Homegoing

Yaa GYASI. Vintage Books, 2016

==============================================

“Two Asante men went out into the forest one day. They were weavers by trade, and they had gone out to hunt for meat. When they got to the forest to collect their traps, they were met by Anansi, the mischievous spider. He was spinning a magnificent web. They watched him, studied him, and soon realized that a spider’s web is a unique and beautiful thing, and that a spider’s technique is flawless. They went home and decided to weave cloth the way Anansi weaves his web. From that, kente was born.”

“Uncle, trade is the only reason we’re here. If you want the British out of your village, you have to—”
“What you cannot hear, Quey, is the third bird. She is quiet, quiet, listening to the male birds get louder and louder and louder still. And when they have sung their voices out, then and only then will she speak up. Then and only then will she choose the man whose song she likes better. For now, she sits, and lets them argue: who will be the better partner, who will give her better seed, who will fight for her when times are difficult.”
“There were no birds like this in London,” Quey said softly. “There was no color. Everything was gray. The sky, the buildings, even the people looked gray.”
Fiifi shook his head. “I don’t know why Effia let James send you to that nonsense country.”

His grandmother didn’t speak at first, just watched him. “We are all weak most of the time,” she said finally. “Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.” She smiled at him. “But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

As for Ma Aku, Jo knew she would never leave Baltimore. Unless she could go back to the Gold Coast, there would be no new countries for her—not Canada, not even Paradise if it existed on Earth. Once the woman had decided to get free, she had also decided to stay free. When he was a child, Jo would often marvel at the knife Ma Aku always kept tucked inside her wrapper, which she’d been keeping inside her wrapper since her days as an Asante slave, then an American slave, then, finally, free. The older Jo got, the more he understood about the woman he called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.

It was in Oseim that Yaw had met the first girl he would ever be interested in. In school, he had loved the Romantic poets best, and he had spent nights in Oseim copying Wordsworth and Blake onto tree leaves that he scattered around the spot near the river where she went to fetch water.
He spent a whole week doing this, knowing that the words of white Englishmen would mean nothing to her, that she could not read them. Knowing that she would have to come to him to find out what the leaves said. He would think about it every night. The girl bringing her bundle of leaves to him so that he might recite “A Dream” or “A Night Thought” to her.

A Dream, William Blake
Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangled spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

'O my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, 'What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?'

'I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!'


A Night Thought, William Wordsworth
Lo! where the Moon along the sky
Sails with her happy destiny;
Oft is she hid from mortal eye
Or dimly seen,
But when the clouds asunder fly
How bright her mien!

Far different we—a forward race,
Thousands though rich in Fortune's grace
With cherished sullenness of pace
Their way pursue,
Ingrates who wear a smileless face
The whole year through.

If kindred humours e'er would make
My spirit droop for drooping's sake,
From Fancy following in thy wake,
Bright ship of heaven!
A counter impulse let me take
And be forgiven.

“You ain’t into the ‘Back to Africa business,’ but you using an African name?” Sonny had put his politics behind him but could feel them creeping up. Amani was nearly half his age. The America she was born into was different from the one he had been born into. He resisted the urge to wag his finger at her.
“We can’t go back, can we?” She stopped walking and touched his arm. She looked more serious than she had all night, like she was only just considering that he was a real person and not someone she had dreamed up when he found her asleep. “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.” She swept her hand in front of her, as though she were trying to catch all of Harlem in it, all of New York, all of America.

The traditional method is to boil starchy food crops like cassava, yams, plantains and cocoyams and then pound them into a dough-like consistency. Fufu is eaten with the fingers, and a small ball of it can be dipped into an accompanying soup or sauce.