Title & author
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Synopsis
In Gyasi’s second novel Transcendent Kingdom, racism is the weather, as well as sexism and the subsequent expectations placed on main character Gifty due to her intersectional identity. The book addresses all of these experiences, without being about any of them. Gyasi masterfully details a story about Gifty’s reckoning of spirituality and science, in an environment created by individuals that too often would prefer her not to succeed.
Who should read this book
Fans of Godshot
What we’re thinking about
The coexistence of science and spirituality
Trigger warning(s)
Substance abuse, abandonment, sexism, mental health, racism
In a country that is attempting to address systemic and structural racism partly through antiracist reading lists, how does this “genre” limit the way we think of the books placed within it? On ad astra, we’ve pointed a few times to the importance of Lauren Michele Jackson’s “What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?” and in a conversation with Rumaan Alam during The Brooklyn Book Festival, author Yaa Gyasi reiterated the importance of Jackson’s piece—how books by authors of color are not all automatically intended to be self-help books for white readers. Instead, many of the books put on these antiracist reading lists depict racism as the “weather,” the background that impacts everything. In Gyasi’s second novel Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf, 2020), racism is the weather, as well as sexism and the subsequent expectations placed on main character Gifty due to her intersectional identity. The book addresses all of these experiences, without being about any of them. Gyasi masterfully details a story about Gifty’s reckoning of spirituality and science, in an environment created by individuals that too often would prefer her not to succeed.
A sixth year PhD candidate in neuroscience, Gifty moves first from her hometown in Alabama to Cambridge, where she attends Harvard, and then across the country to pursue her advanced degree at Stanford. However, impactful events from her childhood follow her, shaping her studies. “Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?” she asks in her research (Gyasi, 44). Propelled at first by her brother Nana’s overdose on OxyContin when he was only fifteen, and later by her mother’s subsequent depression, Gifty focuses her studies on behavioral change. And though she’d originally dreamed of being a worship leader or Preacher’s wife, a desire born from her upbringing in a Pentacostal church, her relationship with religion comes to an abrupt end after Nana’s death, propelling her towards the sciences. But her relationship with both religion and science grows nuanced, her devout past following and shaping her despite her protests. “‘How do you know God doesn’t exist?’” she asks her classmates at Harvard during an Integrated Science course (88). And so Gifty begins to wonder whether science and religion can coexist, whether there can be explanations that are rooted in both.
Gyasi’s graceful, magnetic writing propels the reader’s connection to Gifty’s exploration. “God failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my capacity to believe in him,” Gifty says of the time following Nana’s passing (249). “And yet. How to explain every quiver? How to explain that once sure-footed knowledge of his presence in my heart?” (249). As Gifty parses out her knowledge, emotions, and thoughts, the readers are brought along, encouraging her exploration, her quest. And we follow the relationship with her mother eagerly, desperate to see a happy ending for her, her mother, and their relationship. Through expositions and jumping timelines, we watch Gifty, learn the progression of her beliefs. Gyasi grants the reader with the gift of a narrator who over time begins to let them further and further into the depths of her mind, whilst keeping so many others out.
And all the while as Gifty continues on her path of exploration, her being in and of itself exists as a protest. As Gyasi makes clear—the book is not intended to be a self-help book for readers to better understand their privilege. But that does not mean intersectional feminism is not rooted at the novel’s core. From childhood, Gifty feels the expectations placed on her due to both her race and gender. “I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it,” she says in response to the white Alabamians who criticize her family because of their skin (61). And when she gets to Stanford, “there were only five women in my lab of twenty-eight, and I was one of three black PhD candidates in the entire med school” (21). Gifty’s intellect, what others believe she cannot—and should not—possess because of her identity, is an objection to their prejudiced beliefs. But still, Gifty doesn’t “want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop” (83). Gifty does not have to voice her direct thoughts on being a woman of color in science. She does not have to share her stories of marginalization with others. She lets her being, her existence, speak for itself. And in doing so, her relationships, her exploration of sex and sexuality, of identity, and of her career goals—they are all in the background of the story, but meaningfully. Only when Gifty is ready, only when they’ll help her become a fuller version of her healing self, does she reach for them.
There may be an expectation that books by women, especially by women of color, must be outright feminist, antiracist, and more. But for centuries, stories about and by men have existed on their own, without explanations for why a male protagonist is the greatest, or why he’s able to do what he does. And sure, within the intersectional feminist canon, such books that feature protagonists with clearly stated feminist agendas are highly important. But Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom serves as an important reminder that just displaying different stories can have the same impact. Stories that focus on women, on their careers and family life, their strengths and challenges, stories that are filled with magnetic writing, poetic reflections on life and love: these stories are whole. These stories can reshape the world.
“My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her.”
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We found Gifty to let the reader in more and more over time, versus all at once at the start of the novel. Did you feel the same? How did this shape your reading of her journey?
Does a depiction of racism, sexim, ableism, etc. as the “weather” vs. as the focus of a story alter our understanding of the text? Why or why not?
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