Beautiful and deeply realized, Yaa Gyasi’s “Transcendent Kingdom” captures the experience of growing up shaped by trauma–including the shame of trying to hide your own pain.
The novel’s main character is Gifty, the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, raised in Alabama. As the novel begins, Gifty is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience in Stanford–heady stuff. But the news that her mother, mired in a deep depression, is coming to stay with her inspires the type of panic that testifies to a raw relationship, the kind rooted in painful memories and unfinished business.
Gradually, Gifty reveals the walls she’s built up to protect herself from a difficult childhood. Her father abandoned the family when she was young to build a new life back in Ghana. Her loving older brother fell into opiate addiction, with all the chaos and worry that entails, before dying of an overdose. Her mother, harsh at the best of the times, crawled away to bed after her son’s funeral, even attempting suicide. And Gifty, still a child, was stuck trying to deal with it all herself, dealt the loser’s hand of trying to trying to keep everything together when everyone else is falling apart.
Gifty’s family is deeply evangelical, a fact that only intensifies the pressure placed upon her. While she takes some pleasure in the faith of her childhood, she loses it, irredeemably, when her brother dies. But her church remains a community, for her mother in particular, and as Gifty leaves home for bigger opportunities, she also struggles with the worldly classmates who judge her faith…just as she feels they would judge her if they knew everything.
As Gifty juggles her mother’s arrival with the pressure of finishing her Ph.D., she’s really dealing with the larger task of exploring how to stop hiding who she is. Gyasi does an excellent job building a character who’s brilliant and tough and driven but also deeply damaged, with a need to keep others at a distance. It’s a compelling portrait of what it’s like to be an “adult child,” and it uses sure, elegant prose to let us into Gifty’s interior life without stranding us there.
“Transcendent Kingdom” isn’t perfect. There’s a contentious, intimate-verging-unt0-romantice relationship with another student at Harvard that the novel doesn’t seem quite to know what to do with. The book also ends with a jump ahead in time that felt a little too easy for me. Nonetheless, I found it a great read, particularly with anyone who’s seen the impact addiction has on families.
Quotes
“I had never been to therapy myself, and when the time came for me to choose what to study, I didn’t choose psychology. I chose molecular biology. I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched Nana walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.”
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“I loved Alabama in the evenings, when everything got still and lazy and beautiful, when the sky felt full, fat with bugs.”
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“She paid for the chips and my sandwich as well, and we headed over to the high-tops at the far end of the shop. It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I’d made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone.”
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“I didn’t mind that the library was neither cool nor hip. I liked Mrs. Greer with her soda addiction and her dedication to the eighties perm. In fact, if there was anyone at school that year who would have honestly cared about my problems at home, who would have listened to my worries and found a way to help, it would have been Mrs. Greer.
‘I’m fine,’ I told her, and as soon as the lie left my lips I knew that I was going to take care of my mother myself. I was going to nurse her back to health through the sheer force of my eleven-year-old will. I would not lose her.”