Late in Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, Marjorie Agyekum’s favorite teacher, Mrs. Pinkston, invites her to read a poem during an African American cultural event at her high school in Huntsville, Alabama. But she hesitates to accept, explaining, “I’m not African American.” Though she’s been raised in the United States since infancy, Marjorie and her parents are Ghanaian immigrants. Hearing her resist African American identity, Mrs. Pinkston instructs Marjorie that, “here, in this country, it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now, and here black is black is black.”

HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi Knopf, 320 pp., $26.95

This is both a telling and a tricky moment: Mrs. Pinkston’s explanation of how white Americans flatten all black bodies into a single category arrives in the novel’s penultimate section; by this point in the book, Gyasi has for 277 pages been attempting to define a kind of elasticized blackness, a kind of familial identity that might span the Atlantic Ocean.

This instance of paradoxical flattening and elasticizing suggests to me that Homegoing is really two, interlaced novels. On the one hand, Gyasi has produced an American novel that relies on African American literature’s thick web of tropes, scenarios, and stock characters from exalted slaves to heroic laborers to heroin junkie jazz geniuses. Because her American fiction renders those literary tropes as clichés, black American experience—from slavery to freedom to the 21st century—has been narrowed, flattened into something especially recognizable to white readers.

On the other hand, Gyasi seeks to complicate the idea that “black is black is black” with an Afro-diasporic novel about one Ghanaian family’s participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the curse-like consequences wrought on its future members because of it, from colonialism to independence. Though an accursed fate seemingly awaits these Africans, Gyasi has portrayed them as characters who can actively resist the demands of ethnic allegiance.

With the exception of its earliest chapters, Homegoing floats without plot. Gyasi’s narrative follows the lines of descent that flow from two half sisters, Effia and Esi. The sections are named after male and female descendants, each one representing a specific stage in the seven generations Gyasi imagines; each section is a standalone short story. Gyasi turns her attention from one matrilineage to the other, linking each section into a whole structure, like the spiraling branches of a DNA helix. She opens her narrative with a rape, a birth, a runaway, some domestic violence, some British colonial intermarriage, warfare between the Asantes and Fantes, and, looming in deathly shadow, the Transatlantic African slave trade. The fiction gets heavier with each new section, as Gyasi examines the consequences of the slave trade and slavery on the family branches in the Gold Coast and in America.