settled on wanting to write professionally. She only fully grasped that this was within her reach when at age seventeen she was assigned Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which for Gyasi was an eye-opening demonstration of the literary possibilities for African American women. As she told Aaron Zimmerman for Teachers & Writers Magazine, It was as close as I have ever come to having a religious calling.

      Gyasi attended Stanford University in California, where in 2009 she earned the Chappell-Lougee Scholarship, which enabled her to take just her second trip to Ghana since emigrating to do research for a proposed novel. When she took a tour of Cape Coast Castle, inside she was viscerally struck by the vast discrepancies between the dungeons below and the elite living quarters above. She imagined two sisters simultaneously occupying the two areas, and the seed of her novel grew exponentially from there.

      After graduating from Stanford with a degree in English and spending an unfulfilling year with a start-up in San Francisco, Gyasi gained admission in 2012 to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, she spent three years researching and at last completing the manuscript of her work in progress. Upon graduating, she found an agent, gained a publisher, and moved

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