“This Ain’t the Way It’s S’posed to Be”: Negotiating Trauma Through Postmemory and Implication in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the negotiation of the traumas of slavery and its legacies in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) deviates from traditional trauma literature in terms of its form and content. Gyasi’s novel is shown to be structured as a postmemorial family saga, allowing it to highlight the transgenerational and transtemporal effects of trauma in a way that differs markedly from the modernist aesthetics prescribed by traditional trauma theory. Homegoing features a confrontational approach, as it represents trauma directly and explicitly, whilst positioning the reader and several characters as implicated subjects. The novel moreover shows itself attuned to the complexities of trauma by featuring cases of insidious trauma and emphasising how traumas may be rooted in structural issues.


Introduction
This paper addresses the negotiation of the traumas of slavery and its legacies in Yaa Gyasi's début novel Homegoing (2016). 1 My analysis has two foci: firstly, I read the novel as a postmemorial family saga concerned with the transgenerational and transtemporal effects of trauma. Subsequently, I discuss what I call the confrontational narrative strategies of the novel by centring on its apparent rejection of trauma as unspeakable, its conceptualisation of trauma as both event-based and insidious, and, finally, its positioning of the reader and several characters as implicated subjects. In so doing, my analysis adds to the growing body of scholarship concerned with postcolonial traumas traditionally marginalised or neglected in literary trauma studies and provides further insight in a novel which has hitherto received limited scholarly attention.
Homegoing traces the lives of two separated half-sisters (Effia and Esi) and their descendants from the eighteenth up until the twenty-first century through a protagonistper-chapter set-up, resulting in a total of fourteen narratives set, often alternately, in West Africa (Fanteland, the Asante Empire, present-day Ghana) and the United been overlooked or neglected, with traditional literary trauma studies primarily focusing on the Holocaust. 11 Additionally, in terms of its conceptualisation of trauma, traditional trauma theory as formulated by Cathy Caruth in the 1990s has received considerable criticism from a postcolonial angle. 12 My paper responds to both these issues by analysing a novel that addresses distinctly postcolonial issues, as well as through its application of recently developed concepts in literary trauma studies. Moreover, by examining the novel on the levels of both content and aesthetics, my analysis responds to a tendency in postcolonial literary studies to neglect the aesthetic qualities of texts in favour of solely considering their political elements. 13 In what follows, I discuss the way Homegoing deviates from what Stef Craps calls "normative trauma aesthetics" by centring on its form and content. 14 In this sense, this paper follows in the footsteps of other recent scholarly endeavours that consider cultural engagements which do not fit the mould of the "general trauma aesthetic". 15 After discussing the theoretical framework, the first part of my analysis examines the structure of the novel by centring on the way family functions as a narrative strategy for voicing trauma. I argue that Gyasi's novel can be seen as a postmemorial family saga because of its use of chronologically tracing family bloodlines as a means to approach the transgenerational transmission of traumas. I subsequently address how Homegoing takes what I call a confrontational approach to the traumas caused by slavery and its legacies. I specifically focus on the way the novel positions its characters and the reader as what Michael Rothberg (2014) calls implicated subjects. What my reading claims is that Homegoing offers a heterodox engagement with the postcolonial traumas of slavery and its legacies. In other words, the novel approaches these traumas in a non-normative way, deviating from traditional trauma literature. My analysis argues that the novel achieves this both through its conceptualisation as well as representation of trauma, resulting in a novel seemingly intent on catalysing a process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or working through the past, regarding slavery and its legacies 16 As a trauma fiction, Gyasi's novel emphasises the value of adopting "a more complex and inclusive" approach to trauma and its literary representations, 17 and as such, is a case in point against the "prescribing [of] a fixed aesthetics that results in dogma". 18 Employing a blend of (West) African-and American narrative strategies, Homegoing is notable for its explicit and confrontational approach; its implication of both Western and African readers in the history and legacies of slavery is what distinguishes the novel from other literature addressing these issues. 11 See e.g. Bennett and Kennedy,World Memory;Bond and Craps,Trauma;Rothberg,"Decolonizing Trauma Studies". 12 See e.g. Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing; Mengel and Borzaga, Introduction; Pérez-Zapata, Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma; Rothberg, "Decolonizing Trauma Studies"; Visser, "Trauma and Power in Postcolonial Literary Studies". 13 Bertacco, "Postcolonial Literatures and Disrespected Literatures?", 4; Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 1; Toivanen, Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures, 19.

Traditional Trauma Aesthetics
To begin with, I will address in more detail three key features of traditional trauma literature in order to set up the subsequent analysis of Gyasi's novel, which is structured around these three characteristics. They are the what Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy call the "surprisingly prescriptive" preference for modernist aesthetics as allegedly uniquely suited to representing trauma, the conceptualisation of trauma as an individual and event-based experience, and the general positioning of the reader. 19 As scholars such as Bennett and Kennedy (2003), Luckhurst (2008), Mandel (2006), Meretoja (2020), and Nadal and Calvo (2014) have noted, what Craps refers to as the "formalist aesthetic" of the traditional trauma literature is based on a two-pronged foundation drawing on early trauma theory. 20 Firstly, traditional literary trauma theory argues that modernist narrative strategies of fragmentation and aporia best reflect the psychic effects of trauma, an argument which generally draws upon the view of Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist whose influence is palpable in Caruth's early work on trauma. 21 "An experience that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge", Craps summarises the argument, "will best be represented by a failure of narrative. Hence, what is called for is the disruption of conventional modes of representation, such as can be found in modernist art". 22 A major point of contention is the Eurocentric outlook of this view, particularly given how modernism was very much represented as "a centerpiece of Western high culture". 23 Another key factor in the prescription of modernist aesthetics is the, also Western, notion that to represent trauma in a realist manneror "pretending" to do so 24would be ethically problematic. Hanna Meretoja asserts that "[u]nderlying Caruth's argumentation, like that of many other poststructuralist thinkers, is the idea that narrative is ethically problematic … insofar as it is a form of understanding and that it has ethical potential insofar as it disrupts understanding". 25 Paraphrasing Hayden White, Bennett and Kennedy note that the ethical concerns of the traditional paradigm stem from the view that "[r]epresentations that take the form of narrative realism tend to fetishize events, and provide a false sense of mastery", a notion Meretoja refers to as "conceptual appropriation". 26 Given how modernist aesthetics explicitly disrupt any sense of a coherent narrative, the traditional trauma paradigm poses it as the only suitable form of trauma representation.
Why should a modernist text, the product of a European cultural tradition, provide the paradigmatic form for representing and remembering traumatic events? … [W]here do the traumas of colonization, and the texts that bear witness to them, fit in relation to the concept of the "modernist event"? 28 The preference for modernist aesthetics and the "Eurocentric biases" of traditional trauma theory have led to a strikingly homogenous, that is, almost exclusively Western, trauma canon, which leaves little room for "realist, engaged trauma texts often coming from Africa and other non-Western parts of the world". 29 Bennett and Kennedy go as far as to argue that "[i]n some cases, texts are being selected for study on the basis of how well they illustrate theories of trauma and memory", causing texts that do not fit the modernist mould disregarded despite their "fresh insights". 30 Aware of this problem, Roger Luckhurst suggests a focus on "narrative possibility" by approaching cultural representations of trauma more broadly, beyond the "narrow canon". 31 This paper follows up on Luckhurst's cue by focusing on a novel which falls outside of the traditional parameters of a trauma novel.
Another major feature of traditional theorisations of trauma is its view of trauma "only as a shattering, punctual event". 32 As Lucy Bond and Stef Craps point out, this traditional "punctual or event-based model" fails to consider "the supra-individual conditions that enable the traumatic abuse, such as political oppression, social exclusion, and economic deprivation". 33 Consequently, several scholars have stressed the need to consider not only the punctual traumatic event, but also the contexts in which it is embedded. 34 Additionally, an event-based view on trauma does not account for traumas that are inflicted non-punctually as the result of, for example, structural oppression or (repeated) quotidian experiences. Insidious traumaa term coined by Maria Root (1992) and developed by Laura Brown (2008) has emerged as the most prominent concept to account for non-punctual trauma, answering "the need to supplement the event-based model … with a model that can account for ongoing, everyday forms of traumatizing violence". 35 Referring to Root, Brown points out that while quotidian encounters may not be traumatising in isolation, the accumulation of repeated "microaggressions" may ultimately result in "fullblown posttraumatic stress". 36 Craps adds that, in the case of racism, insidious trauma can also occur through encounters that are less explicitly hurtful than verbal attacks: overt racism has largely been replaced with more covert, subtle, ambiguous and complex racist incidents operating at institutional and cultural levels. Racism nowadays typically takes the form of daily microaggressions such as being denied promotions, home mortgages, or business loans; being a target of a security guard; being stopped in traffic; or seeing one's group portrayed in a stereotypical manner in the media. 37 28 Kennedy and Wilson, "Constructing Shared Histories", 125. 29 Garloff, "Transcultural Empathy", 112-13. 30 Bennett and Kennedy, World Memory, 10. 31 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 89 (emphasis original). 32 Kaakinen, "Reading Literatures of Trauma in the Age of Globalization", 264. 33 Bond and Craps, Trauma, 108. 34 Bond and Craps, Trauma; Craps, "Beyond Eurocentrism"; Pérez Zapata, "Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma"; Rothberg, Preface. 35 Rothberg, "Decolonizing Trauma Studies", 226. 36 Brown, Cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy 103-4.
The forms of racism Craps describes and the concept of insidious trauma evoke Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence, particularly in the way it corresponds to his description of the concept as "an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all … incremental and accretive". 38 The concept of insidious trauma allows for the acknowledgement of non-punctual traumas, and thereby functions as an important tool for addressing and discussing the traumatic effects of racism, inherently related to slavery and its legacies. As my analysis shows, Homegoing incorporates both punctual and insidious trauma, thereby showing itself to be attuned to what Buelens et al. refer to as the "messy complexities of trauma" and prompting us to reconceptualise trauma into a more expansive and inclusive concept. 39 The third and final characteristic of traditional trauma texts I discuss here concerns the positioning of the reader. As Craps notes, traditional trauma texts typically place the reader as an emphatic listener or psychiatrist, with the author or fictional character taking up the role of a patient telling their story. 40 The traditional emphasis on the narrator as trauma victim leaves little room for agency, as it "supposedly obviates any need for critical self-reflection regarding [the reader's] own implication in ongoing practices of oppression and denial", thereby leaving "no place" for making a political intervention. 41 The traditional positioning of the reader, with the fictional character in the role of the victim, is closely related to the victimperpetrator binary evident in trauma studies, with the field traditionally focusing exclusively on the former; engaging with what Bond and Craps call "in-between groups", or, especially, perpetrators has long been a taboo subject. 42 In Michael Rothberg's view, this is largely caused by a category error in which the status of victim is taken to mean the same as "traumatized person". 43 Bond and Craps argue that "a responsible trauma theory would … recogniz[e] the specific experiences of various in-between groups with complicated levels of guilt and complicity such as bystanders, beneficiaries, collaborators, forced perpetrators", etc, thereby addressing the grey area inherently created by the binary. 44 In my analysis, I argue that Homegoing addresses this issue through its inclusion of implicated subjects. Rothberg's concept of the implicated subject offers a means to nuance the victimperpetrator binary. He describes implicated subjects as neither victims nor perpetrators nor passive bystanders. Rather, they occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm. Implicated subjects contribute to, inhabit, inherit or benefit fromin short, are implicated inregimes of violence and domination, but do not originate or control such regimes. 45 In going beyond the traditional binary, the concept of the implicated subject contributes to the (re)development of literary trauma studies by providing an insightful angle from which to approach the way historical traumas reverberate into the present. Rothberg argues that the concept "can help illuminate a wide range of social and political struggles" 37 Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 26. 38 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2. 39 Buelens, Durrant, and Eaglestone, Introduction, 1. 40 Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 41-2. 41 Ibid., 42. 42 Bond and Craps, Trauma, 124; McGlothlin, "Perpetrator Trauma", 100. 43 Rothberg, "Decolonizing Trauma Studies", 231. 44 Bond and Craps, Trauma, 124. 45 Rothberg, "Trauma and the Implicated Subject", 201 (emphasis original). and "has a particular affinity to questions of race and racism". 46 Indeed, apart from making an attempt at covering the ambiguous space between victim and perpetrator, the concept of the implicated subject is attuned to the role of contextual factors relevant in the infliction of traumastructural social, political, or economic issueswhich have long been overlooked. 47 Following the above description and discussion of three major features of traditional trauma aesthetics, the following analyses will illustrate that Homegoing provides a heterodox approach to the literary representation of trauma, which mirrors recent (re)developments in the literary trauma studies.

A Postmemorial Family Saga
In this section, I examine how the form of Homegoing differs from traditional trauma aesthetics by considering the central role of family. Before its narrative proper, Homegoing opens with two paratextual elements. An Akan proverb ("Abusua te sɛ kwaɛ: sɛ wo wɔ akyire a wo hunu sɛ ɛbom; sɛ wo bɛn ho a na wo hunu sɛ nnua no bia sisi ne baabi nko. / The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position"), and a family tree. 48 Both establish family as a key element in the novel. 49 Indeed, family plays a major part in Homegoing in terms of both its subject matter and form. The novel is structured as a "multigenerational family saga" and corresponds with Maame's family tree, as it chronologically follows its branches, resulting in the linear presentation of fourteen narratives. 50 Family has been a common theme in anglophone postcolonial literature. 51 Irene Visser argues that, as a narrative strategy, family can facilitate a wide array of purposes, from narratives emphasising cultural "continuity and growth", to accommodating "themes of conflict and reconciliation". 52 Meanwhile, Astrid Erll notes that family has played an increasingly important role in post-2000 black British literature, as it has explored questions of "generation, genealogy, and genetics" offering "roads into the memories of a postcolonial and immigrant society". 53 Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) is an oft-cited example in this regard. 54 Similarly, family is employed as "the prism of history" throughout Andrea Levy's oeuvre. 55 Michelle P. Stewart notes that family also plays a major role in the way key African American novels such as Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) explore slavery and its aftereffects. 56 Moreover, family, kinship, and questions of descent have a significant and ambiguous connection with slavery, with "ad hoc family-making" 57 during slavery functioning as "a technology of both colonialism and anticolonial resistance". 58 While works such as 46 Ibid., 2. 47 Pérez Zapata, Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma, 5. 48 Gyasi, Homegoing, n.p. 49 Heinz, "Beyond Sedentarism and Nomadology", 126. 50 Gallego, "Sexuality and Healing in the African Diaspora", 7. 51 Mari, "Running In (and Out) the Family", 85; Visser, Introduction, 5. 52 Visser, Introduction, 5. 53 Erll, "Fictions of Generational Memory", 111. 54 Erll, "Fictions of Generational Memory", 112; Pérez Zapata, Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma, 13; Stein, Black British Literature, xi. 55 McLeod, "July's People", 170. 56 Stewart, "Moynihan's 'Tangle of Pathology'", 250. 57 McLeod, "July's People", 172. 58 Adair, Kinship Across the Black Atlantic, 2. (2007) emphasise the suffering caused by a lack of familial connections, studies such as Jessica Marie Johnson's Wicked Flesh (2020) illustrate the empowering effects of kinships produced under slavery. Through its structure as a family saga, Homegoing thus adopts a narrative strategy often used in postcolonialand black fiction, which moreover has particular bearing on its subject matter.

Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother
Homegoing uses family as a narrative strategy for explicitly exploring the traumas of slavery and its "afterli[ves]"to use Hartman's term. 59 The novel displays parallels with postcolonial works such as Kamila Shamsie's Salt and Saffron (2000), a novel which, Jopi Nyman argues, uses "historical traumas to construct a family history". 60 While Shamsie's novel is informed by the Partition of India, Homegoing is structured around the traumas of slavery and its legacies, tracing "the trail of trauma reinvented" across hundreds of years. 61 The linear movement across time allows Gyasi's novel to make explicit the way the historical trauma of slavery reverberates into the present day and contrasts markedly with modernist aesthetics in which time does not function linearly. Correspondingly, Mikić notes that Homegoing provides the reader with "a means of comprehending the effects and affects of slavery, colonialism, and institutionalized racism" 62an element of the novel which Koegler views might benefit those "decidedly underserved by the current education system". 63 The potentially didactic qualities of Gyasi's novel, which are facilitated by its structure, strengthen the socio-political engagement of the novel.
Up to a certain level, Gyasi's novel is reminiscent of Morrison's fiction, in which "slavery and its repercussions" are frequently explored by focusing on "dysfunctional families". 64 However, Homegoing differs from works such as The Bluest Eye (1970) or Beloved (1987) in that the family it revolves around is not always self-destructive as a consequence of the traumas it has suffered. While slavery and its legacies are shown to potentially result in devastating actions such as Akua accidentally killing two of her children, or Willie losing her husband as result of his "passing" for white, Homegoing also depicts family as a source of good and strength. Marcus, for example, has a good relationship with his father, Sonny, whom he clearly looks up to, despite Sonny's past as a drug addict. Meanwhile, the previously troubled Akua ultimately plays a crucial role in the lives of her son Yaw and granddaughter Marjorie. To Yaw, she is a source of strength and support; for Marjorie, she functions as a spiritual mentor, resembling the sort of female "culture-bearer and healer" Gay Wilentz identifies as common in African societies. 65 The family connection between the charactersintegral to a family sagaallows for the novel to progress linearly and to explore trauma individually, as well as transgenerationally and relationally. In this sense, Gyasi's novel lends its structure from the way individual memory is always embedded in family memory; through family, the life of the individual is "prolonged after death" as deceased family members are "remembered, memorialized". 66 Apart from the will to remember one's ancestors, Homegoing also 59 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6. 60 Nyman, Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction, 124. 61 Gyasi, interview by Kate Kellaway. 62 Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, 101. 63 Koegler, "Memorializing African Being and Becoming in the Atlantic World", 378. 64 Stewart, "Moynihan's 'Tangle of Pathology'", 250. 65 Wilentz, Healing Narratives, 28. exploits the natural "overlap" between family members 67the "different experiences, stories, and destinies" exchanged between them which make up what Jan Assmann refers to as communicative memory. 68 The novel utilises the communicative memory that takes place between members of Maame's family tree to express the notion that traumatic memories can be passed down. The way certain traumas in the novel run in the family evokes Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, a concept which, although developed in relation to the Holocaust, is highly applicable to Homegoing. Hirsch defines postmemory as the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to experiences they "remember" only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. 69 An encounter in "Marcus" illustrates the functioning of postmemory in Homegoing. Marcus relates how he got separated from his class during a trip to the museum in elementary school. He remembers "standing there, paralyzed and quietly crying", as he was eventually found by "an elderly white couple". 70 This encounter seemingly results in a traumatic experience: The man … was carrying a slender cane, and he tapped at Marcus's foot with it. 'You lost, boy?' Marcus didn't speak. 'I said, you lost?' The cane kept hitting at his foot, and for a second Marcus had felt as though at any moment the man would lift the cane all the way up toward the ceiling and send it crashing over his head. 71 Despite being only a child and having not personally experienced white aggression the way his ancestors did, Marcus is nevertheless overwhelmed by a terrible fear, describing that "[h]e couldn't guess why he felt that way, but it had scared him so badly, he could start to feel a wet stream traveling down his pant legs". 72 Given how, earlier on, Homegoing focuses on the fearful experiences of Marcus's ancestors with white men, the novel seems to suggest that Marcus's fear was passed onto him through his ancestors, particularly seeing how the language used by the man in the museuma space not incidentally related to colonial memorymirrors racist discourse from the past. In addition, Mikić notes how Marcus's involuntary urinating mirrors a passage in "Esi", Marcus's ancestor, in which "she feels another woman's pee traveling down her legs" whilst being held in the Cape Coast Castle dungeons. 73 The encounter in the museum moreover evokes Achille Mbembe's notion of the occurrence of temporal entanglement in the period he refers to as "postcolony", an age which "encloses multiple durées" that "overlay one another, interpenetrate one another and envelop one another". 74 66 A. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, 10. 67 Ibid., 10. 68 J. Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory", 111. 69 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5 (emphasis original). 70 Gyasi, Homegoing, 288. 71 Ibid., 288-9. 72 Ibid., 289. 73 Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing",110. 74 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.
Marcus's fearful encounter is linked to "Ness", where, as Mikić notes, a slave owner's son wields a cane at the eponymous protagonist of the chapter. 75 This connection further strengthens the implied connection between Marcus's fear and his ancestors, as well as Mbembe's notion of entanglement. As Ness is five generations removed from Marcus, the link between the two exceeds the boundaries of communicative memorywhich is limited to "the time span of three interacting generations" 76and instead mirrors Gyasi's view that "trauma is inheritable" in a more biological sense 77 . Correspondingly, Mikić argues that "Marcus's inexplicable experience of fear in the museum is triggered by an epigenetic memory inherited from his ancestors" 78 . Another passage in "Marcus" also touches upon the limits of communicative memory; it expresses Marcus's will to go beyond its boundaries and discusses the way traumas of passed family members trickle down to later generations: He had only heard tell of his great-grandpa H [a victim of the convict leasing system] from Ma Willie, but those stories were enough to make him weep and to fill him with pride. Two-Shovel H they had called him. But what had they called his father or his father before him? What of the mothers? They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham [Alabama] now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point. 79 The passage mirrors Hirsch's concept of postmemory by mentioning the effect stories about his ancestors have on Marcus. Moreover, it could be argued that the final phrase of the excerpt metafictionally emphasises "the point" of Homegoing as a whole. Indeed, Marcus's aforementioned dissertation appears to function as a double for the novel, a feature also observed by Mikić. 80 One passage, for example, reads that "what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been part of something that stretched so far back, as so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget". 81 Similarly, Homegoing captures the passing of time through its narrative structure in its attempt to ensure that the traumatic suffering of those affected by slavery and its legacies is not forgotten. By focusing on the experiences of Maame's descendants, Homegoing functions as what Hirsch calls a "[p]ostmemorial work": a text which "strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression". 82 The explicitly political aspect of the postmemorial work connects to the other ways in which Homegoing actively addresses contemporary issues to be addressed later in this paper.
The incident in the museum is far from the only way in which postmemory functions in Homegoing. A way in which regularly comes to the fore is through the recurring fear of either fire or water. (Fire on Effia's side of the family tree, for their involvement in the slave trade, water on Esi's side, due to suffering the Middle Passage). To Marjorie and Marcus, the two most contemporary characters in the novel, the precise origins of 75 Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing",109. 76 J. Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory", 111. 77 Gyasi, interview by Kate Kellaway. 78 Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing", 110. 79 Gyasi, Homegoing, 296. 80 Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing", 112. 81 Gyasi, Homegoing, 295. 82 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 33 (emphasis original). their fear of fire and water, respectively, is largely unclear. The reader, having read the stories of their ancestors, however, is aware that both fears are connected to slavery and family. Stories told by family members play a key role in the transmission of traumatic postmemories, and the transgenerational fears of fire and water are good illustrations of this.
The fear of fire features most prominently in "Akua", who repeatedly suffers nightmares of a "firewoman holding two babies to her heart". 83 The repeating nightmares ultimately drive her to kill two of her childrenher two daughtersin a dream-like state, while scarring her son, Yaw. DeLinda Marzette reads Akua's filicide as the novel "follow [ing] a noteworthy line of maternal figures by black women writers who decidedly slay their children", such as Morrison's Beloved and Sula (1973), and questions the "confounding" motivation behind Akua's "sacrifice [of] her daughters". 84 However, it is crucial to note that, in contrast to the intertextual examples Marzette lists, the death of Akua's daughters is anything but intentional. Akua kills her daughters whilst in a sort of trance, dreaming of the firewoman, and their deaths can therefore be seen as accidental rather than as a conscious decision. Indeed, as Marzette herself notes, Akua is "genuinely perplexed to find that she has burned her two daughters […] to death". 85 As will be discussed later, the filicide in Homegoing relates to implication in slavery, in contrast to Beloved, where it is a mother's desperate attempt to enable her daughter to avoid slavery.
The reader is aware that the firewoman is a reference to Maame, who lost both of her daughters (first Effia, then Esi, both through events related to the slave trade), with the stepsisters' family trees separated as a result. Later, in his own chapter, Yaw asks his mother to tell him "the story of how I got my scar", to which Akua answers: "[h]ow can I tell you the story of your scar without first telling you the story of my dreams? And how do I tell about my dreams without talking about my family? Our family?". 86 Her answer underscores the major role of family in passing down (traumatic) memories. In Yaw's case, this memory is memorialised through the embodied metaphor of the scar. The fear of fire ultimately trickles down to Marjorie, who, "[e]ver since she had heard the story of how her father [Yaw] and grandmother [Akua] got their scars … had been terrified of fire". 87 Marjorie has no direct reason to fear fire, yet through traumatic postmemories, the fear of the element is instilled in her to such an extent that she, for example, at one point asks someone to stop playing with a cigarette lighter. 88 Similarly, Marcus's fear of water is influenced by his father, Sonny, who "told him that black people didn't like water because they were brought over on slave ships. What did a black man want to swim for? The ocean floor was already littered with black men". 89 Sonny's explanation for his son's fear draws a clear connection between black identity, diaspora, and the middle passage. This evokes concepts such as Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993) or Figueroa-Vásquez's Afro Atlantic (2020). Five generations before Marcus, Ness was told "bedtime stories … about what Esi used to call 'the Big Boat'" and "would fall asleep to the images of men being thrown into the Atlantic Ocean like anchors attached 83 Gyasi, Homegoing, 177. 84 Marzette, "Children of Fire and Water", 105. 85 Ibid., 105. 86 Gyasi, Homegoing, 240. 87 Ibid., 274. 88 Ibid., 274. 89 Ibid., 284.
to nothing: no land, no people, no worth", again highlighting the Black Diaspora. 90 Because of the way Homegoing is structured in accordance with Maame's family tree, postmemories become particularly effective in demonstrating how past traumasand stories told about themmay affect later generations through family connections.
Rather than categorisations of the novel as a "neo-slave narrative" 91a "generic categorization" that might only be applicable to its early chapters 92 -I suggest that Homegoing is best described as what Alison Ribeiro de Menezes calls a "postmemorial family saga", as it employs the family tiesin terms of communicative memory and genealogyinherent to the genre to articulate the effects of trauma and its legacies across time, and to reiterate their relevance to present-day society. 93

A Confrontational Approach
This part of my analysis addresses what I call a more confrontational approach to trauma in Homegoing. I focus on the diverse ways in which this confrontational style in Gyasi's novel deviates from traditional trauma literature, by centring on its direct approach and rejection of "the unspeakable", 94 its overt representation of the rooting of trauma in structural issues and its manifestation as insidious trauma, and its positioning of the reader, alongside several characters, as an implicated subject.
Although the protagonist-per-chapter set-up of the novel causes Homegoing to be inherently fragmented, this fragmentation is different from that envisaged by the traditional trauma paradigm. Fragmentation in Gyasi's novel comes purely as a result of the set-up of the novel, not as a disruptive force of "textual indecidability or unreadability". 95 In contrast to traditional modernist trauma aesthetics, then, fragmentation thus does not occur as a result of trauma and its supposedly shattering effects, but rather as a means to explicitly highlight trauma, as each character/chapter of the novel negotiates a specific issue related to slavery or one of its legacies. The family ties between the characters and the linear progression down the family tree provide coherence and continuity, features which are not associated with traditional trauma novels. 96 By refusing to employ modernist aesthetics to challenge the reader's understanding of the text and the events at hand, Gyasi's novel rejects traditional theorisations of the representation of trauma which, as Meretoja points out, view trauma as "fundamentally unrepresentable, unsayable and unspeakable". 97 Similarly, Michelle Balaev notes that "the classic [trauma] model" views trauma as "the ultimate unrepresentable". 98 Conversely, in Homegoing, the traumas and suffering of its characters are foregrounded and made explicit, rather than obscured and continuously hinted at and implied. Here, 90 Ibid., 70. See Landry "'Black Is Black is Black?'", 136-45 and Motahane, Nyambi, and Makombe, "Rooting Routes to Trans-Atlantic African Identities", 24-8, for analyses of the way Homegoing addresses diasporic issues. 91 Asempasah, Aba Sam, and Azagsizua Abelumkemah, "A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016) and Kwakuvi Azasu's The Slave Raiders (2004)", 5; Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing",101. 92 Carpio, Lauging Fit to Kill,139. 93 Ribeiro de Menezes, Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain, 69. 94 Mandel, Against the Unspeakable, 4. 95 Bond and Craps, Trauma, 53. 96 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 91. 97 Meretoja, "Philosophies of Trauma", 24. 98 Balaev, "Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered", 5.
Gyasi's novel deviates significantly from Beloved, which has been read as representative of more traditional approaches to trauma because of its narrative strategies of "avoidance, delay and evasion" 99 ; Homegoing, by contrast, is markedly direct, explicit, and to-thepoint. In Gyasi's novel, the traumas of its characters are "historically and politically situated" 100 and directly representable, as opposed to "nonhistorical" and inaccessible. 101 Homegoing resembles Chris Abani 's GraceLand (2004) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) in this regardnovels which, as Amy Novak asserts, "dispel the myth of trauma's unrepresentability". 102 Indeed, Gyasi's novel displays parallels with West African trauma fictions in which "there is no sense that the events, however awful, are actually incomprehensible". 103 Robert Eaglestone reads Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (2007) and Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005) as exemplars of texts where "there is a real sense that there can be comprehension, that a story must be told and can and should be grasped by others", a feature which he suggests might be traced to the "burning political need" to recognise the suffering these narratives bring to the fore. 104 Homegoing can be regarded as similarly direct and politically engaged, as its explicit approach "invests the horrors of the past with urgent immediacy", as Koegler points out. 105 An example of this is when Williewhose father, H, was a victim of the convict leasing system, and whose son, Sonny, is a drug addictexplicitly condemns the injustice of slavery and its legacies: White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can't be with they kids … Alls I can think is this ain't the way it's s'posed to be. 106 The individual traumas experienced by the protagonist of each chapter appear emblematic for larger traumas; these larger traumas symbolised through the characters are perhaps best referred to as cultural trauma, though trauma studies is yet to find an uncontested and clearly defined concept to attest for the way trauma can be experienced beyond the individual. 107 Similar to Nyman's analysis of Salt and Saffron, Homegoing employs the family as a means to connect "the political to the personal". 108 This corresponds with Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué's observation of a frequent "blurring" of "cultural and personal trauma" in anglophone postcolonial literatures as a narrative strategy to engage with "cultural and ethnic traumas". 109 Seeing how the characters in Gyasi's novel share Ghanaian heritage, the novel also to some extent seems to draw upon the trope of the family as "analogous" with the nation 110one minor character even remarks at one point that she "want[s] to be [her] own nation". 111 At the same time, however, Homegoing seems to subscribe to the notion that "diaspora experience is multilocated and transcends the nation space" through its engagement with diaspora. 112 Consequently, it might be argued that family in Gyasi's novel symbolises the diasporic community, rather than the nation.
By explicitly centring its chapters around historical traumas and their effects on later times, Homegoing makes its concerns readily clear. A section from James's chapter, set soon after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, is a case in point: "slavery had not ended … 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". 113 A passage in "Marcus" most strongly encapsulates Gyasi's headon approach to trauma in Homegoing, as it elaborately and explicitly engages with most of the traumas addressed in the novel and underscores their continuing relevance in the present day. A doctoral student in sociology, Marcus reflects on the difficulty of limiting the scope of his research to the convict leasing systemwhich "had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life" 114due to the way the systems of black oppression and racism are interconnected and historically rooted: How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if the mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in … He'd inevitably be writing, too, about the "war on drugs." And if he started to write about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. 115 The excerpt illustrates the ways in which Homegoing deviates from traditional approaches to the conceptualisation and representation of trauma. Rather than positing the traumas of slavery and its legacies as unrepresentable and inaccessible, Homegoing tackles these issues directly. The passage above is a prime example, as Marcus explicitly mentions the traumatic legacies of slavery experienced by his ancestors (all of which feature as protagonists of their own chapters earlier on in the novel).
Marcus's reflections also illustrate that Homegoing exceeds the traditional view of trauma as an individual experience caused by a single event. Rather than viewing trauma as strictly individual and event-based, Homegoing outlines explicitly how individual traumas can be connected to or rooted in structural issues. Marcus's encounter at the museum, meanwhile, is one of several occasions on which the novel explores microaggressions contributing to insidious trauma. Whereas the traditional approach fails to give due attention to the role of supra-individual factors relevant to the trauma in question, Homegoing specifically engages with them in a way that is facilitated by its narrative structure. Marcus's dissertation is a case in point of Homegoing explicitly addressing the way traumas are rooted in socio-political structures of black oppression. The passage cited earlier highlights the collective impact of these structures in addition to the way they are interlinked. By linking his grandfather H's sufferingwhich the reader has 111 Gyasi, Homegoing, 93. 112 Stein, Black British Literature, 65 (emphasis original). 113 Gyasi,Homegoing,93. 114 Ibid.,289. 115 Ibid.,289. been informed of in detail in an earlier chapterto other structures of black oppression, Homegoing touches upon both personal and collective or cultural trauma and illustrates how slavery and its legacies "disrupt the 'consciousness' of the entire community" as well as the individual. 116 Another key feature of the confrontational approach of Homegoing is its positioning of the reader, as well as multiple characters, as implicated subjects. This presents a departure from the psychiatrist/empathic listener dynamic associated with traditional trauma texts. The use of the implicated subject, in combination with its rejection of the unspeakable allow Homegoing to resist the way traditional trauma aesthetics give "permission to turn away" from the issues brought forward in the text and thereby problematise a process of "facing-up-to and coming-to-grips-with". 117 In other words, the approach of the novel could thus be regarded as an attempt to counter the reluctance of society to acknowledge and address (the continuing effects of) the traumas of slavery and its legacies and instead instigate Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
As such, Homegoing can be likened to Kennedy and Wilson's analysis of a Stolen Generation testimony, in which the narrator "does not ask for our empathy [but] for us to become critically conscious of our own positions in the ongoing practices of denial". 118 Whereas texts such as Morrison's Beloved have been read as potentially prompting what is generally referred to as "empathic unsettlement" on behalf of the reader, the positioning of the reader, alongside several characters, as an implicated subject in Homegoing distinguishes the text from novels such as Morrison's. 119 Rather, its utilisation of the implicated subject makes Gyasi's novel akin to what Eaglestone calls "'engaged literature' in a renewed Sartrean sense", that is, affective works simultaneously "aimed explicitly at pricking Western consciences". 120 However, as will be shown later in this section Homegoing differs from the works Eaglestone describes in that, rather than specifically taking aim at the West, Gyasi's novel expands its critical perspective and use of the implicated subject to include (West) Africa as well.
There are several passages in Gyasi's novel in which the positioning of characters and the reader as implicated subject clearly comes to the fore. In "Abena", the titular character's father suddenly speaks up at a meeting of Asante villagers when the topic of the slave trade is brought up: Asante traders would bring in their captives. Fante, Ewe, or Ga middlemen would hold them, then sell them to the British or the Dutch or whoeer was paying the most at the time. Everyone was responsible. We all were … we all are. 121 By interfering in the conversation in this way, Abena's father, James, debunks the villagers' attitude of carrying no responsibility for the horrors of the slave trade, as they repeatedly paint the Fante as white "sympathizers", effectively relieving the Asante of any blame. 122 Crucially, James's last two phrases bear as much relevance to the historical context of the narrativethe Asante Kingdom in the late nineteenth centuryas to present-day society.
The last phrase of James's statement -"we all were … we all are"is particularly powerful because it can be read as directly addressing the reader, as it bridges the temporal gap between past and present in both James's nineteenth-century context as well as that of the reader; "we all are" can thus be read as a metafictional comment which implicates the reader. 123 The positioning of the reader in the excerpt from "James" is in stark contrast to the passive and unengaged position traditional trauma texts place the reader in. Similar to Novak's reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Homegoing rejects viewing the reader as a "blank screen" with no bearing to the traumas addressed in the text. 124 Instead, by positioning them as an implicated subject, Gyasi's novel critically engages the reader and prompts them "to confront" their implication in "the continued legacies of a traumatic racial past". 125 Through passages such as the one cited above, Homegoing repeatedly denies the reader the relatively comfortable position characteristic of texts "favoured" by the traditional trauma paradigm, in which the reader merely records the victim's experiences from a passive distance. 126 In a way not radically dissimilar from Wilfred Owen's direct address of the reader in his World War I poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (1920), Homegoing confronts the reader with their implication in its subject matter. Adding to the example above, the final chapter of the novel criticises how "most people live their lives … on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath", which, again, can be read as both applicable to the historical context of the novel as well as the reader's present. 127 Similarly, in "Sonny", a chapter revolving around the 1964 Harlem riot, the novel takes aim at bias in mediaagain applicable to both past and presentas it describes how "[t]he news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets"; this passage resonates particularly strongly in the light of the (backlash to) Black Lives Matter protests in recent times and again evokes Mbembe's idea of entangled temporalities. 128 Following the riot, Sonny asserts that "in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking", again emphasising the outspoken approach of the novel. 129 Through passages such as these, Homegoing repeatedly bridges the temporal divide between past and present and highlights the continuing relevance and effects of historical issues and (traumatic) events to the present. At the same time, the way these events are framed and reflected upon prompts the reader to reflect on their own position in relation to slavery and its legacies.
By asserting that "we all are" responsible for slavery, Homegoing implores the reader to (re)assess their position as a passive and innocent "bystander". 130 The novel consequently explores an aspect of trauma narratives overlooked by traditional trauma theory, which, 123 Ibid.,142. 124 Laub quoted in Novak, "Who Speaks? Who Listens?", 39. 125 Mikić, "Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing" 111. 126 Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 41. 127 Gyasi,Homegoing,298. 128 Ibid.,260. 129 Ibid., 260. 130 Gyasi,Homegoing,142;Rothberg,Preface,xv. as Kennedy and Wilson note, "misses the more complex and perhaps culturally significant ways in which testimonies of trauma might actually affect readers. They may feel dread and confusion, yes. But readers may also feel guilty, shamed, relieved … or implicated in the past". 131 Such (re)assessment of one's role in relation to slavery is illustrated in "James", a chapter revolving around the grandson of Effia and the governor of Cape Coast Castle, living in what will later become Ghana. A key event in the chapter takes place at a funeral, where one attendant refuses to shake James's hand when offering her condolences: "'[r]espectfully, I will not shake the hand of a slaver,' she said". 132 The encounter turns out to be a turning point in James's life, as it prompts considerable self-reflection on his role in slavery, ultimately leading him to fake his death and abscond his wealth and privileges in order to marry the girl, Akosua. Immediately after Akosua's refusal to shake his hand, James was by turns annoyed and ashamed by what she had said. Did she shake his father's hand? His uncle's? Who was she to decide what a slaver was? James had spent his whole life listening to his parents argue about who was better, Asante or Fante, but the matter could never come down to slaves. The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them. If the girl could not shake his hand, then surely she could never touch her own. 133 James's position clearly reflects Rothberg's description of the implicated subject. While not directly responsible for his ancestor's practices, James enjoys wealth, comfort, and privileges as a result of their legacy and thus his position cannot be viewed separately from their involvement in the slave trade. Similarly, James questions Akosua's position in relation to slavery and suggests that she, too, may be seen as an implicated subject, which underscores how one's position as an implicated subject need not always be immediately obvious. The funeral encounter and James's subsequent reflections may moreover lead the reader to reflect upon their own implication in slavery and its aftereffects. The way Homegoing explores both victimisation and implication in relation to slavery is similar to Susanne Fritz's Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind (2018). In her analysis of Fritz's novelin which she, too, applies Rothberg's concept of the implicated subject -Friederike Eigler asserts that Wie kommt der Krieg in Kind employs Hirsch's notion of postmemory to explore both suffering and implication in the traumas caused by the Second World War.
The excerpt above is representative of the way Homegoing posits the responsibility for slavery and its legacies as an issue very few can claim not to be implicated in. James embodies this aspect of the novel: the son of an Asante mother and Fante father and descendant of Effia's "marriage" to a British governor, James is a synthesis of the different parties involved in the slave trade, making the above excerpt all the more significant. 134 As Gyasi's novel extends the claim of responsibility for slavery beyond "the West" to (West) Africa, it appears to address an attitude of disavowal regarding involvement in the slave trade noted by Saidiya Hartman. Indeed, Derek C. Maus argues that Homegoing displays similarities with Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2007) in the way it "refus[es] to romanticize" a connection to West Africa. 135 Hartman describes that, during her stay in Ghana, people were reluctant to discuss African involvement in the slave trade, and if they did, they explained that African traders didn't know how badly the whites treated the slaves across the water. Others called the Atlantic slave trade the European trade, insisting that the West alone was to blame. It sanitized the whole ugly business and permitted them to believe they were without scars. 136 Incidentally, the novel employs (physical) scars as a means to address African involvement in the slave trade.
Scars work as an embodied metaphor for African involvement and the slave trade and feature most notably in "Yaw". Yaw's scar was inflicted on him by his mother as she suffered a trance-like nightmare of the firewoman. Both the firewoman and Yaw's scar as well as Akua's burned hands as a result of her actsare connected to slavery. Akua explains that a fetish priest explained her nightmares to her as a consequence of there being "evil in [her] lineage". 137 "The fetish priest was right", she tells her son, "[t]here is evil in our lineage. There are people who have done wrong because they could not see the result of the wrong. They did not have these burned hands as a warning". 138 The wrongdoing Akua mentions alludes to the slave trade, which her ancestors actively participated in. In addition to being a physical representation of implication in trauma, the presence of physical scars also further emphasises the suggestion that trauma can be transferred transgenerationally. 139 By approaching the responsibility for slavery through use of both a direct approach ("we all are") as well as metaphor (scars), Gyasi's novel appears to straddle different literary means of remembering the slave trade. Laura T. Murphy identifies "metaphorization" as a key way in which West African literature addresses the slave trade, in contrast to "the forms of overt narrativization so familiar in African American literature". 140 Like the transatlantic set-up of the novel itself, then, Homegoing employs both African and American narrative strategies for representing slave trade involvement.

Conclusion
In this article, I have applied recent (re)developments in literary trauma studies to examine the heterodox way Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing negotiates the traumas of slavery and its legacies by centring on its form and content. In my analysis, I discussed how Homegoing employs the family saga as a narrative strategy to highlight the transtemporal and transgenerational effects of trauma. Gyasi's novel draws upon postcolonial use of the genre of the family saga and combines this with Hirsch's concept of postmemory, resulting in a postmemorial family saga. I subsequently examined the way Homegoing presents a confrontational approach to trauma. I focused on its direct and explicit approach to trauma and on how the novel positions the reader as well as some of its characters as implicated subjects, thereby differing markedly from the way traditional trauma literature places the reader in a considerably more passive and disengaged position. I also argued that Homegoing expands upon the punctual model through its inclusion of insidious trauma; the novel shows itself attuned to the way trauma is often rooted in structural issues and can also be inflicted through quotidian events rather than only through a single extreme experience.
What I have suggested is that Homegoing is a case in point of contemporary heterodox approaches to trauma literature. Its representation of traumaboth in terms of form and contentdeviates from traditional theorisations on trauma and its literary representation. By focusing explicitly on the traumas of slavery and its legacies, Homegoing engages with traumas still relatively understudied in literary trauma studies. Gyasi's novel adopts the genre of the family saga as a narrative strategy for addressing the traumas of slavery and its afterlives. In terms of form, this results in a chronological and realist series of narratives not intended to problematise the reader's understanding of the text, pace the modernist narrative strategies part of traditional trauma aesthetics. Moreover, the text of the novel itself is explicit and confrontational with regard to the traumas at hand, featuring direct engagement and seemingly metafictional statements with cross-temporal relevance rather than indirect probes and circulations of the traumas that inform the text. The positioning of the reader and several characters as implicated subjects in Homegoing exemplifies both its confrontational and more inclusive approach to trauma, as it allows it to deal with questions of implication and responsibility in addition to victimisation. While the explicit and politically engaged approach of Homegoing resembles contemporary West African trauma fiction to some extent, it differs from such works by expanding its conceptualisation of the implicated subject to include African involvement in slavery. Overall, the novel can be viewed as mirroring its Afro-Atlantic set-up as it provides a blend of African and American narrative strategies. Gyasi's novel is literary yet features more outspoken socio-political elements seemingly aimed at prompting a process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In this sense, Homegoing is arguably representative of recent times in which discussions concerning the role of the traumas of slavery and its legacies have been rekindled at the forefront of public debate.