Untangling traumatic memories and tracing the path to healing in yaa gyasi’s homegoing 2016
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Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
In Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi explores the intergenerational impact of the slave trade, slavery and colonialism on a Ghanaian family. The present study examines the traumatic experiences that each character has endured starting from the life path of two half-sisters Effia and Esi in the late 18th century. It demonstrates how trauma becomes an ancestral legacy and burden that is transmitted to the descendants in the course of two centuries. By drawing on the insights from Cathy Caruth in trauma studies and psychoanalytic theory, mainly the use of Freudian and Post-Freudian paradigms, writing fiction is considered therapeutic and it provides a space for the reconciliation of traumatic memories through confrontation, admission, and the liberation of the repressed material within the African psyche. It also unveils the symbolic tapestry that the novel showcases to articulate intergenerational trauma, healing and confronting the taboo subject of African complicity in the transatlantic slave trade.