Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, blew my mind in 2016 when I read it. It was a heavy book, but one that I always recommend to people. When Transcendent Kingdom came out, I wanted to read it, naturally, but was worried. Her debut was so amazing. Could Transcendent Kingdom be on the same level??
It wasn't. It was on a whole other level. This isn't Homegoing, but it's just as powerful. And honestly, I'm jealous.
Gifty and Nana are just kids, living in Alabama after their parents relocated from Ghana. Right off the bat, you know their life is going to be harder than it should. The Chin Chin Man (their father) tried to make his life work in the US, but ultimately ended up going back to Ghana. Gifty's mother suffered from severe depression and was suicidal. Nana, a star athlete, was dead at a young age due to a drug overdose. And that left Gifty, on her own and a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine.
Funny where paths lead.
Transcendent Kingdom follows present day Gifty as she works her experiments on mice, trying to understand reward seeking behavior (ie. drug addiction) and how people can be treated to avoid it. Gifty's mom ends up coming to stay with her in her tiny apartment while she's in the middle of a severe depression episode. The only family they have left is each other, despite their differences. The book takes us back and forth when the family was a whole unit up until present time, with Gifty trying everything she can think of to help her mom.
Gifty barely knew her dad, but met up with him again when her mother sent her to Ghana for the summer.
“My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It's those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.”
“If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”
To say her relationship with her mother, a very religious woman, was complicated is putting it lightly. We often see Gifty on the verge of giving up, we see her mother giving up, but Gifty keeps on.
What is so engaging with this story is the mix of religion and science. Gifty tried to follow her mother into religion, generally overthinking it and often misunderstanding it. Science was her refuge, but religion always stayed there, on the periphery.
“When it came to God, I could not give a straight answer. I had not been able to give a straight answer since the day Nana died. God failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my capacity to believe in him. And yet. How to explain every quiver? How to explain that once sure-footed knowledge of his presence in my heart?”
This is a beautiful book, a wonderfully written story to lose yourself. It's not Homegoing, no, but it's something just as good on the other side of the spectrum.
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