ghanaian literature

Transcendent Kingdom.

I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing a little over three years ago, because my daughter had been assigned it in her high school English class and said it was good but “grim.” I thought it was marvelous, and also grim, but beautifully crafted with a series of compelling characters through the time-shifting narrative.

Her second and still most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has a far more conventional structure and is built around a single family of four, only two members of which, the daughter Gifty and her mother, are still around in the present day, although we don’t learn immediately where her brother Nana and father are or if they’re even still alive. Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, while her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, lives alone in Alabama; Gifty gets a call that her mother has taken to her bed in a severe bout of depression, so she brings her mother to California to take care of her. We learn that this isn’t her mother’s first such episode, and the recollection brings us the story of Gifty’s father, brother, and how Gifty turned away from the devout Christianity of her childhood and towards the science she hoped would explain everything that religion couldn’t answer.

This isn’t a huge spoiler, since it’s mentioned on the back of the book, but if you want to know nothing stop reading here … Nana died of a heroin overdose after a doctor gave him Oxycontin for an ankle injury Nana suffered playing basketball. Gifty wants to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, to understand why someone would be unable to stop when they know it’s hurting them, killing them, and hurting everyone who cares about them. She was about eight years younger than her brother, and watching him go from a lively, popular kid who seemed to be going places to a zonked-out addict, and a thief, and worse has shaped huge swaths of the last eighteen years of her life. It forced her to grow up and take more charge in the house than someone her age should have to do, it broke her faith in God (but not her mother’s), and it turned her inwards, especially when it came to talking to anyone outside of her family about her brother – or even that she had one.

As someone who grew up with religion, devout perhaps in my blind belief but not exactly in practice, but who is secular now, I found particular resonance in Gyasi’s descriptions of Gifty now, knowing something is gone and won’t return, but that there is no regaining it. Religion serves a purpose for many people, and often becomes a core part of one’s identity, but if you lose your faith, as Gifty does and as I did, you can’t simply go to the God store and buy a new one. Once you realize it’s not true, the spell is forever broken. That absence is real, and you may grieve for all that once was, from your belief in a benevolent God to the hope of an afterlife to the fact that so many adults told you these things were true when they’re not. (I recognize not everyone shares my nonbelief, of course.)

Beyond the question of religiosity, Transcendent Kingdom functions as a different sort of coming-of-age novel: The protagonist loses her innocence about the world, and then spends the next eighteen years following one narrow path that she believes will help her make sense of it. Her mother returning to the isolation of her bed and near-total silence bookends the period of Gifty’s quest for an answer to everything, from why Nana fell so quickly into addiction and death to why their mother is so prone to these severe depressive episodes. Faith couldn’t answer these questions, so why can’t science? This structure also allows Gyasi to retell parts of Gifty’s story that don’t involve Nana or their mother, including her time at a certain college in the Boston area and her tenuous relationships with people around her at Stanford. The novel puts Gifty together piece by piece in front of us, jumping back and forth in time to show how she got to this point of a sort of crisis of unfaith.

It’s hard to avoid judging Transcendent Kingdom by the standard of its predecessor, which was a completely different sort of book and wowed with its structure and scope. This is a small novel about a big character, and it doesn’t cast the same sort of spell that Homegoing did. It’s just different, but still has Gyasi’s easy, thoughtful voice, and shows her developing a single character to a much greater extent than she could possibly have done in Homegoing’s staccato stories.

Next up: About to finish Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

Homegoing.

My daughter had to read Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Homegoing for her 9^th grade English class, reporting that she thought it was extremely well-written, just sad. I tend to enjoy post-colonial literature, so I thought I’d give it a shot, further encouraged by the fact that the novel had won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

The novel is a sequence of fourteen connected short stories that follow the descendants of two Asante half-sisters, one of whom was sold into slavery, the other married to an English colonizer, down to the present day, by which point both lineages are in the United States. What happens from there isn’t as simple as you’d expect – this isn’t Sliding Doors, where everything is great in one set of stories and awful in the others – as Gyasi builds a new character in every chapter, developing them as independent people but also recognizing how history would define not just their circumstances but their personalities as well. The stories move through several centuries of history, from the way contact with Europeans tore apart the Gold Coast to how slavery and Jim Crow laws continue to limit Black Americans’ economic opportunities.

Even as the setting shifts from present-day Ghana to the U.S., the shadow of colonization obscures everything that happens in Homegoing. The course of history was changed when white people showed up in Africa and decided it was theirs – the land, the resources, and even the people – and the ramifications echo down through seven generations in this novel. Gyasi doesn’t deny her characters free will, but we are all shaped by our circumstances, and her characters’ circumstances build on themselves like a matryoshka, so that the characters in our present day, who would appear to have more freedom and more opportunity, are still weighed down by the centuries of oppression that preceded them.

I can also see why my daughter wouldn’t love the stories in this book, as most are grim, many are violent, and few offer much hope. There’s some graphic content in here, including rape and sexual assault, enough that I assume many schools wouldn’t assign it, but it’s almost certainly an accurate depiction of the way the English treated the Asante natives, and later enslaved, and of course the way American slaveowners treated their slaves.

Where Gyasi excels is in her ability to create one interesting character after another, despite only giving us a short time with each of them and also working with the constraints of the previous story in each chain (and, I presume, the subsequent stories as well). It’s an impressive feat of imagination within the confines of the novel’s structure, marking her as someone who is as deft with the short form as well as the longer.

It’s also why I’m not talking much about the individual characters and stories – they’re so short that I don’t want to spoil too much of them. Esi is the half-sister who is enslaved, then raped by a British officer; her daughter, born of that assault, grows up a slave in the American south, and manages to send her baby with an escaping slave to freedom in Baltimore, starting a chain of misery that moves back into the deep south and then to New York, with racism, further violence, forced labor, and more. Effia marries the Governor of the slave castle where, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is held in the dungeon below. Their child, Quey, is ill at ease in the white man’s world and returns to his Asante people, beginning a back-and-forth pattern between the Black and white cultures in east Africa until the final story sees their descendant in Alabama, where the two stories will eventually reconnect. It’s a masterwork of planning, with the parallel narratives coming together in a way that is driven by coincidence yet feels natural, almost inevitable, and that will never have you thinking how meticulous the novel’s structure is.

Next up: I’m reading some of the books on writing that you all recommended, having finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and started Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing.

Transcendent Kingdom.

Homegoing.

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