Notes & Links: 'Homegoing'

We kicked off our 2021 book discussions with Yaa Gyasi's award-winning debut novel Homegoing.

In addition to discussing this conversation-sparking book, we warmly welcomed members of the English Language Book Group in Bonn, Germany, for our joint discussion, and marked the start of the Biden-Harris Administration.

As usual, several notes and links came up during the conversation for further reading, viewing, and exploring. These include:

• Amanda Gorman's reading of her inaugural poem, "The Hill We Climb"

• The 1977 mini-series Roots

• "Willful Amnesia: How Africans Forgot--and Remembered--Their Role in the Slave Trade" - PRI's The World (August 2019)

• The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah (Satirical 1986 novel about the early days following Ghanaian independence)

• An account of Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King's trip to Ghana for the 1957 independence day ceremony

• A Ghanaian fantasy coffin in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

• One of the Homegoing chapters includes the arrival of the cocoa bean in a struggling village. This is an article about fair trade chocolate in Ghana.

• On February 3, San Francisco Public Library will host a free presentation about the de Young Museum's "Soul of a Nation" exhibit. (The full schedule of "More Than a Month" Black History events [plus reading recommendations for adults and youth] is available online.)

For February, we turn to a work of nonfiction: The Lonely City: Adventures In The Art Of Being Alone by Olivia Laing.