Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom is a fine representation of migrant body and migrant text. It can be read both as an American and Ghanian story, on one hand, and as a chronicle of assorted nightmares of not only immigrants but also Black experience in America, on the other.
The book does a lot of things at once while keeping focused on its central mission. Bits of Kejetia and Alabama; between the two worlds, all was well until at the point of cultural contact. Gifty’s parents emigrated to Alabama from Ghana. The family grapples with adjustment and belonging amidst the pull of the home culture.
Gifty, born in the US and only has had a passing experience of her parents’ homecountry, finds herself boxed in stereotypical immigrant trappings: lonely and introvert, spending long hours in lab and brooding over everything: the suffering in her family, her relationship with colleagues and friends at church.
Nana, her brother, is a talented athlete, afflicted with addiction and died of opioid overdose. The story is somehow about Nana, but it’s in fact about Gifty, the six-year PhD student at Stanford University School of Medicine, who lives in a circle of multiple traumas of lacking – of community who understood her, of her brother, of father and the grief of her dying mother. Readers come to know events through her mouth and private thinking.
Nana is the dominant unifying force. His dying pushed the family further apart but does not stall the story. In death, he is still alive through Gifty’s thinking and reflection.
From the start the book has about it a funeral character. The brooding nature of Gifty’s mind permeates the narrative landscape – somber and moody – which makes the reading meditative, and draws the reader closer to the pain. The sorrowful ambiance makes it possible for us not to be mere spectators.
Interestingly, the story is built on the basis of oppositions and ideational conflicts: faith vs science, family vs profession etc. Gifty set out to understand the basis of reward-seeking behavior in mice and neural circuits of depression in hope of finding solution to the demons that afflicted her family. She is heavily invested in her family and profession almost in equal proportion. She’s selfless in her pursuit to serve the larger humanity beginning with solving her family’s issues.
While this is an intimate, personal story, Gifty does not seem to have a deeper connection with her parents; her mother was simply known as Black Mamba and her father as Chin Chin Man.
From the family to lab and the church spaces, we have seen the social, the scientific and spiritual, spilling and colliding in each other. As these issues – and more – journeyed through the novel and failed to find common ground, they go their separate ways.
The text, overall, is a window to the world. As a locus of cultural negotiation and conflict, it presents and defines the “radical other” between the two traditions, in which the family has to make a choice. Father goes to nationalism, mother and daughter to internationalism. But their trade-off in favor of the host culture wasn’t enough.
Madison, WI
