Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi (1989- ) is an award-winning Ghanaian American novelist who grew up in north Alabama and calls Huntsville, Madison County, home. She is best known for her 2016 novel, Homegoing, which was selected for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize (2016), the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize (2016), PEN America’s PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel (2017), and an American Book Award from the National Book Foundation (2017).
Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, to Kwaku and Sophia Gyasi. In 1991, when she was two years old, her family moved to the United States so her father could pursue graduate studies. They settled in Columbus, Ohio, and her father completed his Ph.D. at the Ohio State University. After temporary positions in two other states, he earned a tenure-track faculty position as a French professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he continues to teach today. She and her two brothers attended Huntsville City Schools, and then she attended Stanford University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English. She later earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa’s creative writing program, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, following in the footsteps of another famous Alabama-born writer, Margaret Walker.
Homegoing is a historical fiction novel that tells the story of sisters Effia and Esi in the 1700s. They are descendants of their mother, Maame, and live vastly different lives connected to the transatlantic slave trade. Effia marries the governor of Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, who oversees the selling of Africans into slavery. Esi, her half-sister, is imprisoned below in the same castle and sold into slavery in America. Though the descendants of each sister live drastically different lives, their lives mirror struggles and triumphs. The novel traces the lineage of each sister through characterization and themes of trauma, dysfunction, enslavement, segregation, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, and more.
In one part of the story, Ness, a 25-year-old female descendant of Esi, lives and works in the Alabama heat on a cotton plantation in Tuscumbia, Colbert County. Later, the novel incorporates an important part of Alabama’s Civil War past, the coal mining industry in central Alabama. A young and strong man, “H,” in his early twenties and also from the family line of Esi, migrates from Georgia to Alabama in 1880 and soon finds himself entrapped in Alabama’s convict-lease system. Because he cannot pay a $10.00 fine, he is chained to ten other men and sold by the state to work in the coal mines just outside of Birmingham, Jefferson County. He works for nearly ten years to “pay” for that $10.00 fine. He later settles in Pratt City in Birmingham and works as a free laborer in the coal mines. Ultimately, the two families reunite at the end of the book as the characters of Marcus and Marjorie, Effia’s and Esi’s final descendants, meet as students at Stanford University, offering an ending to both sisters’ stories.
The story recalls Gyasi’s own Ghanaian roots, and the idea for the novel came after visiting the Cape Coast Castle in 2009 as a graduate student. While there, she conceptualized her life as an Alabamian through the lens of Ghana. The last chapter of the novel is inspired by the author’s experience of living in Alabama as a Ghanaian American, and she notes in a National Public Radio interview that if she hadn’t grown up in Huntsville, she probably would not have written Homegoing. Gyasi states that she was first inspired to become a writer after reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Much of Morrison’s work explores trauma and dysfunction in families, and her treatment of characterization, setting, and language embodies her Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning writing style. These, too, are hallmarks of Gyasi’s writing, and like other Alabama writers, her fiction connects to memories of Alabama’s past.
Likewise, Alabama is the backdrop of her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020. This highly acclaimed novel highlights the ways religion and science, both a part of north Alabama's rich history, shape the protagonist’s life. This work traces the life of Gifty, a 28-year-old Ghanaian American Ph.D. student studying neuroscience at Stanford. She attempts to achieve balance in her life while coping with the death of her brother, Nana, a gifted athlete, who dies after an opioid overdose. This event compounds the depression of her mother, and Gifty is obligated to become her caretaker while seeking to understand the complexities of faith and science related to human behavior and experiences. The novel characterizes the realities of navigating trauma, religion, addiction, death, and family. Gyasi was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature from the Vilcek Foundation (2020) and the Great Immigrants Award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (2020) after its debut.
In addition to her novels, Gyasi authored “Bad Blood,” a short story that is featured in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021), which was created by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to explore the legacy of slavery in the United States. Gyasi’s contribution in this work is centered on racism and health disparities and is also connected to Alabama, as the idea for the story originated from the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. She has also been published in journals and magazines such as African American Review (2011), Callaloo (2014), Guernica (2015), and Granta (2017).
Gyasi has been celebrated for the ways her fiction features local color and interrogates past and present issues. She now resides in Berkeley, California, and continues to shape characters that resonate with readers through a focus on Alabama history.
Works by Yaa Gyasi
Homegoing (2016)
Transcendent Kingdom (2020)
“Bad Blood” in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021)
