This the fourth interview in a series with authors whose work has been banned. Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, and grew up in Alabama, Illinois, and Tennessee. She earned a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels Homegoing (2016) and Transcendent Kingdom (2020). Homegoing won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the American Book Award. Transcendent Kingdom was a finalist for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Yaa Gyasi won a 2016 National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award. She was named a 2017 Granta Best Young American Novelist and received a 2018 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature.
Your first novel, Homegoing, follows two African half-sisters through the generations. One marries a British soldier stationed in Ghana and the other is sold into slavery and transported in a slave ship to the U.S. Readers all over the world responded to Homegoing when it was published in 2016. Homegoing became an international literary phenomenon, widely taught in high schools and college classes around the US (and the world).
In the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author Isabelle Wilkerson described “the great, aching gift of the novel is that it offers, in its own way, the very thing that enslavement denied its descendants: the possibility of imagining the connection between the broken threads of their origins.”
At what point in its publication did you realize that this novel would come to mean so much to readers?
I think I suspected [it], even before [the book] was published, because there was an auction for the book and so there were so many–I think there were ten publishers who were bidding on the opportunity to publish it. And at the time, I was still living in Iowa. I was doing what’s called a third year, teaching these extended ed[ucation] courses online, and I didn’t know anybody else at [the University of] Iowa [Writers’ Workshop] whose book had gone to auction like that. And so that was my first inkling that it was going to be something of a big deal. And then I think the moment where it really hit home was months later: Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had just published Between the World and Me, was still on Twitter back then, and had gotten an advanced copy of the book, and was kind of live-tweeting his reading experience of it, and my friends were texting me about that, and [at that point] I realized it was going to be bigger than I thought it was going to be initially.
How does it feel to be the author of a modern classic?
Great. I mean, it’s strange. I’m always really touched to hear that people are studying it in high school and in college. My first and most precious encounters with books that made me want to write were in high school English classes. So the idea that there are students out there who read Homegoing and feel that same kind of connection that I felt to writers like Toni Morrison is deeply meaningful to me. I don’t take that for granted.
Your second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, approaches the story of the African diaspora from another literary angle: instead of sweeping through hundreds of years and thousands of miles, it is focused upon one character, Gifty’s, personal experience, including her perception of her immigrant Ghanaian family, which is racked by tragedy and the loss of immigration.
How have people reacted differently to a more personal, twentieth-first century story of diaspora?
I think people were really surprised by how different the second novel was. Obviously, the timeline is quite different. The structure is quite different. It’s set in the first person. So there were a lot of changes in that novel. But I think I would say that the responses to Transcendent Kingdom–even though it didn’t sell as well, and probably isn’t taught in the same way that Homegoing is–the responses that I would get from readers were often quite personal. People talked about their own struggles with addiction, or having family members who had struggles with addiction. [They talked about] their relationship to childhood [and to] religion. So I found that to be really moving as well, to have a book that had connected to people on such a personal level.
Although your work is widely read in schools around the country, your work has also been subjected to censorship. For example, Homegoing was banned from the Iowa City Community School District in 2023. The book was removed from our libraries. We aren’t allowed to choose it as a title to read in Contemporary Literature class.
I actually didn’t know that.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Yeah. I mean, we’re living in really terrifying times. It’s hard to wrap my head around–and it feels so obvious when you look at the language that’s being used, like books being described as ‘obscene’ or, I think Homegoing is often banned ostensibly under the guise of it being ‘sexually explicit,’ which I find interesting. And untrue. But just the excuses people are using to ban books ring so hollow and are so transparent in ways–and yet it’s still happening. It’s never a sign of a healthy society to be having people doing mass book bans. And the clear anti-Black, anti-any-writer-of-color, anti-queer bend of these bans is, I think, just a sign of the decline–[the] further decline–of this country. It scares me.
In Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law that banned any book containing sex or sex acts. Homegoing contains a fair amount of sex in key moments of the story. Why do you think it was necessary to include the sex in order to understand the story?
I always would jokingly say that if you’re going to write a multigenerational book, then people have to have babies. Like, it wouldn’t make sense not to have any sex scenes in Homegoing, considering that in every chapter, you’re following a new descendant. And sex is, of course, a part of life. I think the way that the sex scenes are done is not obscene–not something objectionable. I’ve certainly read what I would consider to be far more explicit sex scenes in classes. But sometimes, like, in books or with language that–I dunno–that people wouldn’t recognize as being particularly tawdry, or raunchy. I’m thinking even, like, something in Romeo and Juliet, which, if you are reading with a skilled teacher, you can see that there’s actually quite a bit of sex or references to sex in that piece–but nobody’s trying to ban it.
In your opinion, what about its contents causes Homegoing to be banned from public schools?
I think that the real reason it’s being banned is because it is very openly discusses what I think of one of the mortal sins of the country: slavery, and the ongoing effects of slavery on today’s society. I think even just the structure of the book, the fact that it ends near the present, and kind of calls out all the ways we haven’t, as a country, properly dealt with the legacy of slavery, is something that scares people. And I think that just the discomfort that white people, particularly some parents, feel about having their kids have to grapple with discomfort, is telling. Rather than use the book as an opportunity to talk about the fact that we are implicated in our history and that we continue to make and shape our country, our history–rather than talk about it in those terms, to just avoid it completely, I think is a great shame.
In which states are your books banned?
I’m not even sure. I haven’t kept a list. Truly, I haven’t kept up with it. I know it’s banned in parts of Tennessee, parts of Iowa, I think parts of my home state of Alabama. But yeah, I haven’t kept up with all the bans.
What are you working on now?
I’m very slowly working on a third novel that’s kind of an allegory, I guess, thinking about climate and also just kind of the social collapses that we’re seeing today and where they might lead in the future. So it’s probably my most speculative work.
Does the fact that your work is being banned change the way you think about writing? Do you try not to let the fact of school book bans affect what you write? Are you aware of trying to remove descriptions of ‘sex acts’ from your work?
No. I have not tried to alter my writing in any way because of the book bans. Certainly I have not tried to, like, limit or consciously decrease the amount of sex in the books in the hopes that they’ll be taught in schools. No. I think that I’m writing the same as I always have.
You mentioned, earlier, that as a country, we haven’t properly dealt with the legacy of slavery. Why do you think it’s important for young people to grapple with history and the history of slavery?
I think something that always troubled me about the way that I learned about this moment in history, or even just about history in general, is that people would talk about slavery in particular as though it were something that happened a million years ago and therefore had no bearing on our present. And as I got older, and definitely when I got to college and was able to take more varied classes than the ones offered in my high school curriculum, suddenly it was so clear how close this history was. How young America is, and therefore, how close the history is. That when we’re talking about slavery, we are still just talking about somebody’s grandmother’s grandmother. It’s not something that happened so long ago that your family wouldn’t live with the effects of it. Everyone’s family lives with the effects of it. And that the major gains that we saw during the Civil Rights era were less than a hundred years ago. [At] the time that Homegoing was written, only about 50 or 60 years ago. And that’s. . . My dad is older than that. And understanding how fragile this supposedly new racially equal society that we’re living in–heavy air quotes on that–but how fragile and how new it is, is a good way of understanding how easily it can be taken away. Which is what we’re seeing now, [with] the rampant dismantling of anything that has to do with diversity. Anything that even uses the word ‘diversity.’ I think is just again a sign of people not really understanding how close all of this is.
What else would you like to add on the subject of book bans in high schools?
I would say, I didn’t experience any explicit book bans when I was in high school, thankfully, but I also know that one of the reasons that I’ve been able to have the career that I’ve had, that I’ve been able to pursue writing in the way that I have, is because I had really unlimited access to books when I was in high school. I loved reading so much. And I think young people are much smarter than we give them credit for, that books themselves are kind of self-limiting. Like, if a book is too hard for you, then you’re not going to get out of it what you might have otherwise gotten out of it. [So] in general, people will set down a book that isn’t working for them. And so the idea that you have to kind of shield or corral or direct your child’s reading life is already such a flawed premise. Let them read whatever they would like to read. In my experience, it only made my life richer, my world richer, and I’m really grateful that my parents didn’t stop me whenever I picked a book up.
I would also say that I think you would much rather your children encounter sex in literary fiction than you would in other places, like the internet.
Do you have any advice for City High students as readers?
No. Go for it. Read on.
