Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Title: Transcendent Kingdom
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Published: 2020
Type: Fiction
Pages: 264
“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so” one might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know” or worse still, “Nothing”?
In Brief:
Gyasi is hands down one of my favorite authors of this time, perhaps ever. This book was so so different than her debut Homegoing (which I loved) and perhaps even more remarkable for it, delving into immigration, faith, race, mental health, and addiction, all with her trademark lucidity and grace.
Rating: 4.7
Synopsis:
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
Where I’m At:
I did not come to this book with any understanding of what it’s like to be Black or an immigrant in this country. Of course. What I did understand, though, was the experience of being a young Christian woman, and coming to doubt the faith that did so much for me.
I started going to an evangelical church when I was a freshman in high school, in part because a few of my friends and my first-ever “boyfriend” went there. No one else in my immediate family was religious, which was odd. But having occasionally attended my Nana’s Catholic services when I was even younger, I always wanted to believe in a god. I felt drawn to the Christian gospel, just didn’t know where to start.
Church quickly became a home for me. As a teenager with (what I now recognize as) very high anxiety, it was the only place that felt safe or made sense to me. It was so physical, stepping onto the campus – my life otherwise was fighting the urge to scream or cry, my nails constantly digging into the palms of my hands, scratching at my wrists or scalp. But there, I could relax. My racing mind was finally quiet and calm. I threw myself into all of it – I was baptized on an Easter in the Pacific Ocean, I was an “intern” leading prayers, I went to bible studies and retreats and even a missionary trip. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school and first couple years of college that I cooled off, finally put off by the church’s message about queer people, women’s rights, or non-Christians in general. That didn’t square with the type of god or religion I wanted to believe in, and the discordance meant I no longer felt at home.
But it still lingers with me, the good and the bad. On the good side, I treasure most ardently the values I still find thumbing through my old Bible – things like forgiveness, service, and love. I try to think about those values every day, and act on them. On the bad side, I’m tormented by guilt, a black-and-white notion of what’s “good” or “bad,” a warped perception of sex/sexuality and my “role” as a woman.
So I’ve become, in some ways, the typical San Francisco-tech-atheist stereotype, the kind of coastal-elite-modern-Marxist-yuppie who looks down their nose at anyone who must cling to antiquated religion for meaning. But not entirely. Like Gifty, my relationship with my faith and my god is more nuanced, my worldview a delicate balance of cold rationalism and tender hope.
Getting Into it:
I couldn’t read this book without comparing it to Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing. It was one of my favorite books of 2019, and a stunning debut by all accounts – a novel that spanned centuries and generations, recounting the story of a family from Ghana to the US and back again.
Transcendent Kingdom is entirely different. Rather than being so ambitiously expansive, it’s ambitiously quiet, more focused. There’s no real plot, whereas Homegoing was essentially a bunch of tightly plotted, intertwined short stories – it’s ruminative, more of a deep exploration of a character/family than a grand narrative. It doesn’t follow a linear timeline like Homegoing, but bounces back and forth from Gifty’s childhood to adulthood, effectively revealing layers of her character and the constant influence of our past.
It helps that Gifty is a fascinating character, one that I don’t think you see much of in books – at least not among female characters. She’s this bundle of wisdom and rage beyond her years, adheres to strict self-control, is driven by fierce, simple ambition and desire to never be seen as weak.
“What are your goals? What do you want?” he asked. I looked at him and thought, How much time do you have? I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less.
(That last line really resonated with me. Sometimes I’m terrified of my own ambition.)
On the flip side, Gifty’s tight control (or repression) of her emotions made make her somewhat inscrutable, which could be frustrating as a narrator. She was certainly unreliable, claiming that her studies on addiction or depression had nothing to do with her family history when… clearly they were. That was the whole point. She also casually describes romantic interest in women, and although I love to see bisexual representation and not making a “thing” about queerness, surely her evangelical upbringing would give her some amount of pause upon recognizing those feelings. I just felt like I wanted more from her, and although there was some emotional growth by the end, it wasn’t as satisfying as I would have liked.
Gifty’s tendency towards observation and contemplation also makes her an effective conduit for Gyasi’s more meta musings, such as on race. She’s greatly impacted by watching her father struggle upon immigrating to America, commenting:
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.
She also observes the way her brother Nana is considered only to have a future due to his mastery of sports by their mostly white neighbors/fellow churchgoers, and listens to their comments when they learn about Nana’s struggle with addiction:
“It is sad, but – and I really do hate to say this – their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs. I mean, they are always on drugs. That’s why there’s so much crime.”
Just a few pages later, Gyasi delves directly into the impact of these early childhood experiences:
What I’m saying is, I didn’t grow up with a language for, a way to explain, to parse out, my self-loathing. I grew up only with my part, my little throbbing stone of self-hate that I carried around with me to church, to school, to all those places in my life that worked, it seemed to me then, to affirm the idea that I was irreparably, fatally, wrong. I was a child who liked to be right.
It’s absolutely devastating. I tend to adhere to the “show, don’t tell” mantra when it comes to novels, but Gyasi’s style is unflinching, pointing directly to the problems. For her, it works beautifully, powerfully. She tells it to you straight. I think it has a lot to do with her writing style – lucid, lyrical yet unpretentious, never preaching. Think of Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
There’s more, too. Gyasi takes a hard look at perceptions around mental illness, particularly in the Black community, Nana’s addiction and the mother’s depression and Gifty’s own trauma/anxiety, as well as her refusal to consider therapy. She also delves into the parent-child relationship, beautifully reflecting:
Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes… I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the streets, there’s dissonance. When she wants things that I don’t want for myself – Christ, marriage, children – I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way, either.
And of course, there’s religion. This one feels a bit too personal for me to really get into publicly (weird, considering everything else I feel fine telling the internet), but suffice to say that so much of it resonates jarringly with my own experience, and all of it is beautifully complex, perfectly acute. There’s also a satisfying resolution in which Gifty finds her own way to come to terms with the nuances of her faith, which I appreciated – too often religion is seen as a stark choice, either you have it or you don’t, which I don’t think is at all realistic.
Once every few months of whenever the mood strikes, I take the long way home from the lab I run in Princeton just so I can step into that church… I never bow my head. I never pray, never wait to hear God’s voice, I just look. I sit in blessed silence, and I remember. I try to make order, make sense, make meaning of the jumble of it all. Always, I light two candles before I go.
To conclude – I don’t know if it was a “decision” on Gyasi’s part to make her second book so different from her first, but if so, I think it was wise. Expectations were so so high after Homegoing – she was so young (my age now when she sold it), could she really be that talented? So to escape a direct comparison, she did something entirely new. And she killed it. Even if it wasn’t a conscious choice, Gyasi proved that Homegoing wasn’t just a lucky break, that her skill is vast and beyond question. It blew me away in perfectly written individual lines, and near-perfect execution as a whole. Unsurprisingly, I think everyone should read this book.
