Family
The importance of family is clear from the very structure of Homegoing, in which each chapter follows a different descendent of a mutual ancestor, Maame. Through this structure, the importance of family and upbringing can be seen in the personalities and decisions of the characters. The fact that all of the characters in the book are related to one another, particularly the characters living in the same time period in Africa and the United States, also serves to show the effects of culture on one's opportunities and expectations. For example, Quey and his son are given privileges because they are related to a white colonist on the Gold Coast, but Ness and Kojo, who live in the same time period in the United States and are also descended from a woman from the Gold Coast and a white colonist, are treated as slaves and criminals.
Relationships between parents and children are especially important in the lives of many of the characters. The importance of the bond between parent and child is shown when children reunite with their parents, which happens with Yaw and his mother Akua as well as with Sonny and his mother Willie. A variation on this motif is children turning to people they are not related to by blood as parental figures, such as Sonny turning to Eli, the joyful yet flaky father of Sonny's sister, and Kojo turning to Ma Aku, who saved him from slavery. These relationships show that family is more about love and protection than biological relationships.
Heritage
Culture heritage is an integral part of the story, both for the descendants of Maame living on the Gold Coast and for those that live in the United States. For the descendants who continue living in Africa, parts of Akan culture must be protected from Western influence. Effia, Maame's daughter who marries James Collins and lives in the Cape Coast Castle, must deal with him calling her religious practices black magic. Even with a white, foreign father, Effia's son Quey is able to integrate back into Akan culture because his mother has taught him their religion, culture, and language. Marjorie, the final descendant in this lineage, still has a strong connection to her family in Ghana and can speak Twi, the language of her ancestors.
In the United States, Maame's descendants face even larger obstacles to passing down cultural heritage. Kojo, grandson of Esi, is the last of her descendants to understand Twi or have much relationship to the Gold Coast. This is because African slaves in the United States were immersed in American culture and at times even physically punished for trying to keep parts of their culture, such as language or religion, alive. However, Marcus, the final descendant in Esi's lineage, still desires to understand his family's past and reconnect with contemporary culture in Ghana.
Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination
The fact that black people have faced, and continue to face, stereotypes and discrimination in the United States is made clear in Gyasi's portrayal of the experiences of Esi's descendants in Homegoing. Gyasi shows that even after slavery ended, stereotypes and blatant discrimination caused people of African heritage, especially those who couldn't pass for white, to face roadblocks when looking for jobs (as shown in Willie's chapter) or simply trying to live free and happy lives (as shown in Kojo and H's chapters). Even in Marjorie and Marcus's final chapters, Gyasi shows that prejudice and stereotypes limit relationships between white and black people in the 21st century.
Gyasi also shows that discrimination, especially based on appearance, happens in many communities, even those in which everyone has the same skin color. Effia's descendants, who remain in Africa, meet prejudice based on their family history and appearance. James is judged for being part of a family working in the slave trade, and his daughter Abena is in turn judged for her father's inability to grow crops. With regard to appearance, both Akua and Yaw are discriminated against for their burn scars. The way most of this discrimination is shown in Effia's lineage is through characters not being able to marry; for example, Yaw does not marry until late in his life because people think the ugliness of his burned face will be passed on to his children.
The Importance of Names
There are many points in the story where names play an important role. A name is usually given to a person by their parents, and often a name can show elements of the culture one is from. The names in Homegoing can show links between people and events as well as the way names others call a person can affect their emotions and reputation.
Gyasi uses multiple names to draw connections between characters. For example, Kojo is a traditional Akan name meaning "Monday-born" that is seen briefly in the beginning of the story as the name of Esi's father's eldest son. Later in the book, there is an entire chapter devoted to a man named Kojo who is the grandson of Effia, the separated sister of Esi. Kojo's name, in contrast to the name of his wife Anna, reveals his connection to his African ancestors. This makes sense since Anna was born in Baltimore to parents who were likely trying to distance her from her heritage to keep her safe, while Kojo's parents were both born in Africa and still felt pride about and connection to Akan culture and language.
In Homegoing, names also reflect how a person is perceived socially. Akua has many names in her life, each showing the way she is seen by others, which in turn influences her self-perception and personality. The missionary who raises her gives her an English name, Deborah, which is the first name she learns how to write. When she marries Asamoah and moves to his village, she returns to her given name, and her children with Asamoah are given Akan names as well. However, the village soon comes to call her Crazy Woman and her husband Crippled Man. These derisive nicknames prevent people from seeing them as complex people with traumatic pasts, and almost leads to the village killing Akua rather than helping her. Yaw finds that his mother Akua is still called Crazy Woman even decades later, when she has been living with only a house girl and not bothering anyone. Her house girl calls her another nickname, Old Woman, which is what people call her later when she moves to Cape Coast. Marjorie, her granddaughter who adores her, later calls her Old Lady, a similar but perhaps gentler moniker. A reader can follow the path of Akua's life through these names given to her by others. The shift from being called Crazy Woman to Old Woman to Old Lady is especially telling because it shows shifts in others' perception rather than a shift in Akua's own behavior or identity.
History
As a piece of historical fiction, one strong theme in Homegoing is undoubtedly history itself. However, this is drawn out even further by Gyasi's characters' preoccupation with the way history is recorded, passed down, and remembered. Two particularly important chapters where the theme of history arises are "Yaw" and "Marcus."
In Yaw's chapter, the son of Abena whose face was disfigured when his mother burned their hut in her sleep teaches his class about history, saying, "history is storytelling" (p.237). What he means by this, he explains, is that anyone who was not present for a certain part of history is told the story of what happened, and the perspective and even events in the story may be altered by who is telling it. Often, history is told by the winners or privileged party at the time, such as the history of colonization in Africa and other parts of the world being told by the West.
The theme is furthered in Marcus's chapter since he studies history as a graduate student at Stanford. He is attempting to study the history of his family, but he feels stuck because of how he must keep pushing back further and further in history to untangle the roots of their struggles in the United States and the way these problems still affect him and his friends in the 21st century.
Taking Yaw and Marcus's ideas about history together, one can understand Gyasi's purpose in writing Homegoing: helping the reader understand the way African and African-American history has been told largely from Western perspectives, and missing the nuance of individual stories.
Scars
Many characters have physical scars in Homegoing, and perhaps all of them have psychological scars marking the traumas that they and their family members have incurred. Gyasi uses physical scars to show family connections and further the theme of discrimination by showing prejudice based on a factor other than race.
In Ness's chapter, scars play a large factor. When Ness is living on a plantation as a young woman, she is married to a fellow slave named Sam. He initially rebels against his masters, and one time Ness is whipped brutally for his actions. After this, Sam reforms his ways, and the scars that form after he helps her to heal mark their relationship with one another. Ness and Sam soon have a child, and a woman helps them plan how to run away. When they are caught running away, Ness is whipped again, even worse than before, and Sam is killed. This time, Ness's scars mark the end of their relationship and the failure of their attempt at freedom. Furthermore, Ness's scars are later used to discriminate against her; Ness is almost made a house slave, a less physically taxing job, at a new plantation, but when the master sees the scars, he decides that she is too awful to look at and that she must be a bad slave to have gotten them. This decision based on Ness's scars shows the deep injustice of the system of slavery and how easy it is for someone in power to use another person's physical appearance to discriminate against them.
Two more chapters that use scars to link two characters and demonstrate appearance-based discrimination are "Akua" and "Yaw." Akua, Yaw's mother, had trouble sleeping because she was plagued with dreams about a fire woman. This eventually led to her lighting her family's hut on fire while asleep, killing her two daughters and injuring her son. Yaw grew up with permanent scars from being burned, the most prominent of which were on his face. His village paid money for him to be sent away, and he did exceedingly well in his studies and eventually became a teacher. However, throughout his education he had social and romantic trouble because people thought his scars were somehow contagious or hereditary. Even as an adult, Yaw had to explain his scars to every new class of students and deal with the horror and curiosity of people on the street. However, when Yaw finally decided to visit his mother Akua, he is instantly recognized in his village because of his scars, and he feels a great connection with his mother when he sees her burned hands. When she touches her burned hands, soft with age, to Yaw's burned face, the complexity of his feelings makes him weep. Akua and Yaw's matching scars show a deep connection between their lives that Yaw could never escape, even by leaving his family and village for so much of his life, and his relationships with Esther and his mother, who both love him even with his scars, deepen once Yaw is able to accept their love.
Gender Inequality
While the major inequality Gyasi examines in Homegoing is racial inequality, gender and gender inequality are also major themes in the text. Gyasi herself has the experience of being a black, Ghanaian woman living in 21st century United States society, a society that still does not give equal treatment to women or people of color. Since Homegoing spans over three centuries, the gender roles and unequal treatment of women is much stronger in the first chapters in the book.
Both of Maame's daughters' lives are affected by being women, which allows them to be controlled by men. Esi is captured by white and African men, put in a dungeon with other women waiting to be sold into slavery, raped, and sent to the United States against her will. Her female descendants must deal with forced marriage, absent fathers, and difficulty finding jobs due largely to their gender. Effia, Maame's other daughter, is married to a white man because of the money it will bring her family; even if she hadn't been married to a white man, she would have become one of the wives of a man from her tribe and spent her days cooking and raising children. Her female descendants, who live in Africa from the 18th through 20th centuries, depend on marriage and motherhood to shape their lives. Even Marjorie, the last descendant in Effia's lineage, is respected by her teachers but not by many of her peers in school because of the intersection of her race and gender.
Womanhood is also shown in a positive light at times, since motherhood and sisterhood are strong positive themes in the story. However, the structure of Gyasi's story and the way women are portrayed in the final two chapters show Gyasi's criticism of the state of gender politics in the United States today.
