By: Phoebe Doscher
“Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.”
These words are declared by Gifty, the central character in Yaa Gyasi’s latest novel, Transcendent Kingdom. Gifty spends her life attempting to repress her personal story, which consists of a murky family history and moments of trauma. A PhD student of neuroscience at Stanford University, she cares for her depressed mother while working to overcome her father’s departure and her brother’s death by opioid overdose. Leading up to Gifty’s final thesis, she uncovers psychological, religious, and cultural aspects to her family life and childhood that bring her closer to forming her own future and sense of self. Gyasi crafts a beautiful narrative of overcoming past traumas while integrating philosophical and psychological rationale in a fictional, self reflective study that is both gripping and shockingly revealing.
Fresh from the success of her debut novel, the American Book Award-winning Homegoing (2016), Gyasi explores Ghanaian-American identity through a new lens in Transcendent Kingdom, focusing on an immigrant family living in Huntsville, Alabama. She likens Gifty’s Ghanaian and Alabamian roots to her own in a study of dual identity, with the main character grappling with her possession of “a million selves.”
In a departure from her historically-rooted novel Homegoing, Gyasi presents a modern take on familial reverberations in the face of addiction and mental illness. She enhances the narrative with lessons from Gifty about psychology; the reward-seeking behavior she studies in mice, by no coincidence, helps her reason with her brother’s opioid addiction. Despite distancing herself from her off-putting family history, she discovers that they are the purpose for her work, and wonders conclusively, “could this science work on the people who need it the most?”
The bulk of the novel’s conflict is Gifty’s inner turmoil. She witnesses her brother’s painful submission to drug addiction as a child while being taught to relentlessly trust God. On top of her spiritual foundation, she contrastingly devotes her adult life to science. “At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become,” Gifty reflects. Gyasi is a gifted and strategic storyteller; she fleshes out traumatic memories from Gifty’s past by including psychological rationale within the fiction narrative. “I would give a lot to be able to inhabit someone else’s body—” Gifty says, “to think that they’re thinking, feel what they’re feeling.” Gifty supplements this in ability to see inside the minds of others—particularly her mom and brother—by digging deep into her own psyche. Transcendent Kingdom, to that end, is more than a story;—it is also grounded in real mental work that speaks to Gifty’s experience and aligns with real life.
Gyasi keeps the reader engaged with the present-day plot by exploring Gifty’s progressively poorer mental instability. By the midpoint of the novel, Gifty is fed up with caring for her mother and shouldering the burden of her brother’s traumatic passing, which keepings readers on their toes about whether Gifty’s withering self-sufficiency will hold up. Despite Gifty’s attempt to transcend the family narrative, proving herself to be a stable, successful exception—“a living theorem, a Logos”—her ultimate downfall lies in the self-reliance and unwillingness to seek help. She stuffs her past down in public, clinging to “the rigor, the toughness” of her life and profession instead of seeking reprieve, which results in a buildup of guilt and responsibility. For a cerebrally-focused author, Gyasi does not let Gifty catch a mental break, and her protagonist suffers through a buildup of debilitating self-support, as if Gifty’s own form of addiction is the very act of causing herself deep suffering.
Transcendent Kingdom not only meticulously balances the self-talk and moving narrative line, it also feels philosophical and psychologically sound, like a real case study in Brené Brown’s book on shame. Gyasi grasps vivid gems from Gifty’s past—stories of attempting to resurrect a dead bird, near-drowning in a desperate attempt to win at something—and places them in fitting points among the ever-moving PhD-student Gifty plot. These gems serve as surprising moments of realization to the reader. They also reveal a subset of Gifty’s personality: her innate desire to glean a larger purpose from her life. Gifty keeps a journal with letters to God and detailed notes about her brother’s addiction, thus, part of the reading journey includes wondering what will come of Gifty’s detailed notes and profound self discoveries. Gifty teases the reader into believing she’ll get better, that she’ll find a way out of her suffering by alluding to desires for a conclusive answer to her trauma and an opportunity to make something of her struggles. Ultimately, Gifty resorts back to her continuous wrestling match with shame: “I still have so much shame,” she says. “I’m full to the brim with it; I’m spilling over.” Despite the difficulty of bearing witness to this wrestling match, considering Gifty’s emotional burden, her inability to move forward is understood.
Rather than writing off Gifty’s story as a sad lesson in loss, Gyasi saves her character’s dignity by bestowing on her unfaltering strength and sharp desires for a better future. Her experience, however, is compounded by a debilitating sense of otherness in terms of ethnicity, gender, and profession. Gifty feels a constant need to prove herself, not only to be the exception in the family but also live up to and defy the expectations of an immigrant and a Black woman in the STEM field. She feels further burdened by the stigmas stemming from her brother’s drug addiction, which becomes a topic of gossip at the family’s predominantly-white church. These themes provide Gyasi ample opportunity to digest institutionalized and internalized racism in America, and she declares with clarity of tone, “There was, there is, little interest in the lives of black people.” This reflection and gripping affirmation is reminiscent of Ibram X. Kendi’s examination of racism in How to Be an Antiracist or Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s harrowing dystopian account of marginalization in Friday Black. Alongside Transcendent Kingdom, these works are an honest plea for visibility,; proof of the need to tip the scale of racial injustice in America.
Gifty’s story—though not unscathed—is real, and shockingly painful. As Gifty nears the end of her thesis, Gyasi’s larger meaning becomes ever the more present: Gifty’s stories immortalize her brother, revitalize her mother, reason with God and “the story of how we got here.” They comprise all she has been and determine who she will be, and, though they live in her as emotional scars, she is also well on her way to writing a new story about transcending her past.