Mixed-race Identity in Homegoing

The collective struggle of humans for a sense of home, can broadly be defined as unhomeliness, ultimately a part of the human condition in that we all struggle for a sense of place. This is especially true for Africans during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, she confronts the issue of unhomeliness through the lens of characters like Quey and his son James. Being that Quey's father is a British slave trader and his mother is a Fante woman, he faces a difficult identity struggle. Quey  does not only struggle because he looks much different than his African friends and family, but he struggles with a sense of unhomeliness, because he does not know quite where he fits in, or whether he is correct to identify with a particular part of himself.
The hybridity of his mixed race brought the issue that he could not claim either of his parent's heritages, because he was a mix of the two, but wholly nothing. Gyasi addresses issues of identity and purity by writing, "He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father's whiteness nor his mother's blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast (Gyasi 56)." This is a poignant point in the book, because it is a different than the typical narrative of hybridity. A reality that is not one of access, but of loneliness, and unhomeliness, because he feels that he can not claim one part of himself. This is an issue that continued to plague mixed African Americans in the United States. Due to laws like the "one drop rule" during Jim Crow, that indicated anyone with black blood is African American and therefore second-class, forced mixed-race individuals to identify with one particular part of themselves either choosing to pass for white or face the discrimination of blackness in a white supremacist society.
Similarly in Leila Aboulela's The Kindness of Enemies, she confronts another aspect of hybridity with the plight of the main character Natasha. Natasha has to reconcile the two sides of her, with her Russian, white mother, and Sudanese, black father. Also, her Muslim background, which is made evident by her birth surname, Hussein, exasperates her search to belong. Aboulela writes, "The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves (Aboulela 42)." Natasha is expressing her struggle to feel a sense of home, because she is trying to reconcile her two sides of her self that don't seem to match. In this, she displays how difficult hybridity can be, and how it often results in difficult identity struggle.