5/12/2023 0 Comments Homegoing novel![]() ![]() The realization only made it more jarring to descend into the fort’s still-rank dungeons, the suffocating, near lightless last stop for millions of captives before they passed through the “door of no return” and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage.īuffeted by images of such wildly disparate fates unfolding floors apart, Gyasi’s mind began racing with ideas for a far more ambitious book than the one she’d been working on. ![]() SUCCESS STORY: Gyasi has been touched by readers’ responses to Homegoing. Expecting solemnity but few surprises, Gyasi, ’11, was fascinated to learn British soldiers sometimes married local women, who lived in ease in the castle’s upper levels. Then a friend’s visit prompted a detour some 50 miles away to the Cape Coast Castle, an old British slave fort, where the inspiration that had been so elusive would suddenly blossom. “I was kind of feeling as though I had wasted everybody’s time and money and confidence,” she says. ![]() ![]() And she was facing the prospect of leaving with little to show for her efforts and ambition, or for the Stanford grant funding them. But her time in the Central Region where Gyasi’s mother had grown up hadn’t revealed much to base a book on. She’d made the trip to the country she’d left as a toddler to do research for a first novel centered on a mother and daughter. For a moment, Yaa Gyasi’s return to Ghana the summer after her sophomore year at Stanford seemed destined to be a disappointment. ![]()
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