Examining Themes of Resistance and Healing in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Manu Herbstein’s Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Abstract

The theme of Transatlantic Slave Trade has been a subject of discussion not only in history but in many literary works such as music, novels, painting, drama and poems. This has contributed to the establishment of an interrelationship between history and fiction. The various material and natural settings such as castles, ships, and plantation that made the slave trade possible have featured in many literary works as well. In literature, the slave narratives that arose after the abolition of the slave trade have undergone lots of transformation. While the traditional slave narratives are written in autobiographical form by enslaved Africans who battled against such an atrocious history, the neo-slave narratives are fictive works that share the theme of slavery. Prominent themes such as female identity, racism, sexual violence, the quest for freedom, resistance and healing are dominant in both traditional and neo-slave narratives, but studies have mainly explored these themes in the traditional slave narratives. Yaa Gyasi and Manu Herbstein in their respective neo-slave narratives, Homegoing and Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, develop their characters based on the history of Transatlantic Slave Trade and how actions in historical items such as slave castles, slave ships and plantations reveal the themes of resistance and healing. Drawing from the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space, the present study explores the depictions of the slave castles, slave ships and slave plantation in Gyasi’s Homegoing and Herbstein’s Ama and comes to the conclusion that the representations of these historical items reveal the themes of resistance and healing which are relevant to the contemporary world.