Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi (review)

In Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi writes of pain and loss so vividly the reader feels it, as if they are actually experiencing it themselves. Gifty, the narrator, is conducting research on mice as a PhD candidate in neuroscience while also tending to and worrying about her depressed mother who rarely gets out of bed. Stories from Gifty's past are interspersed with moments from the present day. The scenes from her past are not in chronological order. Instead, they are more thoughtfully given to readers to keep us wanting more. Her story begins before she was born, when her mother and father meet in Ghana.

Gifty's father is only ever referred to as the Chin Chin Man, a name he earned for the deep-fried snacks made of flour, sugar, milk, and butter that he convinced Gifty's Ghanian grandmother to give him for free. However, Gifty's mother's name is never mentioned. In journaling to God, Gifty refers to her as The Black Mamba. Her parents are married in Ghana, and her older brother, Nana, is born there. Her mother wants to give her new baby everything and decides moving to America is the way to do so, a decision Gifty eventually questions: "this place was everything [her] mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world."

While her father is never keen on moving to America, he quickly follows his wife and young son, but longs for Ghana. In America, he is accused of stealing in Walmart "three times in four months…Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house." Eventually, he returns to Ghana, where he feels free to be a strong, proud, Black man. The Chin Chin Man's absence from his family reverberates throughout the story and leaves Gifty's mother a single, working parent in a foreign country.

There are occasions of racism throughout the novel and Gifty's childhood. In the Sunday School room at her church, Gifty overhears two women talking about her brother Nana, a gifted basketball player who has transformed the local team. But Nana is battling an injury, and his doctor, who wants to see him back on the court, has prescribed Oxycontin. "Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs," the women whisper. Afterwards, Gifty's names feelings of internalized racism before there was a term for it: "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." The drug quickly consumes Nana, filling a void created by the emptiness left by his father, his own internalized racism, or any number of other reasons, and it leads him to other drugs. After Nana is pressed on what it feels like when he takes the drugs, he answers, "like everything inside my head just empties out and then there is nothing left—in a good way."

Gyasi forces readers to see addicts beyond their addiction and the depressed beyond their depression—to face our own participation in the stigma that prevents these people from receiving the care and help they need. In a park, Gifty holds Nana's feet, and their mother holds his upper body. They carry him, passed out, to the car. Remembering this day, she says, "The thing I will never forget is that people were watching us do all of this[…]and no one lifted a finger."

After years of trying to fight addiction and eventually learning to coexist with it, police tell Gifty and her mother that Nana has overdosed on heroin in a Starbucks parking lot and is dead. Gifty's doctoral research on reward-seeking behavior in mice is directly related to losing her brother. She chooses this research as a way to "work through all of...