The Bible Belt informs much of Gifty’s understanding of America’s elaborate rituals of race, class and belief. Combining them in one book “gave me this rich landscape in which to explore questions about religion, which I think are felt and experienced very differently depending on where you live in this country.” “Alabama and California are probably two of the places that were most formative for me,” she says. “It was nice to explore it in this contemporary setting … versus the long scope of history” in “Homegoing.” Gyasi, like Gifty, was raised within a predominantly white Pentecostal church in Alabama and later studied at Stanford. “I think the relationship between America and Ghana is something that I will always be interested in,” she says. Wherever the family went, they reached out to others in the Ghanaian diaspora. from Ghana as a young child, the daughter of an academic and a nurse, and had an itinerant upbringing - Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and mostly Alabama. “The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay?” “The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment,” Gifty thinks. After her husband left and her son died, Gifty’s mother (referred to only as “The Black Mamba,” in the coded language of Gifty’s childhood diary entries to God) struggled to make sense of their shrunken family, never fully adapting to the ways of America. The past is never far behind, even in wide-open California: “I could never shake my ghosts, never, never.” But the future feels limitless having decided that “nothing but blazing brilliance” would be enough to prove her worth, she dreams of running her own Ivy League lab, winning a Nobel Prize, curing addiction and depression and “everything else that ails us.”Īt the heart of the novel is the relationship between Gifty and her aging mother, who - suffering another bout of depression - has come to stay with Gifty. “I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption,” she insists.
For years, Gifty has kept people at a distance, more attached to lab mice than colleagues and partners. It is a path chosen, in large part, to make sense of the traumas of her childhood back in Alabama: the death of her beloved older brother, Nana, from opioid addiction and the crippling depression of their mother in its wake. A sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University, she is studying the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior.
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.Īt 28, Gifty, the narrator of Yaa Gyasi’s revelatory new novel, “ Transcendent Kingdom,” thinks she’s figured things out.
0 kommentar(er)
