I wanted to move as quickly as possible so that you could hold it all in your hand and understand that we are all a part of history and that the present is informed by history. I've never had any desire to write a very, very long novel and even for Homegoing, I felt really strongly that something would be lost - this sense of expediency, of urgency, this sense of just the sweep of time that we are all caught up in - would be lost if this novel was thousands of pages long. doing the writing felt in some ways as an act of love and justice.īook Reviews 'Homegoing' Is A Sprawling Epic, Brimming With Compassion But I think as long as I approached it as an opportunity, again, to kind of resurrect the lives of characters who might have gone through these situations and honor those lives. And so I wanted to honor that by writing the book in a way that didn't hide from the painful moments, that didn't try to kind of elide the painful moments, but also one that didn't kind of relish in the graphicness of some of these situations. The fact of the matter is that for every painful thing that happens in Homegoing there is an equally painful or far worse thing that happened to a real person. And yet when I read these research texts, I couldn't hide. I always say that researching the novel was so much more difficult than writing the novel, because at least as I was writing, I had the knowledge that the characters that I was creating weren't real. On immersing herself in the pain and suffering of slavery to write HomegoingĪuthor Interviews Slavery Scars A Trans-Atlantic Family Tree In 'Homegoing' And, yeah, it's harder to explain what that loss is, but it's one that I carry. And what you miss out on by not being surrounded by people who look like you is a quality that's harder to qualify, harder to talk about. But to know that just eight miles down the road, there was an all-Black school that was graduating its students at an abysmal rate, I think, really, really showed me the fact that not all schools in this country are equal, not by a long shot. And to see all of these young people from Alabama doing this, I think, was really encouraging.

My graduating class sent students to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Brown. And when I was there, my high school was one of the best high schools in the country - and you could tell. I was very fortunate to have the education that I had. On feeling conflicted about her parents' decision to send her to a majority white school in Alabama And I think in some ways it was their children who had to kind of lead the charge in helping them to understand how important race is here in America. I think having come from a country where everyone was the same race as them, race just wasn't a factor that they really valued or that they thought about too frequently.

I think they couldn't really think of themselves in any other way.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi