Reflections of "Transcendent Kingdom"
Intro
I read “Transcendent Kingdom” by Yaa Gyasi for my August 2026 bookclub. We had previously read “Homegoing” by the same author so I was really excited for this book.
There are some similar themes in both books: addiction, mental health struggles in the Black community, diaspora, racism, religion. While Homegoing was an eight-generations-long story that explored these topics and more, Transcendent Kingdom really narrowed in on the aforementioned themes.
There is so much I enjoyed during this read. Gyasi carved out space for the readers to feel the pain and grief that her characters felt. Her writing is so beautiful that while your heart is aching for the characters, you are still enjoying her words. I enjoyed her use of metaphors and her blending of science and faith.
The mice
Gifty is a neuroscientist at Stanford performing experiments on mice which we quickly learn serve as a metaphor for her and her family.
“I was working in my lab at Stanford. I’d had to separate two of my mice because they were ripping each other to bits in that shoebox of a home we kept them in. [...] Both were bleeding and frenzied, scurrying away from me when I tried to grab them even though there was nowhere to run (5).”
Throughout the story, the mice’s behavior sometimes reflects the behavior of Gifty and her mom, of her brother Nana, and of them as a family unit. One example happens after Gifty goes to a party and drinks alcohol for the first time. The very next time she goes to the lab, she compares her mice’s movement to those of drunks as if fearful that one night of drinking would turn her into a drunk.
“My mice staggered around in their boxes like drunks in the tank (42).”
Gifty’s research involved getting mice addicted to Ensure which could be accessed by pressing a tiny lever. Eventually, she added randomized shocks to study the mice’s reward seeking behavior and how much risk they’d be willing to put themselves through to get the reward.
“Some of the mice stopped pressing the lever right away. After a shock or two, they did the mouse equivalent of throwing up their hands and never went near the lever again. Some of the mice stopped, but it took time. They liked the Ensure enough to keep holding out hope that the shocks would stop. [...] Then there was the final group of mice, the ones who never stopped. Day after day, shock after shock, they pressed the lever (70).”
“One of my mice [...] was hopelessly addicted to Ensure, pressing the lever so often that he’d developed a psychosomatic limp in anticipation of the random shocks. Still, he soldiered on, hobbling to that lever to press and press again. [...] I watched him repeat his doomed actions with that beautifully pure, deluded hope of an addict, the hope that says This time will be different. This time I’ll make it out okay (125).”
Gifty’s decision to study neuroscience and addiction was directly influenced by her experience watching her brother struggle with addiction and then lose his life to it. And watching her mother struggle with severe depression. Reflecting on her experiments with the mice, Gifty asks herself:
“...many, many years down the line, once we’ve figured out a way to identify and isolate the parts of the brain that are involved in these illnesses, [...] could this science work on the people who need it the most? Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed (46)?”
At one point Gifty outright compares her and her mother’s situation to that of an experiment.
“The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay (34)?”
Gifty even talks to her mice the way she was talked to when her mother was struggling with her mental health.
“Pastor John squeezed my hand, a little harder than was welcome, and said, ‘Don’t you worry none. Your mom’s doing good. She’s doing real good. God is faithful (45).’”
“‘You’re doing real good,’ I said to the mouse as I put him down (45).”
Gifty as God, The mice as humans
As the story continues, the experiments on the mice mirror not just Gifty and her relationship to her family members, but the experiments also mirror God and their relationship to humans.
“When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body. I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them [...] I always thought of Jesus in the upper room, washing his disciples’ feet. This moment of servitude, of being quite literally brought low, always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More. [...] The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct (95).”
Gyasi’s comparison of something so clinical like experimenting on mice to something so touching like Jesus humbly washing dirty feet is so unexpected. Yet so perfect.
“I had finally finished my experiment, answered the question. I had tested the results enough times to be as certain as was possible that we could get an animal, even that limping mouse, to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity. [...] There was that mouse, that limp. I delivered the light and like that, like that, he stopped pressing the lever (272).”
The mouse that had been addicted was cured as if by a miracle. A miracle Gifty wishes could have been bestowed unto Nana.
Gifty watching her mice in their boxes from above as a scientist, manipulating their lives, mirrors what some imagine God is like. Watching us little humans. Intervening or not. But always present and watching.
Science & faith
“I think we’re made out of stardust and God made the stars (214).”
If Gifty is God, and the mice are humans, then what is science? Is science miracles? Magic? Faith? Yaa Gyasi teaches us that science -like faith- is just another way we try to understand. Science is a path, a methodology to seek answers. Science isn’t itself an answer. It’s a way to ask questions. And the same could be said about all religions. The same could be argued about faith.
“‘The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out [...] That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions (33).’”
“Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. I spent the summer after my eighth birthday reading my Bible cover to cover [...] I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I suspect this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be (55).”
“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 [...] But the truth is I haven’t much changed. I still have many of the same questions, like ‘Do we have control over our thoughts?,’ but I am looking for a different way to answer them. I am looking for new names for old feelings (77).”
“‘What’s the point of all of this?’ is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion (125).”
“This idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning (213).”
Yaa Gyasi beautifully blends science and faith. While usually seen as opposing disciplines, both are attempts to find truth, clarity, and answers amidst life’s chaos and pain. Science and faith are not opposites as foes are, but are opposites as two protagonists in a story, as lovers in a dance. Moving to the same rhythm, in sync, gracefully intertwined almost as if one.
Mental health
We rarely see narratives of mental health centered around people of color. So many times, people who are marginalized are marginalized to the point of constantly living in survival. The questions that are not asked enough are: What does systemic racism do to a person’s stress levels? What does constant stress do to a person? How does this affect a person’s mental health? Yaa Gyasi lays out some hypotheses for us to ponder.
Nana
“I know what Nana looks like when you take the bird’s-eye-view: black male immigrant from a single-parent, lower-middle-class household. The stressors of any one of those factors could be enough to influence anhedonia. If Nana were alive, if I entered him into a study, it would be hard to isolate his drug use as the cause of this particular portion of his pain. It would be hard even to isolate the cause of the drug use (226).”
During one of Nana’s soccer games, a parent of an opposing player tells his son “Don’t you let them n*****rs win.” Everyone at the game hears this, including Nana. And it lit a fire under him.
“Nana ran onto the field, and for the rest of that half he was little more than a blur, moving [...] with pure fury. A fury that would come to define and consume him. He scored goal after goal, even stealing the ball from his own teammates at certain points. No one checked him. The angry parent’s rage was written in the bright red of his face, but even he didn’t say anything else [...]
“Though the occasion for this moment was a somber one, the moment itself was joyful. Getting in the car that day, Nana and I were so happy, glowing in the warmth of our father’s pride, delighted by Nana’s accomplishments. Looking at us then, two laughing, playful children and their warm, doting father, it would be easy to assume that we’d all but forgotten what that man had yelled. [...] But the memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it (63).”
“Nana had tears in the corners of his eyes that were threatening to spill, and he was making a face that I’ve only ever seen in young boys, a face that is the facade of a man, hiding a boy who has had to grow up far too fast. [...] It breaks my heart now, to see that face, to recognize the lie of masculinity sitting atop the shoulders of a young child (80-81).”
Gyasi also showed us how Nana protected Gifty from hearing their parent’s fights.
“Gently, gently, Nana took my hand and led me out of the room. We went to his bedroom and he closed the door. He pulled a coloring book from his bookshelf and grabbed me the crayons. Before long I wasn’t listening anymore.
“‘Good job, Gifty,’ he said as I showed him my work. ‘Good job,’ and outside the sound of chaos swirled on (67).”
Nana distracted Gifty from hearing the fights, the stress about money, but he still heard it. How much weight was on his shoulders? How much responsibility?
Looking at the scene from a broader perspective: Nana protected Gifty, The Chin Chin Man protected both his children, but who protected their mother? Who took weight off her shoulders? They were all just trying to survive.
The Black Mamba
When she lost Nana, after being abandoned by her husband, Gifty’s mother shut down. She went to bed and didn’t get out of it for weeks.
Having to shoulder the weight of taking care of her two children and the household’s finances, as an immigrant, as a Black woman in Alabama, while her husband’s financial contributions were not enough, put immense pressure on her. Losing her son in such a tragic way was too much for her to bear.
“Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost - her home country, her husband, her son. Those losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered, but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to (265).”
She was so overactive trying to care for Gifty and Nana, she needed someone to take care of her. She needed to rest.
“When [my mother] spoke Fante on the phone with her friends, she became like a girl again, giggling and gossiping. When she spoke Twi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm. In English, she was meek. She stumbled and was embarrassed, and so to hide it she demurred (135).”
Gifty
The drive to be the best, to achieve, is this immigrant child drive? Gifty was the oldest daughter of immigrants after all. She had the pressure of achieving something so her mother’s sacrifices would be worthwhile.
“I was, even then, desperate to prove my competence, my superiority, so being the youngest in the youth group felt like a kind of arrival, a demonstration of my goodness (100).”
Their predominantly white church also caused harm to Gifty and Nana. In a hypothetical scenario posed by Nana, he asked the youth pastor if God would still damn a remote village to hell, if they had never had the opportunity to learn about christianity.
“‘Hypothetically, dude? Yeah, they’re going to Hell (101).’”
“He didn’t say, for example, that God doesn’t deal in hypotheticals, a perfectly reasonable answer to a not entirely reasonable question. His willingness to play into Nana’s games was itself a sign that he saw God as a kind of prize that only some were good enough to win. It was like he wanted Hell for those villagers, like he believed there were people for whom Hell is a given, deserved.
“And the part that bothered me most was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people [the youth pastor] believed deserved Hell were people who looked like Nana and me. [...]
“I already understood the spectacle of poverty [...] I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world. [...] [Years later] I started to see the ridiculousness of that idea, the idea of a refined and elevated American poverty that implies a base, subhuman third world. The belief in this subhumanity was what made those posters and infomercials so effective, no different really from the commercials for animal shelters, the people in these infomercials no better than dogs (102-103).”
The combined religious trauma, grief of losing her brother, and the pain of her mother’s mental health crisis created a callus that prevented her from letting people into her life. She pushed all of her romantic partners away if she ever let them get close. She never let them truly know her.
