Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
I picked out this book because of how the description resonated with me. Having a background in neuroscience, I know the anatomical regions of the human brain and I’ve observed experiments and clinical trials — but in this story, a sixth year Ph.D. student realizes that there is so much more to the science of our minds, identities, and dare say, our souls.
Transcendent Kingdom is the second book written by Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi was born in Ghana and she was raised in Huntsville, Alabama, similar to Gifty, the main character we follow throughout the book. Gyasi’s friend in real life, Christina Kim, researched the suppression of reward-related behaviour on mice at Stanford University.
This book is a beautiful mesh of tales that are intimate and sincere, of a girl who struggles with her place in the world, with how her family shapes who she is. She deals with the many peeling layers of discouragement and restlessness that come with being someone outwardly different, and someone with conflicting values.
Gifty, our narrator, is a neuroscientist researching the optogenetics and rewiring of reward pathways in the brains of mice at a Stanford lab. As a woman in STEM, I can relate to Gifty on some level, yet on another level, she is brilliant and suffers in invisible ways. Outwardly, she fits into sundry demographic categories. Her mother is from Ghana, her family struggled with finances, and she grew up as a pious child with reverent loyalty to God. Her father left, her brother then fell into his opioid addiction, and then his mother became so unrousable and depressed.
Gifty doesn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, or a Black woman in science. She struggled very much with who she is and what she believes in, and whether she could believe in two conflicting worlds at the same time.
She spills bits and pieces of her life to us through diary entries, flashbacks, descriptions, and objective narration, at times with such scientific accuracy and precision, her tone stiff, almost as if a defence mechanism.
When her mother became deeply depressed, she began to lose her mother along with herself. Her mother, who once scolded her if she left the house without earrings, would wander away from her apartment in pyjamas, unable to feel pleasure or joy.
When Gifty was a lot younger, she would ask her mother in front of the mirror, inquisitively, if she was pretty. Her mother forcefully pulled her to the mirror, and said, “Look what God made. Look what I made.” in such fierce pride, then kissing her own reflection. This accentuated contrast in her mother’s composure and demeanor, scaffolded by other facets of Gifty’s complicated and ordinary life, makes her story so weighty.
In terms of what I think of Transcendant Kingdom, I don’t think I am disappointed. It delivered what it promised, a strong story of someone finding herself, in a world of complicated fragments and eddies, when everything only sounds simple and straightforward in ideation (like family, a career, and love).
I just found it… Lacking. Three stars — amazing development and layers of characterization, and addressed so many thematically important issues of addiction, depression, science, and religion. I just found some of the build-up slightly dry and flaky, lacking in lustre.
Can I be more specific?
I just think I found this book a little bit repetitive, swirling around in my head, of concepts that are warm, of stigma and problems that are warm. But these concepts were never fully heated up, they just stayed lukewarm.
Gifty speaks of these issues, touching the core, but maybe it was because I listened to an audiobook, and my attention was scattered, I couldn’t focus as intently on her raw emotions. I know a lot of other people love this book, so my judgment may not be entirely fair.
