Heaven: 2022 March Book Club: "Transcendent Kingdom" by Yaa Gyasi
I hope some of us are on board for reading this novel in March! I read it last year and found much to think about that I wanted to discuss with people (hence my suggesting it for book club!). Here's the Goodreads summary of the book:
Post below if you're read, are reading or are planning to read this book! I'll post discussion questions around March 20 as usual.
Transcendent Kingdom is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
Post below if you're read, are reading or are planning to read this book! I'll post discussion questions around March 20 as usual.
Comments
For anyone reading the book who hasn't finished yet, discussion after the 20th of the month may contain spoilers, so you may be best to check back in on the thread after you've finished the book!
1. What did you think of the role religious faith played in the novel? How did religion function in the lives of Gifty, Nana, and their mother?
2. What aspects of African immigrant experience in the US did this book explore? Was there anything here that was surprising to you?
3. The adult Gifty says of herself: “At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become – a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain” (chapter 15). Do you see continuity or discontinuity between the child and adult Gifty? How has her childhood influenced the woman she has become?
4. What do you think of the novel’s treatment of the topics of mental illness and addiction?
5. The end of the novel leaves many questions unresolved, particularly about Gifty’s mother. What do you think of the brief final chapter/epilogue? Does it provide enough resolution to the story for your satisfaction?
6. What did you like best about this novel? What scenes, characters, or ideas will linger with you? (Conversely, of course, if you didn’t like it – what in it did not work for you?)
I'll come back to some of the questions later when I've had a thought about them.
Gifty herself sets out the binary so common between believers and supposedly rational secular people: "I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak."
Neither a 'God lens' nor science though is enough to heal the wounds in the family (the mother's mental illness), or answer the bigger questions about addiction. I noted down another quotation in the novel from King Lear: “We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body." Are we humans an animal species governed by natural laws or is there something transcendent to save us from ourselves?
Years ago, a Catholic priest (trained pre-Vatican II) would tell us, "God forgives; nature doesn't." Meaning that if you swallow a lethal dose of poison and then repent and beg God for forgiveness, God will forgive but the poison will take its natural course and your body will die. I've argued with that binary tension for many years.
Religious faith was the foil of the scientific method. It was also a form of ecstatic, addictive behaviour. The feeling the mother got from religion was analogous to the ecstatic feeling that Nana experienced while high on drugs. Religion as much as her brother’s drug addiction spurred Gifty on to better understand the nature of addictive behaviour.
2. What aspects of African immigrant experience in the US did this book explore? Was there anything here that was surprising to you?
The racism, the drop in relative social status including economic status, the attempt to find one’s way in a strange culture. Until pointed out, I thought the family was attending a “black church”. It surprised me that they were part of a predominantly white congregation and other than fellow Ghananians the family seemed not to be close to other black families.
3. The adult Gifty says of herself: “At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become – a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain” (chapter 15). Do you see continuity or discontinuity between the child and adult Gifty? How has her childhood influenced the woman she has become?
I see both continuity and discontinuity. I think without her religious upbringing, Gifty would not have found her way to neuroscience and the study of addiction.
4. What do you think of the novel’s treatment of the topics of mental illness and addiction?
It might have been a bit more in depth but then it might have taken over as the predominant aspect of the story. Nana’s experience with drugs echoes many, many other stories of the path of addiction. The mother’s experiences with grief and depression and treatment regimes were realistic. Her religious faith seemed to prevent her from going all in on pursuing treatment regimes that would make her feel better.
5. The end of the novel leaves many questions unresolved, particularly about Gifty’s mother. What do you think of the brief final chapter/epilogue? Does it provide enough resolution to the story for your satisfaction?
6. What did you like best about this novel? What scenes, characters, or ideas will linger with you? (Conversely, of course, if you didn’t like it – what in it did not work for you?)
I don’t have the novel at my fingertips so I will look at it this evening.
What aspects of [African] immigrant experience in the USA did this book explore? Was there anything here that was surprising to you?
It was no surprise to me that the family did not find life on arrival in the USA to be as rosy as they had been led to believe. That is a common experience of voluntary migrants elsewhere also, certainly here in Australia. (Refugee expectations are rather different!). Also a common experience is that the second generation , who arrive either as young children (like Nana) or are born in the new country (like Gifty) do much better than their parents – not least because the parents, seeing education as the way up, strongly push their kids along that path.
More surprising was they opted to go in the first instance to Alabama, which has the reputation of being among the least friendly states in the USA for black people of any kind. I imagine , though the book does not say so that I can recall, that the aunt who painted such a glowing picture of life in the USA was a bit of a fantasist and inclined to look on the bright side of life. Certainly that aunt fades rapidly out of the story.
The mother is determined not to admit, even to herself, that she has made a huge mistake in the path she has taken, despite enduring daily insults and very inadequate pay from black-baiting employers. This too is a common migrant experience. But her children see the pit they are in all too clearly, and strive to fight their way out of it though sports (Nana) or academic achievement (Gifty) . She takes consolation in her religion, but her children see more clearly than the mother allows herself to do, that they are left alone by a culturally different congregation.
The father feels more than the rest of the family that the migrant experience is nowhere near as good as he has been led to believe, a feeling made worse as it is his own wife who has painted the rose-tinted picture for him. He has even more trouble than her in getting paid work, despite being big and strong enough to do almost any manual work. I suspect (from my very limited knowledge of American history) that the unqualified white men who will later be left out in the “modernisation” and “de-industrialisation” of America hold all those jobs and other big black men in Alabama suffer similarly. As it turns out, he is so big strong and black that he is regarded by many people as threatening, which further limits his employment prospects. Unusually in such circumstances, somehow (I can’t recall how) he finds enough money to fund his return to Ghana, where he feels much more loved and at home. Interestingly and tellingly, when she is briefly back in Ghana herslf, it is Gifty who feels culturally adrift.
Disclaimer. My comments above of the migrant experience in Australia are based on observation over decades, but not on direct personal experience.
I'll aim to return to some of the other questions later, but I should say at this stage that I found this book both worth reading and not a struggle to get through.
But Ghana (formerly part of the Gold Coast) has a history within the Atlantic slave trade and when Yaa Gyasi was given a travel grant to visit Ghana she spent time at the Cape Coast Castle, a former slave fortress, and that prompted her to write about slavery and segregation in the United States. Her father had been offered a position teaching French at the University of Alabama, not a place I imagine he would have chosen but to stay in the US meant finding work where you could. For many of those first-generation newcomers, I think the inner tug-of-war between wanting to return home and wanting to make a better future for one's children was profound. That is how I read the father in Transcendent Kingdom. His abandonment leads to tragedy, financial hardship and his son's addiction and death.
1. What did you think of the role religious faith played in the novel? How did religion function in the lives of Gifty, Nana, and their mother?
It was pivotal to the characters' lives. Nana turned away from faith, unhappy with the fundamentalist approach to Christianity and its cold, harsh explanations of who can be saved, but he was still influenced by being raised in the church. It was interesting that his drug dealer also attended the church and behaved differently there than outside. It would be interesting to know his story. I grew up in an evangelical church and some of my peers there did behave like 'good little evangelicals' at church while getting up to a lot of mischief during the week (we all did to some extent).
Gifty also left the faith as she turned to science to try to solve the problems that affected her family, however by the end of the novel it seemed a less fundamentalist form of Christianity had become important to her.
Their mother found belonging in the local church and support from the pastor, even if the family were outsiders and seemingly not included by most of the congregation. I didn't see her religious belief as an addiction, though perhaps it did contribute to her not wanting to get professional mental health treatment to help with depression, grief and addiction to sleeping tablets. However she also had a bad experience when she was a patient in the hospital that added to her reluctance.
The novel also explored Gifty's experiences of befriending and studying alongside atheists and secular students who had no understanding of the Christian faith from the perspective of a believer.
I liked that the novel gave a balanced view of Gifty's childhood church - the youth pastor was young and gave the fundamentalist answer to Nana's question about those who have not heard the gospel, he by no means realised his response would kill Nana's faith or might be upsetting to his class. The church was gossipy and treated the family as outsiders, but did not exclude them totally and the pastor and his family supported Gifty and her mother.
2. What aspects of African immigrant experience in the US did this book explore? Was there anything here that was surprising to you?
The book explored the experiences of African migrants who did not have the education to gain well paying jobs in the US (unlike the author's parents who were a university professor and a nurse), the children of migrants who migrated at a young age or were born in the US and their experience growing up in a white-supremacist environment, second generation migrants striving to succeed in sport and education, migrants who choose to return home vs. those who stay and the affect of a father going back to his home country without his family (I know a number of South Sudanese families who went through this experience) and child/parent relationships in migrant communities where the children are seeing a different sort of parenting in their community and are less accepting of their parents' parenting styles and methods.
3. The adult Gifty says of herself: “At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become – a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain” (chapter 15). Do you see continuity or discontinuity between the child and adult Gifty? How has her childhood influenced the woman she has become?
I saw continuity. It is normal for teens and young adults to question the faith they were brought up in and perhaps lose faith or change faiths. If Gifty had attended a less fundamentalist church (such as my childhood church that was evangelical, but fairly progressive and attended by scientists and many university educated people) she probably wouldn't have seen science as not compatible with religion in the first place.
4. What do you think of the novel’s treatment of the topics of mental illness and addiction?
The book was empathetic to those suffering from mental illness and addictions. It was topical in that Nana's addiction began with prescribed opioids, as happened to many during the time pharma companies somehow convinced doctors that newer forms of opioids were not addictive (something that anyone with a basic science education should have questioned). I couldn't believe Nana was given anything stronger than paracetamol or ibuprofen as a first resort for pain from a sprained ankle.
The book draws on knowledge from the author's scientist friend, who has undertaken similar research to Gifty in real life. I am sceptical that we could cure or prevent addiction by putting probes in people's brains, though perhaps it could help. People may have a genetic propensity for addiction, but life experiences and access to addictive substances also play a big part. Probes in the brain cannot cure the damage caused by trauma such as a parent abandoning their children or childhood abuse and neglect.
Knowing people who have serious life-long pain due to disabilities and chronic conditions I wish (and pray) that scientists can one day invent an effective pain killer that does not cause addiction, have serious side effects or become less effective over time if the dose is not increased. These people do require pain treatment to live without constant severe pain and risk addiction and also stigma from doctors and pharmacists now worried about over-prescribing or causing someone to have an addiction or risk overdose.
5. The end of the novel leaves many questions unresolved, particularly about Gifty’s mother. What do you think of the brief final chapter/epilogue? Does it provide enough resolution to the story for your satisfaction?
I was glad things ended up on a positive note for Gifty, but would have liked to know if her mother recovered before her death or if she had lifelong struggles with depression and addiction, but made the best of life she could.
6. What did you like best about this novel? What scenes, characters, or ideas will linger with you? (Conversely, of course, if you didn’t like it – what in it did not work for you?)
I liked that Gifty made true friends and her relationship with Han. The book would have been too heavy and depressing without these positive aspects of Gifty's life.
The novel seems to suggest that religious ecstasy, as in a fundamentalist/evangelical church, and drug addiction as Nana experienced, are maybe two sides of the same coin. But it doesn't dismiss this in a simplistic way (eg "religion is the opium of the masses" or "god is nothing but brain chemistry"), Rather, the author seems to imply that as humans we genuinely desire experiences that "take us out of ourselves," which both addiction, and many types of religion do, and that that's not a bad desire or a bad experience -- just that there are different ways to achieve it. Which I guess is at the heart of what Gifty is trying to learn with her research on mice.
I wished the novel had given us more closure about her mother, but I did love the image in the final chapter of Gifty visiting the church -- a sense that there is still something in that mystical/religious experience that calls to her, even though it isn't the same type of religion as in her youth.