Fragmented Belonging and Diasporic Return in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

Spanning multiple generations and different geographies, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) explores the lingering effects of colonialism, slavery, and dislocation, unfolding the complexities of the black diasporic experience. Mapping the family branches of Esi’s and Effia’s descendants – one in Ghana and the other in America – the novel unfolds the tensions surrounding the African diaspora, throwing light on the fractures, estrangements, and shifting identities that complicate notions of return and belonging. While Ghana’s Year of Return initiative in 2019 encourages descendants of the African diaspora to reconnect with their long-lost roots and ancestral belonging, Homegoing complicates this idea of diasporic return, portraying it as a fraught, incomplete negotiation rather than a resolution to historical displacement. Under the colonial rule in Ghana, Effia’s descendants grapple with the contradictions of postcolonial identity and cultural hybridity, indicating how Africa is not an unchanged and unproblematic homeland. On the other hand, through the experiences of Esi’s descendants in the US, Gyasi highlights how the African diaspora survives the violent legacies of the Middle Passage, Jim Crow segregation, and systemic racism, and also how diasporic Black women withstand the general trauma induced by racial division. By foregrounding these parallel narratives of displacements and mutual estrangements between Africa and the Black diaspora, Homegoing not only interrogates narratives of seamless returns and reconnections but also reinforces that diasporic returns are mediated by history, memory, and the limitations of belonging. Analyzing the female characters’ experience of displacement and return, this paper examines Homegoing as a diasporic narrative that resists the fixity of “homeland” and instead presents return as an uncertain, often illusory process shaped by historical trauma and generational rupture. Drawing on Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, this paper aims to situate Homegoing within critical discussions of Black diasporic identity and the afterlives of slavery and argue that Gyasi's novel ultimately reframes return not as a physical journey back to the continent, but as an ongoing, contested and gendered process of diasporic self-making across time and space.