REVIEW : Transcendent Kingdom / Yaa Gyasi
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There’s an unsettling emptiness in certain corners of the self-help world that can best be described in three words: Live, Laugh, Love. Three syllables that melt the heart of a certain type of person while simultaneously turning them into a punchline, whether that‘s fair or not.
I’ve always (meanly) prided myself as someone way above things like quotes or vision boards, but a few short chapters into Transcendent Kingdom, author Yaa Gyasi’s sophomore novel, I came across an idea that felt like therapy. It was a little clue to tuck safely into my pocket—the way I assume other people squirrel away inspirational quotes—and I (again, meanly) had a self-righteous urge to print it out and send it to any well-intentioned relative who had ever told me to suck it up and live-laugh-love myself through any hardship:
“If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”
So says Gifty, the child of evangelical Ghanaian immigrants and protagonist of Transcendent Kingdom—who, like many children whose pathologies begin with cold parents, just so happens to be a bit callous herself.
When we first meet her (the novel alternates back and forth between Gifty’s childhood and present) she is a Stanford graduate student studying neuroscience—or more specifically, studying addiction. Why, her lab work asked, would certain mice push through electric shocks to get hits of Ensure while other mice learn to control their urges in the name of self-preservation? During her studies, her mother's suicidal depression eventually forces her to move into Gifty’s cramped student apartment where she mostly just sleeps and refuses meals.
The mother in question goes unnamed throughout the entire book; she’s simply “my mother” when her husband leaves her with two children to return to Ghana, “my mother” when her only job prospect in small-town Alabama is as a caregiver for a casually racist family, “my mother” when her only son dies of a heroin overdose, and “my mother” when her crippling depression finally leads her to Gifty’s apartment.
The only alias we’re given for her is “The Black Mamba” a not-so-hard-to-crack codename used in Gifty’s childhood letters to God. (“Dear God, The Black Mamba has been really mean to me lately. Yesterday she told me that if I didn’t clean my room no one would want to marry me.”)
Like many people with complicated relationships with their parents, Gifty spends the majority of her life, of the book, trying to distance herself from the woman she nicknamed after a venomous snake.
What’s not so obvious to Gifty is that through shared experiences she is decidedly her mother’s daughter, and the stony-hearted characteristics of her family can’t be explained by neuroscience or fixed with the right electric shocks. As she said herself, people harden when life is really, really, traumatic and really, really unfair. Just as her mother’s pain has caused her to close herself off, so it does to Gifty. When, in a flashback, we return to the day that Gifty’s only brother died of a heroin overdose, she’s so callused over her reaction is uncomfortably clinical: “We were blindsided.”
There’s only one place “The Black Mamba” will allow herself to turn for help: Religion. Church, baptisms, speaking in tongues, mystics, witch doctors—nothing is too over-the-top. To her, capital D depression is for indulgent white people. Praying is for people with good sense.
Rather than relying on a plot full of fireworks, Yaa Gyasi (also a Ghanaian-American Stanford graduate who grew up in Alabama) lets her readers slip into the family and more or less ride out their lives alongside them. As such, the story sometimes feels as if it’s happening in slow motion—not in that it drags, rather in that it mirrors her mother’s depression. The arcs aren’t obvious. It’s quiet and unpredictable in it’s uncertainty, making the too-tidy ending, my only real beef with the book, a bit jarring.
I’m not so callous myself that I can’t appreciate an ending that comes wrapped in a bow, but what I welcome more, and what Transcendent Kingdom generally does so well is to let characters have complicated, unresolved feelings about family pain. Decades-long trauma is emotional quicksand, and if that can make you want to tell Live, Laugh, Lovers exactly where they can shove it, maybe that’s just the way it is. Maybe we can appreciate a callus for what it is.
Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom is out from Knopf now.
Laura Jaye Cramer, writer lady.
