Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, explores themes of belief, loss, doubt, love, and mice. The protagonist, Gifty, comes from a Ghanaian family living in Alabama that has been cut in half, causing her to shift her focus from religion to science in her quest to make sense of her world. Transcendent Kingdom follows Gyasi’s epic debut, Homegoing, which traced the legacies of two half-sisters in Ghana from the slave trade through the present. Gyasi herself, 31, was born in Ghana and moved with her family to Hunstville, Alabama, when she was 10.
This Saturday, the St. Louis County Library Foundation presents Gyasi in conversation with Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage. SLM caught up with Gyasi by phone in advance of Saturday’s event.
Both Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom are novels, but both obviously required a ton of research. What was your process like for two such particular types of research—the ripples of enslavement across centuries of humanity versus aspects of mice brains?
The two books really required different kinds of research. For Homegoing, the research was really wide and intensive, and I always think of it as wide but shallow—I needed to know a little bit about a lot of eras. I was already familiar with the history to some extent. For Transcendent Kingdom, I had to do a deep dive into a single topic—far more narrow but deeper. My dear friend from childhood is a neuroscientist, so it really felt in many ways like a conversation between my work and hers. She was really incredibly generous and gracious with me, let me tour her lab and pointed me in the direction of essays or books and was generous enough to answer my minute questions about what a day in the life of someone doing this work might have looked like. There are a lot of similarities [between the novels]—namely, what do we do with the trauma we are given, that we inherit? How do we continue to make a life for ourselves with the struggles that come with being alive?
In both novels, readers are left with a much more humanized and nuanced understanding of the historical moment of the book—for Homegoing, the legacy of slavery and how it shows up in modern American life, and for Transcendent Kingdom, the immigrant experience and the destructive swath addiction cuts through families. Do you set out to give readers history lessons?
I don’t really go into writing a project with the hope of being informative—certainly not didactic. I think it’s really wonderful when you read literature that opens your eyes to something new, or you learn about something. I am always trying to focus on the character first—what they are going through, the environment they are living in. Everything stems from that.
In Transcendent Kingdom, the protagonist Gifty is a researcher and a perfectionist, but her interrogation into the brain chemistry of addiction and depression are informed by her own family struggles. What made you choose opioid addiction as the family lens against which Gifty negotiates the unquestioning religious faith of her childhood against the scientific rigor she arrives at in adulthood?
I chose opioids in particular because of everything that I was reading at the time. I feel like particularly around 2018 there was a lot of really excellent reporting being done around the opioid crisis, reporting that was thinking of this as a health care crisis, not just something to be criminalized; looking at the role of pharmaceutical companies, of capitalism, in creating this problem. I was encouraged to see the sensitive, nuanced, humanizing body of work that was being done around this crisis, but I always felt like it was hypocritical because it was only being done because the crisis was affecting white suburban people. It looked at the families, looked at what was going on in the children’s lives in ways I wish could have been extended to Black people during the crack epidemic or even the heroin epidemic.
Gifty grew up a very devout, churchgoing child, and as an adult who has experienced crushing loss, she approaches the faith of her childhood with skepticism while finding comfort in the infallibility of science. Can you please talk about that tension?
It was something that was deeply informed by character. Gifty is a person who as a child was raised in the church, was incredibly devout, raised by an incredibly devout woman. All of her drive and her perfectionism was geared toward being "good" in the religious sense of it—she wanted to be a holy person, a good child. This was something that really attracted her to her religion. Given all of that, she was going to a predominately white church in a predominately white neighborhood. Once her brother started to succumb to addiction, she saw the way her church saw her—as other, as irredeemable. How could she be a part of a church community that did not love her back? How could she love a god that would allow her brother to pass? That was the beginning of her turning away from her church. That energy, that drive—it didn’t disappear, she just kind of had to redirect that. Early on she directs it toward her academics, this pursuit of the science of the brain. With science, she’s still asking some of those same pivotal questions—what it means to be alive, why we’re here, what we can offer each other—that she was asking in church.
The video conversation between Gyasi and Jones premieres Saturday at 7 p.m., hosted by the St. Louis County Library Foundation, Left Bank Books, and HEC Media. Watch online at facebook.com/hectv.
