"If it’s true that ‘history is written by the victors’, then fiction not only has an important role to play in retelling history from marginalised perspectives, but also in bringing it home that there are as many ‘truths’ about what happened as there were people experiencing the events."
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| Photograph by Kate Plumridge |
Her debut novel, The Wise Witch of Orkney, was published earlier this year and is now available in paperback. It tells the story of Elspet Balfour, a wise woman and healer from Orkney. Some might call her a witch:
When the king's new bride, Anna of Denmark, summons her to deliver her baby and cast a binding spell over the child, Elspet is trapped between two impossible choices - she cannot refuse the queen, and she cannot be discovered by the king. While Elspet struggles to hide her secret identity in a court that wishes her dead, another woman seeks her aid: Kitty Muirhead, outcast, persecuted and desperate to escape the shadows of her past. Kitty and the queen could not be more different, but they may be each other's salvation.
Anna is obsessed with the hidden voices of women and a compelling underdog story. Luckily, history offers plenty of these. She's inspired by the glimpses into a woman’s life we get before the historical record moves onto something considered much more important. What was happening in these gaps?
When I was asked if I wanted to include an epigraph in my debut novel, I knew exactly what my dream choice would be. But I never imagined I’d actually be granted permission to use it.
It’s a quote that inspired me enormously when I first read it, and which has influenced my whole approach to writing historical fiction.
‘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 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 get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.’
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (2016)
When I received a response saying yes, I was over the moon. Homegoing is an extraordinary book, one I’d recommend to anyone who loves well-written historical fiction.
With her writing, Gyasi performs a magic trick. Homegoing contains the stories of people separated from me by centuries, race and continents. But somehow, it’s also a book about each of us as an individual: our ancestry, unique and separate from the grand narratives of ‘history’. This is a book that prompts you to consider your own forefathers, and mothers, who you are and how you came to be the way you are (even if that is far from straightforward.)
Gyasi starts her story in Fante and Asante, in what is now Ghana, in the eighteenth century. We meet two half-sisters whose lives take very different paths as one is sold and enslaved, and the other sold to be a wife to a white slave trader. We trace eight generations forward, meeting the descendents of the sisters from these two branches of the same family.
The narrative illuminates the politics of slavery over centuries: the different ways the Fante and Asante peoples were involved and affected by it. And its lasting legacy for people in both the US and Africa.
Homegoing is essentially a book of short stories, as we are given just a snapshot of the life of one person in each generation before moving on to the next. But Gyasi has an impressive knack of finding enough to pull us quickly into each new focus.
There are some huge historical events covered: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Jim Crow segregation laws, the civil rights movement. But Gyasi is more interested in the experiences of individuals, and the subjective nature of history. “History is storytelling,” says Yaw, a teacher in Ghana in the penultimate generation of the book.
“Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe then?”
If it’s true that ‘history is written by the victors’, then fiction not only has an important role to play in retelling history from marginalised perspectives, but also in bringing it home that there are as many ‘truths’ about what happened as there were people experiencing the events. And this is what Gyasi achieves, with bells on.
I don’t claim to have been anything approaching as successful in my own writing. But her work certainly inspired me to seek out lesser-known stories from history, in my case, women we catch enticing glimpses of before the record moves onto something considered more important. I’m fascinated by what might have been happening in these gaps.
As I closed the back cover of Homegoing, I wiped tears from my face. Each of us is the product of what came before; the people and events that shaped the life we were born into. We leave the book not only with the beautiful image of people swimming in the Ghanaian sea, making peace with their heritage, but also with a renewed appreciation for the importance of the stories in our own history.
When the king's new bride, Anna of Denmark, summons her to deliver her baby and cast a binding spell over the child, Elspet is trapped between two impossible choices - she cannot refuse the queen, and she cannot be discovered by the king. While Elspet struggles to hide her secret identity in a court that wishes her dead, another woman seeks her aid: Kitty Muirhead, outcast, persecuted and desperate to escape the shadows of her past. Kitty and the queen could not be more different, but they may be each other's salvation.
Anna is obsessed with the hidden voices of women and a compelling underdog story. Luckily, history offers plenty of these. She's inspired by the glimpses into a woman’s life we get before the historical record moves onto something considered much more important. What was happening in these gaps?
When I was asked if I wanted to include an epigraph in my debut novel, I knew exactly what my dream choice would be. But I never imagined I’d actually be granted permission to use it.
It’s a quote that inspired me enormously when I first read it, and which has influenced my whole approach to writing historical fiction.
‘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 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 get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.’
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (2016)
When I received a response saying yes, I was over the moon. Homegoing is an extraordinary book, one I’d recommend to anyone who loves well-written historical fiction.
With her writing, Gyasi performs a magic trick. Homegoing contains the stories of people separated from me by centuries, race and continents. But somehow, it’s also a book about each of us as an individual: our ancestry, unique and separate from the grand narratives of ‘history’. This is a book that prompts you to consider your own forefathers, and mothers, who you are and how you came to be the way you are (even if that is far from straightforward.)
Gyasi starts her story in Fante and Asante, in what is now Ghana, in the eighteenth century. We meet two half-sisters whose lives take very different paths as one is sold and enslaved, and the other sold to be a wife to a white slave trader. We trace eight generations forward, meeting the descendents of the sisters from these two branches of the same family.
The narrative illuminates the politics of slavery over centuries: the different ways the Fante and Asante peoples were involved and affected by it. And its lasting legacy for people in both the US and Africa.
Homegoing is essentially a book of short stories, as we are given just a snapshot of the life of one person in each generation before moving on to the next. But Gyasi has an impressive knack of finding enough to pull us quickly into each new focus.
There are some huge historical events covered: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Jim Crow segregation laws, the civil rights movement. But Gyasi is more interested in the experiences of individuals, and the subjective nature of history. “History is storytelling,” says Yaw, a teacher in Ghana in the penultimate generation of the book.
“Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe then?”
If it’s true that ‘history is written by the victors’, then fiction not only has an important role to play in retelling history from marginalised perspectives, but also in bringing it home that there are as many ‘truths’ about what happened as there were people experiencing the events. And this is what Gyasi achieves, with bells on.
I don’t claim to have been anything approaching as successful in my own writing. But her work certainly inspired me to seek out lesser-known stories from history, in my case, women we catch enticing glimpses of before the record moves onto something considered more important. I’m fascinated by what might have been happening in these gaps.
As I closed the back cover of Homegoing, I wiped tears from my face. Each of us is the product of what came before; the people and events that shaped the life we were born into. We leave the book not only with the beautiful image of people swimming in the Ghanaian sea, making peace with their heritage, but also with a renewed appreciation for the importance of the stories in our own history.
Homegoing is published by Penguin.
The Wise Witch of Orkney is published by Black & White Publishing.
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