Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Yaa Gyasi will read at Prairie Lights at 7 p.m. today.
By Claire Dietz
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of the universally acclaimed Between the World and Me, called Homegoing, the début novel from Writers’ Workshop graduate Yaa Gyasi, “an inspiration.”
At 7 p.m. today, Gyasi will read from her novel, which now famously sold for upwards of $1 million shortly after she graduated from the Workshop.
The novel is described as “the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver.” It traces the generations of family who follow, as their lives lead them through two continents and 300 years of history.
Gyasi, who has been able to read since a young age, described her writing and reading as going “hand-in-hand.”
“I was always interested in writing from a young age, in particular because I was such a big reader,” she said. “I read a lot as a child, and I wanted to see if I could create the things I was reading about.”
When Gyasi came to the Workshop, she saw it as an opportunity to fully commit to her novel, which she had already begun.
She described the early stages of the book as something she “had started but never really had time to devote to.”
The novel was inspired by a trip to Ghana she took when she was 20, as a result of a fellowship she received while studying as an undergraduate at Stanford.
“While there, I happened to take a trip to the Cape Coast Castle, and I took a tour,” she said. “On this tour, I kind of began to understand what my novel was going to be about.”
While in this castle, she visited the dungeons, which she saw as something completely “indescribable.”
“It was a part of history I hadn’t heard much about,” Gyasi said. “The tour guide had mentioned a bit about how the British soldiers who lived and worked in the castle married the local women. From there he took us to see the dungeons, [which] still smell and are covered in grime, and it’s both easy and difficult to imagine what it would have been like to be kept in there.”
Her novel has its root in the stories of two half-sisters split up by the slave trade and proceeds to trace them and their lineage for more than 300 years of history. As the novel moves toward present day, the descendants of the siblings lose contact, until they no longer have any idea they are related.
Gyasi said the structure of her novel was influenced by Gabriel García Márquez’s classic One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Another author that influenced Gyasi’s life profoundly was Toni Morrison, whom she read in high school, an experience she saw as “revelatory.”
“I loved reading as a kid, but most of the work I encountered was written by white people about white people,” she said. “It was really hard for me to imagine myself having this kind of career, because no one I knew did this.
“I never really saw people who looked like me written about with the attention, and beauty, and care Morrison writes about black people. Reading her when I was 17 really kind of changed the course of my life.”