In her sophomore work, the Ghanaian-American novelist illuminates the complexities of family
For a book that was launched during a pandemic, Yaa Gyasi’s sophomore novel “Transcendent Kingdom” seems perfectly timed–a quiet work that focuses on one family yet also illuminates keen observations about society at large.
“I wrote to process some things I dealt with – spirituality and making sense of the world when senseless things happen,” said Gyasi, during a recent Zoom event with former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith earlier this month. Gyasi’s debut novel, “Homecoming,” was released in 2016 to much acclaim.
Indeed, Gyasi’s masterful use of mirror imagery is what Gifty, the book’s protagonist, uses to make sense of her dichotomous existence. Publicly, she is a bright Stanford Ph.D. neuroscience student researching behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. In her personal life however, Gifty is a grieving sister, attempting to find answers about the death of her brother Nana, who died of a heroin overdose years ago.
In her study of the brain, Gifty attempts to answer the question of her brother’s addiction. The answer seems simple enough: Nana’s pain from his father’s absence was expressed in addiction. But why, Gifty wonders, was her brother unable to recover? Finding the answer to this becomes Gifty’s personal and professional preoccupation.
“Transcendent Kingdom” also masterfully utilizes mirror imagery to explain how Gifty makes sense of the world around her. In Ghana while her mother recovers from a breakdown in the States, Gifty watches a mentally ill man during a trip to the market. The man struggles like her own mother but Gifty remarks on their difference: even though he was wild on the outside, the man seemed at peace, unlike her mother, possessing a wildness that stays within and is not expressed loudly.
Through journal entries to God, readers learn useful backstory and insight into Gifty’s home life. In one passage, she describes an experience at a restaurant where the waiter asks her mother to repeat herself because she is speaking so low.
“There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don’t think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.”
Among many poignant observations, this one strikes as particularly accurate in describing those on the “outside” — immigrants or people of color who navigate through merely existing in institutions that do not acknowledge them. Gifty, although born and raised in Alabama, is also an outsider because of her race and culture, and with her family, feels alienated wherever they go.
Gifty’s understanding of religion and Christianity is also filtered through her experience at the Pentecostal, mostly white church her family attends; they are the only black family there. She gets saved but her brother’s addiction–and the congregants’ whispers about him–leads her to question God. She sees the selective way her brother’s Blackness is not afforded grace in the church to make mistakes. When a teenage pregnancy in the same church is quickly forgiven and forgotten by the congregants, Gifty eventually turns her back on the church and decides to make science her religion.
Transcendent Kingdom is filled with unrelenting sadness interspersed with clinical studies and scientific definitions. The sadness takes you unawares and you realize that the story of survival is never complete and that not everything can be resolved neatly whether it be in a book or in life.
