Highly recommend Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I heard about it while reading an article about Stanford’s Three Book program for incoming students. Using a line from Marjorie, this is a book you can “feel inside you”. Powerful lines:
- He didn’t understand. Even after his translator spoke to him, he didn’t understand.
- The dark brown circles of his irises looked like large pots that toddlers could drown in, and he looked at Effia just like that, as though he wanted to keep her there, in his drowning eyes.
- The curse may have been rooted in a lie, but perhaps it bore the fruit of truth.
- Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.
- “You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”
- Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
- “These people do not come from nature,” she said.
- White men smiling just meant more evil was coming with the next wave.
- Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.
- You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.”
- They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.
- He had known his grandfather only as a person knows his shadow, as a figure that is there, visible but untouchable, unknowable.
- Whether he stole, whether he lied, whether he promised alliance to the Fantes and power to the Asantes, the white man always found a way to get what he wanted.
- Maybe he’d be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.
- “All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.”
- Though she had never been there, she could sense its presence in her life. A premonition. A forward memory.
- Harlem was about the sky.
- If she did hear it, if he did come, she would close her eyes quick, and the two of them would play the game of make-believe, acting like the people onstage at the club did. Robert’s role was to slip in quietly beside her, and hers was to not question, to let him believe that she still believed in him, in them.
- In Harlem, Lenox Avenue was impossible to avoid. It was where all the dirty, ugly, righteous, and beautiful things were.
- “A poet’s got to spend more time livin’ than he does studyin’,”
- “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.”
- And the nebulous, mysterious object of his anger was his mother
- For Sonny, the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. Sonny had been trying to get away from white people for as long as he could remember, but, big as this country was, there was nowhere to go.
- He was mad at her because he didn’t have a father, and she was mad at him because he’d become as absent as his own.
- “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.” She swept her hand in front of her, as though she were trying to catch all of Harlem in it, all of New York, all of America.
- She said that those were the books that she could feel inside of her.
- It was one thing to research something, another thing entirely to have lived it. To have felt it. How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it.
The dramatic irony of that last line is unbearably beautiful.