“WELCOME HOME”: THE UNHOMELY IN YAA GYASI’S HOMEGOING

Abstract

This paper critically examines the contested and ambiguous notion of the home in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, utilizing Yaa Gyasi’s transformative neo-slave narrative, Homegoing (2016), as a focal point. By intricately tracing the story of seven familial generations over three centuries across Ghana and America, Gyasi portrays Atlantic deracination, diaspora, and transnationalism as both individual and collective experiences. In this way, as the novel’s title suggests, the home, as both a physical and psychological space, is desired but also elusive. The perpetuation of homegoing, thus, connects characters despite physical, temporal, and generational separation—meaning that the emergence of the home and the return to the home are interconnected. This paper draws on Homi Bhabha’s concept of the unhomely—a condition in which the boundaries between the private and the public blur, creating a postcolonial space that is both familiar and estranged. In this regard, Bhabha provides a framework for how characters within Homegoing engage with things left unsaid, unresolved histories, and unspoken truths that suddenly re-emerge within the political and social existence. This paper analyzes the establishment of an anchored yet ambiguous “non-place”—characterized by de-rootedness—which produces cyclical hauntings and a fractured sense of the home for subsequent generations. Ultimately, this paper concludes that despite the sense of unhomeliness, the contemporary generation finds a sense of reconciliation with the home by returning to and tentatively reconnecting with their origins.