Transcendent Kingdom is the second novel by Yaa Gyasi, who burst onto the scene a couple of years ago with her brilliant and celebrated historical fiction novel, Homegoing, which followed several generations of a Ghanian family experiencing slavery in Europe and America. Gyaasi’s sophomore novel has a narrower focus than Homegoing, which spanned decades and continents, instead largely focusing on the American South, and the life of one girl and her immediate family. That girl is Gifty, and when we meet her she is working on her Ph.D. thesis in neuroscience at Stanford, studying reward seeking behavior in mice, hoping to apply her findings to understand more about addiction and risk-taking behavior. Gifty is passionate about her research, partially because it is so personal: Gifty lost her older brother Nana to overdose when he was just a teen, and became addicted to the opioid pills he was prescribed to deal with a basketball injury. Following the loss of Nana, Gifty’s mother has suffered from severe depression for almost two decades, and the once fierce and hardworking single mother is now bedridden. So in addition to her research, Gifty maintains care taking of her mother, who has moved into her apartment in California.
Gifty grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents settled after immigrating from Ghana with Nana, who was an infant at the time of their move. Gifty’s mother and father, the Chin Chin Man, worked tirelessly to provide for their children, but when Gifty was just a young child, it became too much for her father. Reflecting upon her father’s inability to stay in America, Gifty remarks that “she’d seen how America changed around big Black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months.” The Chin Chin Man returns to Ghana, always promising to return to his family, but never coming through, and thus Gifty and Nana are raised from a young age by their mother, who works as a home health aide, shouldering the family’s financial burden while also shouldering the child rearing responsibilities. Gifty’s mother begins attending a christian church in Alabama, which becomes the center of the family’s life, and is central to Gifty’s formation of identity. While Nana is an incredibly talented athlete, Gifty devotes herself not only to academic success, but to spiritual purity.
The novel maintains a fascinating spiritual thread, and as Gifty comes of age, her relationship with Christianity changes. As a young girl, she is a devout believer, writing journal entries to God every night, and waiting to be saved. As she grows older, she grows apart from her faith, but it is not her passion for science that initiates her journey away from the church. It is the racism she witnesses in her church community after Nana’s death that makes her begin to question what she had previously accepted. After hearing two women in her parish speaking about her brother’s addiction, saying, “their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs”, she wonders why God would consider these people worth saving, and questions how holy the church community really is if they’re still spewing the same racist rhetoric as anyone else. She wonders why the church community was so willing to pray for Nana when he had a basketball game coming up, but so quickly turned away from him when he was in the dark and lonely world of addiction.
While Gifty’s study of reward-seeking behaviors is certainly inspired by Nana’s struggle with addiction, and her mother’s ongoing struggles with depression, Gifty’s body of work also has spiritual implications for her. She slowly reconnects with her faith in grad school, never willing to totally disavow the presence of God in her work and in her life. The passages in which Gifty considers her experiments with the mice contain so much empathy, as she ruminates on the nuanced shame of losing a loved one to addiction, piled on top of the grief, and places her hope to understand her brother in her experiments with the mice. The way that science and faith coalesce in Gifty’s life illustrate how these two threads are inextricable, uniting the faith of Gifty’s childhood with her academic pursuits as an adult. Both science and faith are ways for Gifty to reach out to her family, to understand them and to attempt to heal them.
Gyasi has penned a beautiful and mediative novel, centered in the consciousness of Gifty, a stunning narrative voice. The novel refuses to shy away from difficult and complicated familial relationships, as Gifty recalls the horrific nature of Nana’s addiction, of her and her mother driving around town to look for him when he would go missing for days, also detailing Gifty’s efforts to rouse her mother out of bed, to get her to speak or move. In the wake of Nana’s death and the Chin Chin Man’s departure, Gifty and her mother are drawn into a fierce bond, holding on to each other with a tenacity that can only come from such profound loss. The novel is a quietly powerful meditation on mental illness, addiction, trauma, and family, that shows Gyaasi capable of a more subtle but equally powerful gift for storytelling as she displayed in Homegoing.
Further Reading: Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, is another excellent story centering on identity and family.