Photo credit: Nicole Salow via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Oh my god this book.
A few different people in my Read Harder book group raved about this book by Yaa Gyasi and then my book club voted to read it, so I lost no time in ordering it from the library. It arrived quickly and I had plenty of time to read it before my book club’s next meeting. But I got distracted reading other things until I suddenly remembered it was due back at the library three days before the due date and I couldn’t renew it because other patrons were waiting to read it. So I gobbled this book up in a few days, which was not that hard because it’s only 300 pages.
I was glad to hear some of my fellow book club members had a hard time getting this book from their libraries because it means this book is in demand and that makes me so happy. This is definitely a must read.
It starts out in what is now Ghana in the 1700s as the slave trade is ramping up. The first chapter is told from the point of view of Effia, a local tribal girl who gets married off to one of the white English slave traders and goes to live with him in Cape Coast Castle, a real castle that was really used to hold slaves before they were loaded onto ships to cross the Atlantic. I don’t think slavery is ever explicitly mentioned to her and I don’t think she ever sees the slaves, who are kept in the dungeons before being herded onto the beach and loaded onto the ships. That said, Effia is neither blind nor dumb. She can hear the screams from down below, and although she and the other soldier’s wives never talk about it, they know what’s going on.
What Effia does not know is she has a half sister by her mother and that half sister spends some time in the dungeons before being shipped off to America and sold as a slave. The book then follows Effia’s and Esi’s offspring in alternating chapters down the line through the centuries. Effia’s offspring remain in Africa until the early 2000s, but that doesn’t mean their lives are easy. Each character only gets one chapter, but Gyasi manages to put so much into those chapters: the horrors of slavery and what came after, as well as each character’s individual personality and their personal histories, which for many of them, is the only history they have.
That said, many of them retain tiny bits of information and memory from their African ancestors, even if they’re not consciously aware of it. I was glad I read this book in such a short time frame because there are many little things that relate back to previous chapters and I think reading it quickly enabled me to remember and refer back to those earlier sections.
This is a beautiful book, and despite having gotten it from the library, I might have to buy a copy so I can read it over and over again. It is one of those very rare books that I wanted to immediately start re-reading as soon as I had finished. Unfortunately, it was due back at the library, so I didn’t get the chance.
What did you guys read this week? Anything else that blew your mind?