Straddling Different Worlds: The Experience Of Two Artists - Born In Africa, But Raised In The US

I consider Yaa Gyasi's novel, Homegoing, a masterpiece. A multi-generational novel that follows the story of two sisters and their lineages - one sister who ends up being sold into slavery from Ghana, while the other sister ends up marrying an Englishman overseeing the Gold Coast slave trade for Britain. Their lives, and those of their descendants, diverge as some are left to live through British occupation of Ghana, while the rest come to the US first as slaves, then as runaway slaves who live under the continued fear of recapture, then as post-civil war coal miners in a modern form of slavery/mass incarceration, finally living through the civil rights movement and the ongoing racial persecution in the US. I marveled at how Yaa Gyasi was able to capture the stories so well of those who remained in Ghana and those who came to the US as slaves. 

In this article, Nigerian-Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi seeks to understand the multi-continental lens that is behind the work of Ghanaian-born, Alabama-raised novelist, Yaa Gyasi, and Nigerian-born, Alabama-raised artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola. Both raised in Huntsville, Alabama as children of professors, their experience in the US negotiates three divides, "first between blackness and whiteness; the second within blackness, between native and foreign; the third between African and American". It is because of this divide that their work is able to capture the experiences both on the African continent and in the US. Their particular form of unbelonging, makes them interesting observers of race in the US. 

The article captures their passion for holding onto their different identities in their work. Yaa Gyasi talks about her book being her way of showing the plural identities within one person - within the same black person - while Toyin Ojih Odutola talks about her work trying to show what skin should feel like. When it was dismissed as not being fine art, she wondered, "Why would you limit [my drawings] to the flattest blackness possible?"