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Dramatic Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Probably Royal, Too:
Abena stumbles into dramatic irony during her visit to the heart of the Asante kingdom. After she and Ohene Nyarko pass an old man who mistakes her for James, her traveling partner jokes about her potential “royal ancestry”:
Once he had gone, Ohene Nyarko pushed Abena along, out of the gates, until they were firmly back in the bustle of the city. "That old man was probably half-blind," he muttered, steering Abena by the elbow.
"Shhh," Abena said, though there was no way the man could still hear them. "That man is probably a royal."
And Ohene Nyarko snorted. "If he is a royal, then you are a royal too," he said, laughing boisterously.
Homegoing presents a moment of double irony. Ohene’s banter comes at the heels of the old man’s misrecognition. “They said you had died in the war, but I knew that could not be!” the old man exclaims, mistakenly believing Abena to be James. But even after correcting the old man, Ohene’s own joke is no less ironic. “If he is a royal, then you are a royal too,” he tells Abena, part scoffingly.
The reader knows the answers to both. Having followed Quey’s marriage to Nana Yaa and traced James’s fictionalized death, they recognize that James is, in fact, still alive. They also know of the royal blood that lurks within Abena. Ohene and the confused old man are at least partly correct, even if they don’t believe themselves to be so. The town laughingstock happens to be a man who formerly possessed unimaginable power. The random girl is part royal. The man who supposedly died has not died. As characters fumble around the truth, the novel shares with its audience the secret surprises of history.
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