Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi (born 1989) is a Ghanaian-American novelist.

• I thought the novel would be traditionally structured, set in the present, with flashbacks to the 18th century. But the longer I worked, the more interested I became in being able to watch time as it moved, watch slavery and colonialism and their effects – I wanted to see the through-line.
  • On what she originally envisioned for her novel Homegoing in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us still’” in The Guardian (2017 Jan 8)

• I was devastated. I felt immense rage. The dungeons still smell after hundreds of years. There was grime on the walls and a tiny air hole at the top. When they closed the door, there was no light. Hundreds of people were kept there for three months at a time before being sent God knew where. The terror they must have felt – not knowing what was to become of them. You can imagine and you cannot possibly imagine.
  • On taking a trip to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle where slaves were incarcerated in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us still’” in The Guardian (2017 Jan 8)

• It is a dual thing – you belong and you don’t. I remember the Ghanaian passport official reading my name correctly and it felt like the biggest, warmest welcome. At the same time, I understand my native language but don’t speak it. So I am necessarily at this remove – the country can never be fully mine.
  • On the duality of identity when visiting Ghana in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us still’” in The Guardian (2017 Jan 8)

• It’s interesting because this book comes from a place of always feeling like I wasn’t Ghanaian enough for Ghana and not African American enough for the United States. So it will also be interesting to see how Ghanaian critics respond to it, because I can imagine getting the opposite side of the critique, where they think my treatment of the African American characters is nuanced. I don’t know what to do about that. I have always existed in this weird, murky space where someone is allowed to say I’m not either thing, if they are that thing.
  • On how her novel Homegoing might be received by Ghanaian critics in “More at Stake Here Than Beauty: An Interview with Yaa Gyasi” in Los Angeles Review of Books (2016 Sept 24)

• We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must 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 get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.
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• You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.
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• The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.
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• You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, "now I will remove my knife slowly - so let things be easy and clean; let there be no mess." There will always be blood.
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• This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.
  • [5]

• 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
  • [6]

• If we go to the white man for school, we will learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.
  • [7]

• 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?” She
  • [8]

• This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.
  • [9]

• (What’s the last great book you read?) ...The last great one I read was Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” a fascinating novel about the legacy of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic.
  • Trevor Noah interview (2016)

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Yaa Gyasi