Hopegoing: Animist metaphor as deferred hope in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

This article argues that Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing (2016) offers an animist model of deferred hope that considers the spiritual, conscious, and “speaking” elements of non-human matter. Drawing on Harry Garuba’s notion of animism’s excessive aesthetic presence, which possesses a “spirit of constant awareness [that] functions on a logic of inclusion rather than exclusion”, it analyses the “portability” of both literal and metaphoric fire in Homegoing (2003): in particular, Effia, Esi, and the dream firewoman whose presence leads to Akua accidentally inflicting violence on her children. Reading Homegoing for animist structure makes provisionality and interconnection central to decolonial hope, fulfilling Dominick LaCapra’s call for a literary trauma aesthetic that resists Christian notions of redemption and Christof Mauch’s conception of slow hope, a measured and deferred model of thinking through the future. In this way, Homegoing becomes a “hopegoing” that gains a planetary dimension.