As usual, this summer proved to be a great time to catch up on my reading.  I was able to get to quite a number of books this summer, including the usual assortment of interesting nonfiction works on education and brain research, which will be the subject of some future blogs.  Even more of my reading focus was in my original teaching field of English literature.  In recent years I have intensified my study of world literature as I have developed elective courses in both contemporary African and contemporary Middle Eastern literature.  The choices have never been more impressive in these two areas, as more and more authors are finding publishers and getting widespread release. 

 

Two of my favorites from the summer have gotten a great deal of deserved attention and acclaim: Homegoing by the Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, and Salt Houses by the Palestinian-American writer and psychologist Hala Alyan. There are powerful parallels between the two novels written by these relatively new literary voices.  Both trace multiple generations of a particular family—one in Ghana and then the United States, the other in various locales in the Middle East—and lead us through actual historical events via the specific family involved. (To assist, both even start off with family trees that serve as handy reference points.) Both rely on a narrative structure in which multiple characters provide perspective on the unfolding storyline.  Rather than turn to Faulkneresque first person accounts, however, Gyasi and Alyan maintain a more detached third person narration, which allows us into the minds of the characters while also providing the reader with some distance and, many times, a more critical and nuanced perspective on the characters’ actions.  The protagonists’ strengths are believable and authentic, as are their flaws.  No one comes off as a saint, even when they are subject to discrimination, mistreatment, or abuse.  Similarly, when the characters do rise above their circumstances, they have to battle through both societal and familial limitations, proving once again the truth behind the old 1960s adage that the “personal is political.”

 

Because of the chosen narrative structure, the chapters could stand alone, as each traces a narrative arc that would be satisfying as independent short stories.  A teacher could excerpt a chapter and provide students with a meaningful read.  Here there will no doubt be a major decision to make around which chapter or chapters to choose.  My advice would be to focus on Riham’s first section in Salt Houses and Kojo‘s story in Homegoing, but really one can’t go wrong.  Still, if time and opportunity is such that a teacher could assign the entire book, the rewards in an English, history or, even better, an interdisciplinary class, would be significant.  Indeed, the collective power of the multiple stories is how both Salt Houses and Homegoing pack their punch.  When we see, for instance, that the repressive effect of slavery persists even after abolition – as evidenced in the chapters on sharecropping in the early 20^th century and even the drug epidemic in Harlem in the 1950s and ‘60s – we get a better sense of one of Gyasi’s major assertions: that the weight of history on all of these characters stays on their shoulders, even many years or even centuries beyond its origins.  Similarly, the Palestinians of Alyan’s novel feel the burden of their loss of land and, even more personally, the loss of an important family member, generations after the initial events. 

 

From an historical standpoint, both novels would be strong additions to any course wishing to depict either the history of Palestinian displacement in the 20^th century or the lasting legacy of slavery from the perspective of both West Africa and the United States.  There are numerous historical references along the way such that any teacher could use these novels as springboards to broader discussion.  One learns quite well, for example, that warring tribes in eighteenth-century Ghana were all too eager to sell their foes into a European-based slavery system as a means to advance their own powers and settle old scores.  And that the Europeans themselves (in Homegoing it is the British) were all too eager to exploit these rivalries and pit Africans against each other.  Gyasi reminds us that the whole business was de-humanizing on multiple levels.  The physical presence of the haunting Cape Coast Castle (which still stands today), where imprisoned Africans spent their last days before being put into slave ships, looms over the early chapters of Homegoing, haunting all who inhabit it, both freeman and slave.

 

Independent of the historical connections and lessons, the novels work effectively as works of high literary merit precisely because they do what good fiction can do so well: they zero in on specific stories to build empathy in their readers.  In today’s socio-political discourse we often focus too much on the big picture and the aggregate numbers, forgetting that every statistic has a human face.  These novelists put us in direct contact with the sorts of people who lived out these painful historical moments.

 

One of the most poignant aspects of Salt Houses is the fact that one of the main characters succumbs to the effects of Alzheimer’s, thereby erasing her ability to remember either her own family or her people’s historical past.  By the end, Alyan seems to ask: Which is worse—never to remember or never to forget?  Both fates come with their own consequences.