The Chronotopic Image of the Cape Coast Castle in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Article 2, Volume 80, Issue 1, October 2022, Pages 29-51 PDF (936.63 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2022.282196 | ||
| Author | ||
| Engy Salah Saleh | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This research paper explores the inseparability of time and space in relation to 300 years of slave trade and slavery in America fictionalized in Homegoing (2016), by the Ghanaian American novelist Yaa Gyasi .Set within the context of eighteenth- century Ghana throughout present-day America, the novel aims at investigating how the American novelist Yaa Gyasi in her novel Homegoing (2016) brings both time and space together into on literary crucible through holding a historical panorama that spans about 300 years of slave trade, colonialism in Africa, and slavery in America. All events in the novel take place in The Cape Coast Castle, a real place which was used as a terminal for exporting slaves from Ghana in Africa to America. The Castle narrates a long history of pain, brutality and suffering of the colonized Africans along with the inhumane practices of the British colonizers. This is done with Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ forming a pivotal point of reference, serving as a tool to analyze how the Cape Coast Castle, representing place, is held to denote time represented in the history of slavery and colonialism. Held in Bakhtin’s chronotope is the assumption that there is an intrinsic relationship between time and place; something that comes clear in the portrayal of the Castle in the novel. As time changes in the novel, the perception of The Cape Coast Castle changes, as it shifts from being a place of practicing oppression and degradation to a place that documents for such practices not only to the African people, but also to the whole world. Inside the castle is held a dialogue between the past in which the African people were unwillingly dragged backwards, the present where they are now facing their true identity, and the future where they will be evolving and more powerfully growing more powerful in reconstructing their countries. They will go to combine the place they are in with the place they originally come from to create the ‘third place’ for a new identity. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Bakhtin’s Chronotope; Homegoing; Cape Coast Castle; African slavery; Third place | ||
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