Yes, Homegoing Is Banned!

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel follows two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana: Effia, who marries a British slave trader, and Esi, who is captured and shipped to America as a slave. Each subsequent chapter follows the next generation of each sister’s descendants, tracing the parallel lineages through colonialism, slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the crack epidemic, and into the present. The novel’s structure is ambitious and precise, each chapter a self-contained story that illuminates how history’s violence echoes through generations. Gyasi wrote the book in her twenties, and it reads with the clarity of someone who has something urgent to say.

Homegoing was challenged 11 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans across Florida and Tennessee school districts. The challenges cite sexual content, violence, and racial content. The violence in the novel is inseparable from the history it depicts: slavery, colonialism, and racial oppression were violent, and Gyasi doesn’t pretend otherwise. Removing Homegoing from school libraries because it contains violence done to Black bodies throughout American history is, at minimum, a troubling editorial choice about which aspects of that history students should be allowed to encounter.