>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Ron Charles: [Applause]
Thank you all.
It's so wonderful to be
here for this festival.
It's such a shot in
the arm every year.
We will not have time
for questions today.
Our author needs to sprint
away to a wedding, not her own.
Yes, I asked.
A brilliant debut novel like
"Homegoing" can be deceptive.
I mean, it seems to come
out of nowhere, doesn't it?
I mean, how can such
talent just spring
up suddenly and dazzle us all?
And then she's on the Late
Show with Seth Myers, you know.
You're like, who is this
person, where did they come from?
But of course, that version of
the author's success usually skims
over years of hard work and the
remarkable story of a writer's life.
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana
and came to the United States
when she was two, and her family
eventually settled in Alabama.
She holds a BA in English
from Stanford and an MFA
from the Iowa Writers Workshop,
and I think she was one
of Marilyn Robinson's students.
[applause] This does
not surprise me.
Her work on "Homegoing"
took seven years.
She's only 27 years old.
And it was not a sudden or
straightforward road to success.
The idea of the novel first came
to her as a college sophomore
when she visited Ghana and
toured the Cape Coast Castle,
this old fort where slaves were
once held before being shipped out.
Eventually she conceded this vast
and complex story about slavery
and racism that begins in the
18th century with two half-sisters
who don't know each other.
They are, as she writes, like
a woman and her reflection,
doomed to stay on opposite
sides of the pond.
From there the novel
stretches out over 300 years,
following the descendants in
Africa and the United States.
Chapter by chapter, the book
moves back and forth between them
and the respective contents, jumping
ahead a generation each time,
until she finally arrives
where we are today,
in an era still struggling
to create a society
in which all people are treated
equally and with respect.
It's just a devastating story that
manages to capture the degradations
of slavery among the
enslaved and the enslavers.
It asks us to consider the tangled
chains of moral responsibility
that hang on our history.
During the last chapter,
it's up to the 20th century.
A teacher in Ghana tells the
students, 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 my missing?
Whose voice was suppressed so
that this voice could come forth?
Yaa Gyasi has found several
of those suppressed people
and given them a voice
that is truly captivating.
Please welcome her to the stage.
[ Applause ]
>> Yaa Gyasi: Thank you so much,
Ron, for that introduction,
and thank you all for coming today.
As Ron mentioned, I'm sorry
we only have a short amount
of time together.
I have to run off because
I'm Maid of Honor
in my best friend's wedding.
So we won't have time
for a Q&A I'm afraid.
I want to begin this
talk with a story.
James Powell was 15 years old.
He was playing with his
friends in front of a building
in a predominantly
white neighborhood,
when the superintendent
of the building started spraying
the boys with a water hose.
Annoyed, perhaps angry, Powell
started chasing after the super.
A police officer by the name
of Thomas Gilligan
responded to the scene.
Moments later, Powell was shot dead.
Did he have a knife?
Did he not have a knife?
Every account seems to differ.
Two days later, what we now refer
to as the Harlem riots of 1964,
broke out, causing damage and
destruction and numerous arrests.
These riots come up in
my novel "Homegoing."
A character named Sonny is thinking
about the damage while walking
to his mother's house in Harlem.
He's fearful.
He's worried.
But also he just needs to get home.
"Homegoing" is a novel that
follows the family lineage
of two half-sisters.
The first half-sister, Effia, is
the wife of the British governor
of the Cape Coast Castle, a
slave fort that still stands
in the country now known as Ghana.
Esi, the second sister,
is kept in the castle
as a slave before being
sent to America.
The novel travels through 250 years
of Ghanaian and American history.
Each chapter devoted to a new
descendent of Effia and Esi,
all the way down to the present day.
I started writing "Homegoing"
in 2009,
after visiting the Cape Coast
Castle and taking a tour.
On that tour, the guide spoke to
us about how the British soldiers
who lived and worked in
the castle at the time used
to marry the local women.
From there, he took us
down to see the dungeons.
And I wish I could describe
to you all what it felt
like to stand in those dungeons.
They still smell, even
though centuries have passed,
they're still covered with grime.
The death can't be washed
away from those walls.
I knew that day in the castle that I
wanted to write about this history.
But over the course of the seven
years that I worked on this novel,
my project grew and grew.
In part I think because the more I
wrote about and studied the past,
the more concerned I
became with our present.
There is a quote that often
attributed to Mark Twain that goes,
"history doesn't repeat
itself but it rhymes."
Even today, as I stand here,
our country is yet again
in turmoil following the
extrajudicial shootings
of black men.
Governor Pat McCrory of North
Carolina declared a state
of emergency on Wednesday
night, as the uprisings
in Charlotte started to swell.
We've been here before.
This moment rhymes with ones we saw
in Baltimore last April
following Freddie Grey's murder.
And that moment rhymes with ones
we saw in Ferguson two years ago,
following Mike Brown's murder.
And those moments rhyme with the
one I described to you earlier,
in Harlem, in 1964, more
than half a century ago,
following James Powell's murder.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther
King delivered a speech
at Stanford University,
where he said the following.
"I think America must see that riots
do not develop out of thin air.
Certain conditions continue
to exist in our society,
which must be condemned as
vigorously as we condemn riots.
But in the final analysis, a riot
is the language of the unheard.
And what is it that
America has failed to hear?
It has failed to hear
that the plight
of the Negro poor has worsened
over the last few years.
It has failed to hear that
the promises of freedom
and justice have not been met.
And it has failed to
hear that large segments
of white society are more concerned
about tranquility and the status quo
than about justice,
equality, and humanity.
And so in a real sense, our
nation's summers of riots are caused
by our nation's winters of delay.
And as long as America postpones
justice, we stand in the position
of having these recurrences
of violence
and riots over and over again."
This quote was shared widely across
my social media circles this week.
It's powerful.
Another example not only
of Dr. King's wisdom,
but also of his oppressions.
You read it and you
think, how did he know?
This quote is often truncated,
ending with a famous quote,
the famous phrase, "a riot is
the language of the unheard."
But I am often most struck by the
consequence that Dr. King lays out,
that as long as America
continues to postpone justice,
we stand in the position of having
these recurrences of violence
and riots over and over again.
There, again, is that repetition.
The idea of historical recurrence.
The idea of rhyme.
There's a character in
my novel named Marcus.
Marcus is Sonny's child.
He's a graduate student at Stanford,
studying for a PhD in sociology.
I admit that Marcus's struggles
to write his dissertation echo
my struggles to write this novel.
On page 289 of "Homegoing," Marcus
describes his freckles like this.
Originally he'd wanted to focus his
work on the convict leasing system
that had stolen 10 years off
of his great grandpa H's life.
But the deeper into the research
he got, the bigger the project got.
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 he mentioned the great
migration, he'd have to talk
about the cities that
took that flock in.
He'd have to talk about Harlem.
And how could he talk about Harlem
without mentioning his
father's heroin addiction?
The Stinson prison,
the criminal record.
And if he was going to talk about
heroin and Harlem and the '60s,
wouldn't he also have to talk
about crack everywhere in the '80s?
And if he wrote about crack,
he'd inevitably be writing
too about the war on drugs.
And if he started talking 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.
And if he talked about why friends
from his hood were doing five-year
bids for possession of marijuana,
when nearly all of the white
people he went to school
with smoked it every
day, he'd get so angry
that he'd slam the research book
down on the table of the beautiful
but deadly silent Lane reading room
of Green Library of
Stanford University.
And if he slammed the book down,
then everyone in the
room would stare.
And all they would see would
be his skin and his anger.
And they'd think that they
knew something about him.
And it would be the same something
that had justified putting
his great grandpa H in prison,
only it would be different too.
Less obvious than it once was.
Marcus is, again, talking
about moments that rhyme.
Though he lives in Palo Alto in
the 21st century, he understands
that there is a kind of echo,
a kind of reverberation,
that he thinks began
with his great grandpa H,
who lived in Alabama
in the 19th century.
But we know that it didn't
begin with H in Alabama.
Rather, it began further
back, with Esi, the slave.
Who in the 18th century, was
stolen from her shanty village,
taken to the Cape Coast
Castle and shipped
through to the middle
passage through to America,
where she would spend all of the
rest of her living days as a slave.
One thing that struck me while
writing "Homegoing" that continues
to strike me as I listen to
the news, is that 100 years is
but a breath in the march
of time, it is but a breath.
My father was born in 1957, the
year that Ghana gained independence.
Therefore, Ghana, as
we know it today,
is only ever as old as my father.
Only a few days ago, Ruby Bridges,
one of the first black children
to desegregate an all
white school in Louisiana,
celebrated her 62nd birthday.
Maybe you've seen the pictures
of little Ruby Bridges' march
to her new elementary school.
Maybe you've seen the crowds
of white people gathered
to launch racist epithets
at the child, who spit
and threw rocks at a
six-year-old child.
To imagine that the brave
young woman who withstood all
of that violent racism is only 62
years old today is an important
reminder that our past is not as
distant as we might like to believe.
Even slavery, that thing that I
have heard people say happened
like a million years ago, is much
nearer than we'd care to admit.
America is a young country
in a very old world.
And a century is but a breath.
I'd like to end today's
talk by reading a little bit
from the sixth chapter
of "Homegoing."
This chapter follows
Kojo, called Joe,
the son of Ness, the
grandson of Esi.
Kojo is a runaway slave, living
in Baltimore with his family,
when the Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850 is passed.
Within a couple of weeks, word
came in that James Hamlett,
a Baltimore runaway,
had been kidnapped
and convicted in New York City.
The white folks wrote about
it in the New York Herald
and in the Baltimore Sun.
He was the first, but everyone
knew there would be more.
People began moving up to
Canada by the hundreds.
Joe went to Fells Point one week and
what used to be a sea of black faces
against the backdrop of the blue
green bay had turned into nothing.
Matheson had made sure Joe's
whole family had their free
papers together.
But he knew others with papers
too, and even they had fled.
Matheson spoke to Joe again.
I want to make sure you know
what's at stake here, Joe.
If they catch you,
they'll take you to trial
but you won't get any
kind of say at all.
It'll be the white man's word
against yours, which
is no word at all.
You all make sure to carry your
papers at all times, understand?
Joe nodded.
There were rallies and
protests throughout the North,
and not just among the Negroes.
White people were joining in
like Joe had never seen them join
in about anything before.
The South had brought the spite to
the Northern welcome mat when many
of them had wanted
nothing to do with it.
Now white people could be fined
for giving a Negro a meal or a job
or a place to stay, if the law
said that Negro was a runaway.
And how were they to know who
was a runaway and who wasn't?
It had created an impossible
situation.
And those who had been
determined to stay
on the fence found themselves
without a fence at all.
In the mornings, before Joe
and Anna went off to work,
Joe made the children
practice showing their papers.
He would play the federal marshal.
Hands on his hips, walking up to
each of them, even little Gracie,
and saying in a voice as stern as
he could muster, where you going?
And they would reach into
the pockets Anna had sewn
into their dresses and pants,
and without any backtalk,
always silently, thrusts
those papers into Joe's hands.
When he'd first started doing
this, the children would burst
into laughter, thinking
it was a game.
They didn't know about Joe's
fear of people in uniform,
didn't know what it was like to
lie silent and barely breathing
under the floorboards of a Quaker
house, listening to the sounds
of a catcher's boot
heel stomp above you.
Joe had worked hard so that
his children wouldn't have
to inherit his fear.
But now he wished they had
just the tiniest morsel of it.
You worry too much, Anna said.
Ain't nobody looking for them kids.
Ain't nobody looking for us neither.
The baby was due any day now.
And Joe had noticed that his wife
had become crankier than ever,
snapping at him for
the tiniest of things.
She craved fish and lemons.
She walked with her
hands on her lower back.
And she forgot things.
The keys one day.
The broom the next.
Joe worried she would
forget her papers next.
He'd seen her leave them
rumpled and worn on her side
of the mattress one day
when she went to the market.
And he'd yelled at her for it.
He'd yelled at her until she cried.
Bad as he felt that day, he knew
she would never forget again.
Thank you all so much for listening.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
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