Transcendent Kingdom

Transcendent Kingdom is a 2020 novel by Ghanaian American writer Yaa Gyasi. Narrated by the main character, Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of Gifty, a 28-year-old neuroscience PhD student, and her severely depressed, Ghanaian-born mother. When the latter comes to visit after another depressive episode, Gifty is sparked into a series of reflections on what led her there and the narrative of her family’s collapse. Specifically, she reflects on her brother’s addiction to opioid drugs, which led to his death. Set in the context of her research into reward-seeking behavior, Gifty aims to understand what happened to him. This guide uses the 2020 Penguin Random House edition.

Plot Summary

Gifty is a final-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University in California. When the pastor from her hometown in Alabama calls to say Gifty’s mother is depressed again, Gifty invites her mother to stay with her. Her mother’s arrival and awful state lead Gifty to re-examine the story of her childhood and family life. She attempts to understand what has brought them to this point, and if there is any hope of redemption from it. The text does not always tell this story in a linear or chronological fashion. Gifty’s central childhood narrative is interspersed with details of events from the present and from Gifty’s time at college and graduate school.

Gifty’s parents meet in Kumasi, Ghana, and marry there. Despite thinking they were too old for a child, and years of trying, they are blessed with Gifty’s brother, Nana. They decide to emigrate to the United States to provide a better life for him. Gifty’s mother goes first, staying with a cousin, with her father to follow. Having emigrated, they live in Alabama, where her mother gets a job as a care worker and her father a janitor. They soon have Gifty, when her mother is 40. The stresses of poverty, racism, and homesickness for Ghana put a great strain on her parents’ relationship. When Gifty is four years old, her father returns to Ghana for good on the pretext of seeing his brother.

Gifty’s brother starts playing basketball, having previously excelled at, but abandoned, soccer. In his last years at high school, he becomes a star player for his local basketball team, but he injures his ankle playing and is prescribed opioid-based painkillers. Gifty and her mother discover that Nana has developed an addiction when they find drugs hidden in his room. He soon moves onto to heroin and suffers terribly from withdrawal when he attempts to stop. Following this unsuccessful bid to quit, and several more relapses, he goes into a rehab program. However, he relapses merely 14 hours after leaving. Three years after first taking the painkillers and following a turbulent period where he goes missing for days at a time, Nana dies of a heroin overdose.

The trauma of this event causes Gifty’s mother to have a breakdown, and she tries killing herself. While her mother goes to a psychiatric hospital, Gifty stays with the local pastor. She is then sent to stay with an aunt in Ghana while her mother continues her recovery. On returning, and as a means of escape, Gifty decides to pursue a career in science. She excels and graduates from Harvard. She then starts a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford, where she meets a man named Raymond, a PhD student in literature. She has her first serious relationship with him. This relationship comes to an end, though, because of Gifty’s secrecy about her family history.

Back in the present, Gifty is in the process of completing her PhD on reward-seeking behavior in animals, a topic inspired by what happened to her brother. By experimenting on mice that have become addicted to the nutritional supplement Ensure, Gifty hopes to find a cure for addiction in humans. At the end of the novel, she succeeds in curing one mouse’s addiction to Ensure, and her research is complete. While still depressed, she has also become closer to her mother. In a postscript set years later, Gifty is in a relationship with her previous PhD lab partner, Han, and they live in New Jersey together. Gifty’s mother is now dead, but in being able to speak to Han about her past, Gifty has found closure. Her acceptance of what happened in her childhood is symbolized by her returning to church and finding spiritual reconciliation with her mother’s Christian religion.