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The main ideas from this information are: - The importance of reflecting on how relationships in our lives have influenced us. - The impact of not knowing one's familial lineage on living experiences for people of color. - The theme of racial identity and displacement in the novel Homegoing. - The influence of Clay's biracial identity on his experiences and struggles with his identity. - The impact of Kojo's separation from his parents on his decision-making and understanding of his cultural background. - The significance of understanding one's roots and familial bonds in Lose Your Mother. - The generational impact of decisions made by Abena's ancestors on her life and identity. Familial relationships are essential to identity. 🎵 🎵 Y'all ever took a second, like actually some time, to sit down and think about how the relationships in your life have influenced or impacted you? Have you ever sat and thought about if those relationships were good or bad, or what you wanted to do with them? If not, pause this real quick and take a second to think about how your relationships, whether they're big or small, important to you or not really, have impacted your life and changed you for the better or worse. What's up, listeners? We're back again with Who's Your People, and you're here tonight with your host, Drew West, and today we're going to be talking about Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and Sadiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, an attempt to answer the question, in what ways can not knowing your familial lineage impact your living experiences? A troublesome issue for many people of color today who struggle understanding how they may be affected by not knowing their lineage and where they come from. All right, let's jump into one of the first examples I found in Homegoing of an individual who was greatly impacted by his family throughout his story and see if his life can be applied to the original question. I'll start off with a quote from Clay's story. Are you white? Kujo had asked him, touching his hair. Clay recoiled at Kujo's touch, though many others had done the same thing while asking him the same question. I'm not white, he said softly. What? Speak up, Kujo said, and so Clay repeated himself, nearly shouting. From the distance, the boy's father's turned to observe the commotion. Not so loud, Clay, James said. Clay could feel the color flood into his cheeks, but Kujo had just looked on, clearly amused. So you're not white, what are you? I'm like you, Clay said. Kujo held his hand out and demanded that Clay do the same, until they were standing arm to arm, skin to skin. Not like me, Kujo said. So, while reading this, a question that developed around the theme of racial identity was the first thing that popped into my head. And that was, how has growing up as a biracial person affected Clay and his experiences in life? Being a biracial person myself, I've always felt like I didn't fit in on either side. And here, we see a young man similar to me, who is actively asking himself and questioning who he is. This is one of the many instances in Homegrown where we experience this theme of racial identity and displacement. In this situation, we could see it could be caused by Clay's upbringing and birth, and one of the first instances in his life where he initiates this self-conversation in an attempt to figure out who he is. Because of his sheltered upbringing caused by his mom, Clay really wasn't keen on hanging with a lot of kids that lived at Cape Coast, leaving him just his mom and later Kujo to depend on for friendship and comfort. Through this disconnection, he doesn't feel as if he's either British or African, which then causes a chain reaction throughout Clay's story where we witness him struggle with this theme of racial identity, learning that he doesn't fit into these two worlds, with both African and British people making him feel uncomfortable about who he is. We watch these concerns follow Clay throughout his life, witnessing him continuously struggling with figuring out his identity, leading him to believe that things like his parentage, romantic affairs, and the color of his skin are all wrong. We gather that the life of a biracial person is more difficult than some may think it is. Yes, there are some privileges that come with it in some cases, but overall we watched how his inability to reside with either one of his identities was impossible for him, resulting in him never really knowing who he is and limiting him to who he wanted to be. Getting to the story behind the next character in the novel, Joe. And let's just start right away with a quote. Joe used to worry that his family line had been cut off, lost forever. He would never really truly know who his people were and who their people were before them. And if there were any stories to be heard about where he had come from, he would never hear them. We adopt this same theme of identity and pose a new question. How his growing up away from his parents affected Kojo? Would he have moved his family north if he had known how horrible slavery was? Kojo's separation from his parents during his childhood had a significant influence on his decision making later in life. It also influenced how he perceives his own lineage and treats his family now. We can come to certain conclusions, but the novel doesn't exactly address whether he would have been more inclined to bring his family north or not if he had knew about the atrocities of slavery. What we do know is that Kojo experiences a cultural disconnect as a result of this separation from his parents. He doesn't remember his grandmother and he barely remembers his mother. The Kaku who was raising him isn't as steeped in family and cultural customs. His sense of self and comprehension of his cultural background are impacted by this gap. Additionally, Kojo has little understanding of the facts behind slavery in the United States as he grows up. The perils that enslaved people endure are unknown to him. His perspective is shaped by this lack of personal experience. Kojo could have understood the urgency of leaving the South better if he had had a direct knowledge of the tragedies that resulted because of slavery. This information might have affected his choice to relocate his family north in order to protect them from the dangers of slavery. However, given the perils associated with escaping slavery, moving his family north would still come with a great deal of risk and uncertainty. It's possible that Kojo's hesitation to include others in this quest sprang from his wish to keep his family safe from those same threats. We can gather and understand that because he had almost no familiar relations since he didn't know his parents and grandparents, Kojo really lived a life making his own decisions based off his own personal experiences, but still constantly reflected on what his life would have been like had he known his family, leaving him with these feelings of wondering and a realm of unknowing. Even in Lose Your Mother, we see these similar themes of identity and the impact of familial relations connected throughout the book. And this one's nonfiction. But how do we see the impact of familial relations references in Lose Your Mother? Throughout the entirety of the book, Lose Your Mother, readers notice the close relation of familial bonds as Hartman indulges in the absence of direct ancestral connections. We see Hartman explore ideas of not only blood ties, but communal bonds as well when addressing the shared histories of oppression. Hartman introduces us to the idea of the necessity of understanding one's roots and how family, biological or forward through shared struggles, adds to the ideas of what makes identity. Through this exploration of loss and reclamation, Lose Your Mother encourages its audience to sit and reflect on the vast impact of familial relationships when thinking about identity and how it may have been affected through the legacy of slavery. It all just flows right in together and adds off of each other. We finally come to our last supporting piece of evidence in Homegoing, an Abena story with generational impact and ethnic identity being two of the reference themes. Starting with the quote coming from Abena, I would like to visit Kumasi. It is met with her mother's response, your father and I are not welcome in Kumasi. We ask the new question, how have decisions made from Abena's ancestors affected her life as she knows it now? In the final example, we're shown a flip side to many of the situations talked about previously. Here we have a young lady, Abena, who is curious about her ancestry and where her people come from, but is met with reluctance by a father who wants nothing to do with his ancestral past. Once she learns her father is from Kumasi, she immediately wants to go and see what it's like and in doing so she opens up this door of information that she's been shut out for so long. Her father, James, tries his best to keep the truth from Abena, the truth about his side of her family and how they were slave traders. As a result of this hesitation from James, we pick up on a major disconnection between Abena and James, just showing how generational trauma forces implications and issues down to later generations. Due to James' humility of the actions of his family, Abena is unaware of her family's history as slave traders, furthermore showing these negative impacts referenced earlier. Seeking acceptance and comfort from other people, Abena finds herself unmarried and with child, and also realizing that she doesn't want to live at home anymore with her parents, she decides to take herself and her unborn child to a missionary school, potentially resulting in a similar upbringing for her kid. So we just see time and time again the impact generational trauma can have on a person and understand that because of all this and the decisions made by Abena's ancestors, she started to question her own identity and who she wants to be, causing her to make choices and actions different than those before her. That was definitely a lot, but through these stories we can really start to see how impactful a family has on someone and that having one really does influence one's actions, thoughts, wants and needs, and so many more things that just make someone who they are. After having done all this research, I want to turn towards what we can do with it now that we got it. Things we can consider about this is that while the novel Homecoming is fictional, the lessons inside of the stories are what truly matter, and we need to understand that familial relationships are essential to identity. Through this information we can understand why these connections are so important and then start posing new questions. Questions like, what substitutes for learned lessons when there's no one there to teach you? Like in Joe's case, or how can people learn information that one would usually find in strong family connections? But to end it nicely, we have a list of outcomes or ways people can be impacted and influenced by the lack of familial relations, and I want all my listeners to sit down after this podcast, think about everything I've said, and answer the question, how do you think the relationships in your life have impacted you and your decisions? Thank you, and good night.
