"Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves."
Slavery is a motif that runs throughout the story, from Maame's experience both owning and being a slave to her descendants' experiences on the Gold Coast and in the United States. When Esi, Maame's daughter says that the village would think her father was weak if they didn't beat their slave girl Abronoma, Maame counters with this view about slavery, even though she has not yet admitted to Esi that she herself had been a slave earlier in life. Maame teaches her daughter that slaveholders are the weak ones, which is part of what gives Esi strength when she is taken to the Cape Coast Castle by slavers and eventually must work on plantations in the United States.
"You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond."
This quote, which Abronoma says to Esi, seems to foreshadow the rest of the book, but eventually becomes ironic. Maame's two daughters, Effia and Esi, are originally separated by being from two warring tribes. Their descendants are separated by even more: location, since Effia's descendants continue living on the Gold Coast while Esi's descendants live in the United States, and status, since Effia's descendants are lifted into the upper echelon of society through marriage while enslavement keeps Esi's family in the lower class for generations. However, Gyasi shows that social status is malleable and ephemeral by the fact that Effia's descendants eventually fall to the lower class through James's choices, while Esi's descendants raise their social class somewhat through generations of hard work. Furthermore, the curse of having to stay on "opposite sides of the pond" (p.45), which seemed to foreshadow the family's literal separation by the Atlantic Ocean, is finally broken when Marjorie's family moves to the United States, and Marcus and Marjorie even meet in the same location on equal social footing.
"The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again."
Gyasi makes an important historical point with this quote, which is that the enslavement of black people in the United States did not cleanly end with the emancipation proclamation. Sharecropping, prison labor, Jim Crow Laws, and discrimination kept many black people financially or legally subjugated by white masters for decades after slavery was technically ended in the United States. Gyasi shows this through the stories of Esi's descendants, especially Kojo, H, and Willie.
"Whose story do we believe, then...We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture."
Yaw, a descendant of Effia living in Ghana during a tumultuous time in African history, is a teacher. The question he wants his students to explore in his class is who decides what history is recorded and remembered. During his first class with a new group of students, he says these words, asserting that whoever has the power or privilege in a certain society will get to decide what goes in the history books. Yaw challenges the young boys in his class to seek out alternate stories that may nuance or even contradict the traditional discourse about a time period or subject. This quote can also be seen as communicating one of Gyasi's goals in writing Homegoing.
"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...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."
James, the son of Quey and grandson of Effia, represents a shift in his family's history. He is born into a very high status family as the grandson of the Asante king, but he throws this status away when he decides to leave his family and remarry for love. This choice, and this quote in which Effia encourages him to make the change he desires, both highlights the importance of motherhood in the book and shows how one's family and upbringing do not totally dictate one's potential.
"No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”
The lives of Maame's descendants are shaped by slavery; some are enslaved, some are slavers, and some must grapple with having slavery in their family's past. In this quote, Akua encourages Yaw to be free, even though neither of them has been a slave. Maame's descendants in the United States who deal with prison labor, Jim Crow, and race-based discrimination also grapple with their relationship to slavery and those who were once slave masters even though they themselves weren't enslaved. The fact that the children and grandchildren of those once enslaved can still feel like captives underscores themes of family and heritage in the story.
"The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man."
Religion, especially Christianity, appears as a theme in the lives of multiple characters in Homegoing. Ma Aku says these words to Kojo, who grows up in Baltimore distant from his African roots; however, it could as easily have been expressed by Effia, who was married to a white man named James Collins and forced to hide her religion and customs, which he calls black magic. Since many white people used religion as an excuse to colonize Africa, it is reasonable that Ma Aku would have an antipathy to religion itself, especially the idea that only one God—the God of the white man—exists.
"There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?"
Abena is the daughter of James, who leaves his life as the grandson of the Asante king behind to marry for love and work as a simple farmer. When she is young, her father teaches her an important lesson about regret; one day she tries to help him farm by bringing water to his plants, but she doesn't bring enough and they die. Her father tells her that she shouldn't cry or feel regret, but instead learn from the experience by bringing more water next time. Abena thinks of this when she sleeps with Ohene Nyarko even though they aren't married, telling the reader that she feels no regret. By remembering her father's words, Abena takes control of her body and choices in a way that goes against her village's norms, a move that foreshadows her complete rejection of the village when she leaves a few years later.
“Tonight, you must be like an animal when he comes into the room. A lioness. She mates with her lion and he thinks the moment is about him when it is really about her, her children, her posterity. Her trick is to make him think that he is king of the bush, but what does a king matter? Really, she is king and queen and everything in between.”
In Homegoing, Gyasi writes from both male and female points of view. However, in this quote, Gyasi shows the importance of females, femininity, and motherhood to the book. Adwoa warns Effia that she must get pregnant to be kept at the Cape Coast Castle with her white husband and encourages her to use animal-like feminine wiles to impress him in bed. Throughout the book, parents, especially mothers, must make choices to defend or prioritize their children; for example, Willie, a descendant of Esi, raises two children largely on her own because their fathers don't feel the same need to stay in their lives.
“Split the Castle open,
find me, find you.
We, two, felt sand,
wind, air.
One felt whip. Whipped,
Once shipped.
We, two, black.
Me, you.
One grew from
cocoa's soil, birthed from nut,
skin uncut, still bleeding.
We two, wade.
The waters seem different
but are same.
Our same. Sister skin.
Who knew? Not me. Not you”
Marjorie bravely writes and performs a poem about her experience as a black woman in the United States. The poem shows her connection to her roots in Africa as well as her extended family's experience as slaves. By using the address "you" at multiple points in the story, Marjorie makes it unclear whether she is addressing someone in her life, perhaps her grandmother, or addressing her thoughts directly to members of her audience. The main images in the poem are sand, water, and skin, all things that reference Marjorie's summertime experiences with her grandmother in Ghana.
