It took me a long time to realise that… the word “black” can seem to generalise everything. The older I got, the more I realised there’s no right way, that everything I do and am is also allowed to be black. I found it difficult to feel I was being black in the right way. One thing I ran up against a lot as a child was that saying “black” or “Afro-American” implies a certain cultural identity that was different from mine as an immigrant. Had my parents not decided to emigrate to America, my life would have been completely different.

My father is a professor of francophone African literature. Getting to see that, having moved a lot myself, has been powerful. It has been interesting, during this election, to register that places in America are vastly different and influence people’s ideologies. So many people in the States grow up in one place and settle. I studied English and creative writing at Stanford and Iowa. I was born in Ghana, grew up in America, have lived in Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama. Your novel raises interesting questions about identity – how has your identity been affected by place, circumstance and genes? In this post-election space, as Donald Trump takes over, we are wondering what fresh hell may be about to be devised Slavery is something we have not gotten over, it is on people’s minds and it affects us still. The subject of slavery has produced outstanding work from Toni Morrison ’s novel Beloved to Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave …Īnd this year alone, in America, there has been The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Grace by Natashia Deón. You can imagine and you cannot possibly imagine. The terror they must have felt – not knowing what was to become of them. Hundreds of people were kept there for three months at a time before being sent God knew where. When they closed the door, there was no light. There was grime on the walls and a tiny air hole at the top. The dungeons still smell after hundreds of years.

Homegoing by yaa gyasi