Progress on all fronts is slow, at times nonexistent, giving Gifty plenty of time to reflect on her life and her beliefs, specifically the Pentecostal faith she adopted as a child. By observing her mice’s addictive behavior to the nutritional drink Ensure, she hopes to understand not only her mother, who she tries to coax out of inertia, but also her brother Nana, who died from an opioid overdose. There are clever parallels in Gifty’s lab work and her life. Outside of lab hours, Gifty tries to help her mother, who “lay underneath a cloud of covers … a sound like a purr out her lips.” In fact, its affairs have reached a kind of impasse (yet again) when Gifty’s mother, a deeply religious woman who has lapsed into a depression so severe she sleeps all day, comes to stay in Gifty’s apartment.īy day, Gifty is a graduate student at Stanford University, researching “the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior.” She works with mice in a cold lab alongside Han, a graduate student easily prone to embarrassment. For months on end, she colonized that bed like a virus, the first time when I was a child and again when I was a graduate student.”Īll has not gone well in America for Gifty’s immigrant family - it has suffered indignities (racism), betrayals (a mostly absent father) and tragedy. “Whenever I think of my mother,” she narrates, “I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room. We first meet Gifty through an unnerving memory of her own. She is allowed all her preoccupations, small and big she is a Black immigrant-type character who contains multitudes - and in today’s world, this remains a very good and relevant thing.
However, she is more than the sum of these delineated parts in Gyasi’s superbly written novel. “The young African immigrant must locate herself along three divides: the first between blackness and whiteness the second within blackness, between native and foreign the third between African and American.” These are the words of Nigerian-Ghanaian writer Taiye Selasi, and they offer us some insight into the life of Gifty, the protagonist at the pulsing center of Yaa Gyasi’s much anticipated second novel, “Transcendent Kingdom.”īorn to Ghanaian immigrants in Huntsville, Ala., Gifty does indeed straddle these divides, fraught as they are with issues of race and belonging.
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