None of this Belongs to Me

Before we had to move, I had heard of Ellie Sawatzky’s debut poetry collection None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions, 2021) and was intrigued by the title. 

I interpreted it like a confession, and I sensed sadness and loss.

When I visited Toronto in May right after the landlord put “our” house in Vancouver up for sale, that house was almost the only thing on my mind. Language is slippery. It was our house but it was also not ours. It took visiting Toronto to write a poem about what we were losing in Vancouver. The idea of ownership (what actually belongs to me? what can I call mine?) haunted me. Sawatzky’s title returned. None of this belongs to me.

When I heard she was giving a poetry reading at Massy Arts this past September, I was determined to go and finally buy the book from the author herself (provided I liked what I heard, and I did).

In her collection, I found coming-of-age poems, ex-boyfriend poems, Kenora (Ontario) poems where the author grew up, Vancouver poems where the author lives, vacation poems, and work poems.

My favourite section of the book (where the book’s title comes from) are these “work” poems that offer vignettes of the speaker’s role as a nanny looking after a three-year-old girl called “B.”

Take these lines from the poem “Nounou” that also relate to language:

I sit with B in her kitchen, discuss
a Safeway bouquet
of lilies. I say lis. B says

Maman accidentally. 

None of this belongs
to me.

That twinge of sadness and loss is amplified in “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” where Sawatzky writes: “The first girl just wants something to belong to her…”

While the book covers multiple subjects, the connecting thread of “playing a part” was most evident for me. Playing the part of mother, of adult, of being responsible. The joy in reading the book was discovering what “this” in the title refers to. The lines quoted above make it explicit—“B” doesn’t belong to the speaker, but there are many other examples of what doesn’t belong to her throughout the collection. 

Adulthood, with all its revelations, loneliness, and losses, is another one. 

B doesn’t know

she won’t always be a child,
the way I didn’t know I’d be

thrust into this thistle-stitched
ditch of adulthood.

-“Ouroboros”

I love the assonance of those short ‘i’s, echoing the narrowness of a ditch, as well as the spitty awkwardness of those “th” and “ch” consonants that suit the thorny journey to adulthood.

On a road trip at 24 with her parents, Sawatzky writes in “Recalculating”:

In the silence now
we’re all adults and no one knows

what’s best.

And in “What Blue”:

With Grandfather dead,
we are three single women, sisters, girls, absorbing

the mysteries of the world comparing blues.

These are poignant lines, but there is also humour and sass in Sawatzky’s writing, like in “Blessings Upon U and Ur Bullshit” that she dedicates to her neighbour “who threatened / to have my car towed / bc it was parked in front of / ur house…u’ll understand when ur / a mom u said / u’ll understand / when ur a homeowner / but I won’t / I will never be like u”.

Her house doesn’t belong to her either, and how many other renters can relate to the feeling conveyed in the line “i pay her / so she owns me”?

Sleep doesn’t belong to the speaker anymore when she’s at her father’s bedside in a hospital room in the opening poem. Rob Taylor beautifully analyzes “Overnights at the Hospital” in his Tyee article, “Be Brief and Tell Us Everything.”

A self-conscious voice emerges in some of Sawatzky’s poems. A surprising number are self-referential (I began counting how many have “poem” in the poem) and felt they could have been stronger without this (but I am of the school that doesn’t usually like the fourth wall broken). Sawatzky mentions in this interview with Rob Taylor that she likes playing with expectations of poetry and drawing attention to its process, but I found those poems detracted from her otherwise strong theme.

Sawatzky is at her best when the poem isn’t obvious, when it fades into the background and the reader is left with images and sounds that haunt, punch, linger, explode; when she’s working out what does and doesn’t belong to her and subverts readers’ expectations of girlhood and female desire. The reader might assume someone who wants kids or who does want them but can’t have them would pursue work as a nanny. But not so. In “Crystals,” Sawatzky declares, “I tell my mother I never want kids.”

By the end of the collection, I notice a movement from naming and/or lamenting what doesn’t belong to her towards claiming what does belong to her…even the unpleasant parts one doesn’t like to admit.

In “Self-Portrait as Ostrich,” the second-last poem, she sounds the most vulnerable and mature:

I do dream regularly
that I’m gathering eggs

And I thought it was because I used
to look after children

Or because I’ve rewatched
Fly Away Home

so many times and maybe that’s true
but maybe also

I’m finally taking responsibility for me
Anger has a shape too

Ditto shame ditto pride when it unfurls
when I rise

Up off my knees to become
the biggest bird alive

Here is a speaker who accepts she doesn’t have it figured out (“maybe that’s true”) and holds numerous possibilities out in her hand like seed for a bird, not sure which one will take. But the uncertainty doesn’t shrivel, paralyze, or keep her on her knees. Rather, it emboldens her to the extent that she stands up to become “the biggest bird alive.”

Coming out of (and soon approaching another) season of uncertainty, as is the way life ebbs and flows, None of this Belongs to Me felt like a gift at the right time. I am prone to anger too, prone to complaining about life not being fair (and yes, the old adage who said life was fair? always plays in my mind in response), and there is a sisterhood, so to speak, in Sawatzky’s words and in the kind message she wrote in my copy of her book:

Sending care as you settle into your new space. Hope you enjoy the familiar and strange in these poems.

I have been so focussed on our old house, our old city, what we lost and left behind (and there is a season for mourning) but I think it is now time for me to look ahead, not only for myself but for the sake of my child, who very much belongs to me even as she simultaneously does not belong to me. Oh language, oh the paradox of both/and.

The future is as it always was, a quivering
night lit occasionally by lightning. World
without end.

-“Matrilineal”

Nostalgia for Moving Parts

This latest poetry book by Diane Tucker makes me glad I am old enough to remember using a payphone. The title poem recounts in detail the speaker’s process of making a phone call on this antiquated device, this relic of a bygone era where “cold square buttons resist pleasantly / my index finger’s pressure” and where the handset makes “a real click” when put back on its cradle, none of the “digital ping” today’s phones bring. Yes!

You can tell the speaker takes pleasure in revisiting old things—whether objects or memories. I am too young (or uncultured) to know many of the other references she makes such as The Lawrence Welk Show, Eva Gabor, Three Dog Night, Gerry Rafferty, Pablo Cruise, Brigadoon, to name a few—but that didn’t stop me from enjoying her poems. In “Beautiful grade four teacher,” one of the early ones, she lists what was in fashion in 1974 and this gave enough context to situate the speaker in the world she is conjuring.

While Tucker highlights “golden-hour” memories like playing badminton in her East Van backyard with her brother in “As we leapt”; riding a merry-go-round in “The horse is a cathedral”; falling in love with theatre and its stars in “Brigadoon, 1979″ and “The star”; or listening to a mesmerizing busker in “Blue melodica,” she doesn’t just see the past with rose-coloured glasses. In “Dream of Old Vancouver,” the (day)dream comes to an end with the sobering realization:

This was how a woman earned her safety:
the workman noticed you and bought you drinks.
You played the well-liked woman; you went along.
You threw the dice of yourself and hoped you’d win.

Nostalgia, like memory, is complicated. “Love the sad men” is a beautiful yet bittersweet tribute to her father who showed his love in “scroll-sawed shelves to hold phalanxes of dolls” but just before, in “Tiny Dresses,” the speaker admits:

I saw the calendar ladies on the garage
wall not covered enough with pickle jars
of nails. Dad would give me long wood
shavings, curls as golden as Eva Gabor’s
hair. I guess I put two and two together.
This is what beautiful ladies are like.
This is what men like ladies to be like.”

The collection is divided into 4 sections: “The Child Is Still Kin,” “Tidal Volume,” “Keep Walking,” and “Though I am Tattered.” The first half delves more into the speaker’s memories of childhood and memories of her own children while the second half predominantly draws from nature and seasons in Vancouver to reflect on what lies ahead: life without her parents, her own aging body, mortality.

A recurring image throughout the book is that of a tree. In “World wall,” the speaker remarks:

A tree
seems able to stay rooted and yet rise.
How lovely it becomes, torso ridged

with strength. Crown full of mosaic light,
branches all airy elbows. All it receives
it wraps in rings around itself. Am I patient
enough to somebody be a tree? I want to try.

This wish, expressed in the last poem of the second section, surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. After all the glam and fascination with moving things in the first part of the book, the speaker aspires to be something that stands still, solid, rooted and steady. She’s moved from the 1970s into present-day Vancouver. “Imagine being planted long enough / that your roots grow up through the earth” she begins in “VanDusen Garden in October” and later muses, “I ache to be the maple / outside my father’s hospital room window. / Just standing there, she ministers healing / and need never worry about where to be / or what to do with her slender dark arms.” (“The day before my father died”)

When I read back through the poems, I noticed this tree image appears in the very first poem, too. Tucker describes her aging body holding a yoga position called “Child’s Pose” (the poem’s title) with her “small spine / a path from darkness to darkness” / arms twin tree roots cradled in earth.” The very last poem, “I’ll take the answer,” complements and contrasts this imagery with the speaker invoking the lullaby-prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep” where in the darkness of night and even in unanswered prayer, the Fingerprint of a Creator burns, “making my body a light that cannot be hidden.”

The poems in Nostalgia for Moving Parts speak to a poet who’s in love with the created world and who describes it so poignantly and concisely. One of Tucker’s favourite methods to quickly set a scene or mood is a compound adjective, especially when it comes to colour: “rust-orange carpet,” “blue-black air,” “blue-boxed breath,” cartoon-red beefsteaks,” and by far, the winner for this reader: “”February skies hang rodent-grey.”

There is so much colour in these poems, so many news ways of looking at old things (for example, “slow ducks ink themselves in”), and so much courage from her aging, gaping heart she calls a “begging bowl” that is still open, ready, and waiting to be filled even when venturing from the known past to an unknown future.

Trying to Love the World: Maggie Smith’s Good Bones

I, and others I know, have been searching for poetry collections about motherhood—not with clichés or Pollyanna sentiments, but with intelligent, fresh poems that speak to the nuances of what it means to mother.

Maggie Smith does this with Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017). She walks the thin line between darkness and light. Maybe you’ve read her titular poem that went viral in 2016 featured on Poetry Foundation.

She’s not afraid to name the darkness: darkness in the form of miscarriages; of an absent father; of a child’s picture book that reminds her of a friend’s suicide; of pedophiles luring children into panel vans, of a mother who jumps from a high-rise building with a baby strapped to her chest; of a world that is “at least fifty percent terrible.”

Lest she be overwhelmed by all this darkness, she reminds herself in “Let’s Not Begin” to make a list of “everything I love / about the world” for the sake of her daughter. “I’m trying to love the world,” she writes with an honesty that guts me. This collection reads as her aspiration to love the world.

Let’s begin
with bees, and the hum,
and the honey singing

on my tongue, and the child 
sleeping at last, and, and and—

If I had to put a theme to this book, I would say it’s about a mother trying to reconcile bringing children into a broken world. I wish I didn’t like these poems; I wish they didn’t ring true. I’ve written some poems that similarly ask: How much do I keep from my child? How much do I share with her? How much can any mother protect her child? As Smith says in “Rough Air:” “’Motherhood / never kept anyone safe.”

The book invites the question: Where does darkness come from? It seems that some people are more burdened by it—they have a greater sensitivity to suffering. Smith reveals to her daughter that she is one of these people in “At your age I wore a darkness:”

several sizes too big. It hung on me
like a mother’s dress. Even now,

as we speak, I am stitching
a darkness you’ll need to unravel,

unraveling another you’ll need
to restitch.

Do future generations inherit darkness? Later, in her poem “What I Carried,” she writes:

I carried my fear of the world
to my children, but they refused it.

These lines give me hope. Every mother I know worries about passing something awful down to her child—anxiety, depression, fear, anger, resentment, impatience, you name it. But children don’t necessarily accept our “gifts.” Thank God.

As much as darkness hovers like the hawk that flies over the girl in many of the poems, Smith’s attention to ordinary things—to language and colour— is an act of beauty in itself, of paying attention and naming what is, of being present.

She takes her daughter’s questions (what is the past? what is the future? how do leaves fall off the trees? does the sky stop?) and engages with them via poems. You feel like you’re eavesdropping on intimate, tender conversations between a mother and child. The daughter’s golden baby curls become bedding for the hawk’s nest; in another poem, the mother knows the curls “will darken” “like honey left too long in the jar.” (“Lullaby”)

This change of colour—from blonde to black—found throughout the book charts the movement from innocence to experience, wilderness to city, childhood to adulthood. I can’t help but think of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The girl and her mom live on a mountain (the man is away for long periods of time) and the hawk’s presence is akin to that of a pet on a leash: “They are tethered, an invisible / string between them.” (“The Hawk”) And yet of course a hawk is nothing like a dog. 

In one of the last poems, “Mountain Child”, Smith writes:

When the girl leaves the mountain
she is no longer a child

but she has not outgrown the hawk.
She wears its shadow on her shoulder,

an epaulet. It bears the weight
of allegory.

What began as a mother’s journey becomes threaded with her daughter’s journey towards knowing and loving the world. If the hawk represents the wild, untamed, and dark side of life, it doesn’t go away with age. Perhaps it’s a weight you get used to, or at least counteract. It doesn’t have to be an albatross. 

Smith concludes her collection with a poem that poignantly gathers all these ideas. I find it incredibly fitting that it’s called “Rain, New Year’s Eve” because it reads like a resolution, something hopeful to carry into a new year.

The Art of Losing Part 3

Rebecca Solnit makes getting lost something to aspire to. In her collection of autobiographical essays proving there is no subject out of her reach, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she maps out various ways to be lost. Lost in place, time, music, conversation, identity, family, society, and so on. She frames getting lost as invitation to discover new things, not least about yourself.

She explains her terms early on:

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in an onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss. 

p.22-23

Solnit’s imagery of the rear-facing view on the train immediately grabbed me. (Given current COVID times, I also could not help but add “masks” to the list of quotidian things I would see stream past my window).

But her description also horrified me. She moved from household objects to people in the same breath. You don’t lose a friend in the same way you lose a key or a bracelet. And what about the loss of sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, spouses? Perhaps reading this book in a pandemic has heightened my sensitivity to these human losses that are far from romantic. Would people who have said goodbye to a loved one, or multiple loved ones, describe themselves as “rich in loss?”

Given her topic and her mention of “keys”, I thought Solnit would reference Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “One Art” that also talks about loss. In fact, I frequently title this poem “The Art of Losing” in my head since this line is repeated so often in the villanelle. (I’ve actually written on this poem before in Part 1 and Part 2). Bishop similarly moves from talking about insignificant objects like keys to weightier losses like places and houses until she reaches the subject of her poem, the loss of a loved one. It’s like she’s working herself up to be able to talk about the latter, as if by practicing losing keys or “the hour badly spent” will prepare you for losing someone you love. And though she keeps repeating that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” it becomes apparent through the poem that losing IS hard to master. The villanelle form requires Bishop to repeat that line but the reader gets the sense the speaker is only trying to convince herself. In the last stanza, she falters and concedes that “the art of losing isn’t too hard to master” (emphasis mine). In other words, yes, it is hard.

Whereas Solnit’s description of loss is rather flippant and viewed through rose-coloured glasses, Bishop’s poem doesn’t sentimentalize loss. Considering how erudite Solnit is and how eclectic her references, I thought it a real miss that she didn’t mention Bishop.

I came across this reading of “One Art” by Canadian high school student Sophia Wilcott and had to share it here. She captures the struggle of the poem so well.

That critique aside, there were countless passages in A Field Guide to Getting Lost that I flagged for copying into my journal. Take this section, for example:

Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practise as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis. 

p.80

Even though she puts people into two generic categories, is it not fairly accurate? (It reminded me of my niece when she was young who would go around saying: “There are two kinds of people in the world” followed by whatever she observed that day: “those who close the door and those who open the door” or “those who talk and those who don’t” and she would come up with all sorts of contrasts that were actually very illuminating). Even though it’s obvious that Solnit puts herself in the travel-far-from-home-to-find-yourself camp, I feel she is kind and even a bit in awe of those who grow up with an “unquestioned sense of self.” There is something to admire about both paths as long as they don’t lead to self-righteousness and closed-mindedness.

Those are just a few thoughts I wanted to pull out from this meandering but delightful book. (When you’ve flagged so many passages in a library book, it feels necessary to just buy it). Here’s an actual review of the book by Josh Lacey in The Guardian for those of you whose appetite may be whet and want to know a bit more about it.

Desire Path

My dad loves to remind me that I once described Langley, where I grew up and where my parents still live, as “the place where romance goes to die.” Needless to say, I am not a fan of the suburbs. As a poet, I love writing about place, but these places are always cities. I have one poem about my hometown and it reads more like an instruction manual: “leave suburb / make new home.”

So I came to Taryn Hubbard’s debut poetry book Desire Path published by Talonbooks in 2020 with curiosity, aware that it’s about growing up in Surrey, BC, and I was impressed. A whole book devoted to the suburbs—that’s commitment. I couldn’t do that for Langley. I kept looking for the speaker’s attitude towards the suburbs, towards this awkward adolescent place rapidly changing from rural to urban, and it wasn’t obvious. Sometimes she felt critical, other times accepting, and in this evocative description from “In the Afternoon,” mournful:

Commuter hearts
start like the engines of diesel
trucks when field across
station, free for all-day parking
gets dug up.

Hubbard pays attention to Surrey. Even the gas stations, parking lots, and fast-food joints—things that don’t often make it into my poetry. I once had a writing teacher say that “parking lot” isn’t a very poetic phrase to put in a poem so Hubbard’s book feels like a middle finger to that teacher. Yes, she can write “parking lot” in a poem and do it well. She can write an introductory poem (“Heirloom”) that begins, “I was born across from the first / McDonald’s in Canada” and hook me immediately. Hubbard can use a ubiquitous landmark to anchor her self and her work.

Over the past couple decades, attention has shifted from major metropolises like Vancouver and turned towards outlying cities growing up in their shadows like a younger sibling. After Hubbard’s debut, there can be no talk of a body of literature about Surrey (from a growing coterie that includes Leona Gom, Kevin Spenst, Veeno Dewan, Phinder Dulai, Fauzia Rafique, Heidi Greco, Renée Sarojini Saklikar) without mentioning Desire Path.

Construction near City Centre Library, Surrey, in 2011. Photo by Charlene Kwiatkowski

Hubbard summarizes the plight of the suburb in her poem “Wayfinding”:

it’s hard to find
the idea of here
and there
from a form
that grew only
with the idea of
car & home

For this reason, the “here” of Surrey could be the “there” of Oshawa, for the nature of suburbs is wash, rinse, repeat, something echoed in the structure of Hubbard’s collection that has four repeating poems aptly named “Repeat (I) (II) (III) (IV).” The poet has a hard task cut out for herself then in writing a whole poetry book about the suburbs and maintaining the reader’s interest. In “Markers,” she writes:

“The streets are empty, the houses are far apart including the empty lots saved for a rainy day when it will be more advantageous to redevelop them into something with suburban density, which is code for a strip of three-story townhouses cut apart like pieces of bread.”

Fortunately, Hubbard largely avoids the suburban cookie cutter (or shall I say bread cutter?) fate by varying her poetic forms. She scatters prose poems between free verse poems while also including a fifteen-page poem of fragments called “Attempts” near the end, about being pregnant during wildfire season. The poems that are most successful in standing out from the rest are ones where the speaker removes her distance glasses and gives us more personal details linking her to this no-where/every-where. For this reason, “Heirloom,” “Weighted Keys,” “Dear 203B,” “Shadeless,” “Boarded-Up Strip Mall Church,” and “Little Holubtsi” are my favourites. 

Overall, Desire Path is a tight collection that boldly asserts a place like Surrey is worth paying attention to, not in spite of, but because of its contradictions; its tension between past and future, rural and urban; its identity crisis; its complicated role in shaping a speaker from here to there, then to now, child to mother.

There is something to be said for really knowing a place, for taking the time to pay attention to it. It’s a form of love. This love is perhaps most evident in “Flagpole” where Hubbard begins: “One summer I walk the same path each day with the idea of creating a folded corner on a very specific patch of grass.”

I dog-eared a few poems in this book, folding back the corners of the pages like she folded the grassy path that led us here.

An Uneasy Family Tree

Yaw, one of the many characters in Yaa Gyasi’s book Homegoing, begins his history class with the words: “History is Storytelling.”

Gyasi—who was born in Ghana, raised in Alabama—gives us a book of stories in this epic debut. Each of the sixteen chapters is named after a different character who all trace their lineage to a woman named Maame, an Asante slave in a Fante household in West Africa. The book moves chronologically through eight generations from the 18^th century to the present day, alternating between two bloodlines. Maame has two daughters by different men: Effia (who lives in Asanteland in the interior of what we now call Ghana) and Esi who lives in Fanteland along the coast. They know nothing of each other. Effia is married off to an English official involved in the Atlantic slave trade at Cape Coast Castle. Underneath its whitewashed exterior and palatial rooms lay separate female and male dungeons that African slaves were packed into for weeks before boarding boats to America to work on cotton plantations. This is the fate of young Esi who is captured in a raid on her village.

Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The half sisters and their descendants live very different lives. The strand from Effia stays in Ghana; the strand from Esi unfolds in America. And yet no character has it easy. Gyasi shows how each character and bloodline is implicated in the devastating legacy of slavery. A character reflects: “The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them.”

With Homegoing, I felt like a student in Yaw’s class. Not a boring class but a riveting, I-want-to-know-more kind of class that often happens when I’m reading fiction and realize I’m also reading history. With each chapter/character, the author takes on multiple Black histories: the African-American slave trade, Britain’s colonization of West Africa and the arrival of Christian missionaries, the Anglo-Asante wars, slavery in the American South, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, also known as the “Bloodhound Law”, convict leasing, Jim Crow laws, the Great Migration of Blacks from the Southern US to the North between 1916 and 1970, the Civil Rights Movement, the heroin and jazz scene in Harlem in the 1960s, the “war on drugs”, and the racism that underlies it all and still exists today. This incredible scope of time, subjects, places, and characters make Homegoing a contemporary classic and a must-read, especially now in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting racial protests.

With each character, I (probably foolishly) hoped, Surely this person will have a better life than their parents. What’s a better life though? Each story had sad parts. Each choice (when there was a choice) had repercussions. Some stories brimmed with sadness. As Gyasi took us through the uneasy family tree, I noticed the racism grew slightly less overt but no less damaging. 

When I was at a North American arts marketing conference in Seattle a couple years ago, I had dinner with a small group of attendees. One woman was Black and had studied Psychology. She told our group she thought all Black people should go to counselling by nature of being Black—to process what their people have been through. I didn’t fully understand her comment at the time but after reading this book, I have a clearer picture.

Yaw goes on to tell his history class:

We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.

The last two stories in the book, Marjorie and Marcus, provide the most hope. After just reading through how these modern-day characters came to be, the reader has a deep appreciation that the closing scene ends with laughter—play, even.

In keeping with the theme of split families (“A Tale of Two Sisters” is a moniker that comes to mind), Gyasi pairs each bloodline with a recurring natural symbol: fire on the Fante side, water on the Asante side. The novel begins:

The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound.

From there, the author continues to play with fire and water. How these symbols develop and culminate through her prose is as layered as the family’s storyline. I began to see fire and water imagery everywhere, even in a line like “a wave of missing hit her, separate and sad.” It’s as if Gysai reminds us that the memory of slavery is always present, breaking through the surface, breaking into speech.

While Homegoing‘s subject matter was far from enjoyable, Gyasi’s use of language certainly was. I would read this book a second time to pay more attention to how she connects characters through word choice. In the following examples, the emphasis is mine. 

Yaw’s daughter Marjorie has an Asante name, Abronoma, which means “little dove.” The author writes:

She had always hated it when her father called her Dove. It was her special name, the nickname born with her because of her Asante name, but it had always made Marjorie feel small somehow, young and fragile. She was not small. She was not young, either. 

Later in the book, Gyasi transforms Marjorie’s African name from noun to verb when another character describes Marjorie:

He had learned not to be surprised by how forthcoming she was. How she never gave in to small talk, just dove right into deep waters.

To layer the connection even more, Gyasi has Marjorie enact this metaphor in the closing scene of the book. She dives into the ocean.

Another example of linked language:

Marjorie muses about her parents who are watching a movie:

Maybe her mother was sleeping too, her own head leaning toward Yaw’s, her long box braids a curtain, hiding their faces.

When a character later meets Marjorie at a party, Gyasi writes:

At the mention of her name, Marjorie lifted her head, the curtain of wild hair parting to reveal a lovely face and a beautiful necklace.

Gyasi scatters family clues like Hansel and Gretal, and this reader loved picking them up. Another purpose these language connections have is unifying a book that could be criticized as resembling a collection of short stories more than a novel. I experienced this primarily in the first part of the book, but in part two, more preceding characters are present in various ways, strengthening the book’s cohesiveness. That being said, each character was so richly drawn, I wanted to follow them longer. To achieve this effect sixteen times is no small feat. Gyasi could write sixteen separate books for each character. Yet she provided just enough material to grasp each person’s essence. The choices they made, the choices made for them. Who they love, who they hurt. How they love, how they fight. Their small acts of defiance and compliance. The contradictions of the human heart. Split identities. 

I had the sense Gyasi could have kept writing this story forever. When do you stop a family lineage? When does that better life materialize? It’s what every parent wishes for their child. It’s why there are Black Lives Matter protests. If Gyasi were to continue with this family tree, what would the stories of future descendants say?