Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi follows Gifty through the struggles of her life and the intersections of religion, addiction, and science. These intersections play a big role in how Gyasi drives a deeper emotional impact on the reader and forms an intimate and personal relationship with Gifty and her family. By doing so, one can gain an understanding of how Gyasi not only reflects fiction but also reality in some cases. Through Gifty, her mother, and her brother, Nana, the reader can see how childhood moments directly influence the path one may end up on. Gifty’s grief from her brother’s overdose and her mother’s depression fuels her desire to understand the human brain and its behavior. Gifty’s research plays a significant role in the story, as it’s a big part of who Gifty is. This research plays a pivotal role in understanding who Gifty is and shows how Gyasi combines science and emotion to drive a deeper understanding of Gifty’s character.

Gifty is a PhD candidate who researches the reward-seeking behavior in mice. This is done by feeding the mice Ensure and delivering a random shock whenever the mice go towards the Ensure. In her past, Gifty’s brother had gotten addicted to prescription drugs and passed from an overdose. Through this time, Gyasi writes Gifty as coming from a religious household; as her brother’s addiction progresses, she deviates from this spiritual path that she grew up on, as Gifty turns to science. It was mentioned that she had become an anthropologist recording her brother’s behavior because she wanted to know it “as though it were my own” (Gyasi ch. 37). Through her lab mice, Gifty searches for understanding addiction to understand it as it was her own. Gifty’s choice to pursue reward-seeking behavior after her brother died, for drugs and the reward-seeking, influenced how she became as a person. Her brother’s overdose led to her choice of neuroscience and research; it is also seen through her wanting to understand the mice as she tries the Ensure (Gyasi ch. 28). Gyasi writes Gifty to be a stoic, as the death of her brother and her mother’s depression have left her ultimately alone to cope and understand the grief in her way. Her past partners, Raymond and Anne, left her because of how she would react to them talking to her about family (Gyasi ch. 49; ch. 53). Despite this demeanor and exterior that she creates when talking about her family, her compassion with the mice shows that there’s a part of her that is not as stoic as Gyasi writes her. Gifty cares for the mice, wanting them to stop chasing the Ensure even though it went against what her research was about (Gyasi ch. 52). This directly reflects her wanting her brother to stop choosing drugs and start choosing them (Gyasi ch. 32).

A comparison can be made between her research and her brother’s. Gifty’s main reason for researching reward-seeking behavior was to understand why his brother chose drugs over them or himself. This compassion that she showed to the mice directly reflects the same sentiment that she held for her brother. Gifty constantly wishes that the mice would stop chasing after her in the same way she saw her brother chase after drugs. The mice reflect her brother in her present, as she also wants to understand by even tasting the Ensure to understand the rat’s obsession (Gyasi ch. 28). Gifty doesn’t only want to understand her brother through the research, but also the mice, as seen by her drinking the Ensure. She has a deeper need than to understand it, but to know it from inside and out. It was seen by the way she documented her brother’s addiction to her trying the Ensure. She wants to know about addiction as if she were going through it. Her research is the closest she can get to knowing it as her own. 

Gyasi also formats the story so that it shifts from memories to the present. This is where you see the comparison with how she is with the mice and her brother. While Gifty lost her brother when she was a teen, she sees her brother through the mice, through her research. Through her research, she tries to cope with the loss of her brother. She uses it as a way to understand and bring meaning to his death. Science becomes her solace as she searches for reasoning she lost in God (Gyasi ch. 36). She will never understand the choice her brother made, but the mice experiments give her some solid scientific understanding of what happened. Her research and mice serve the purpose of her coping mechanism. When she lost her brother, she avoided her faith because it didn’t give her the answer she was looking for. Science gave that to her, allowing her to understand her brother but also express those feelings of loss and pain through the mice addicted to ensure that it becomes a vessel for all those buried feelings over her brother.

While combining the literary and the scientific, there is one way to understand the research better. One may bring up the ethical implications of the research done on the rats. Gyasi writes that they would have to cut open the rat to implant a device to better understand brain readings (Gyasi ch. 6). When her mother visits her lab and asks if they hurt the mice, Gifty says, “We try to be as humane as possible…” (Gyasi ch. 45). This shows that even though there might be some care, the mice will still go through some misfortune in the name of science. It’s an unfortunate cycle that to understand addiction, one must get addicted. The mice are put through the pain and suffering that Nana, Gifty’s brother, had to go through to help Gifty understand what her brother endured. This animal experiment brings up ethical concerns as it forces them to become addicted, undergo surgery, and go through pain. It is a cycle of pain and suffering that these mice go through without being able to fully communicate the truth, only an interpretation of the data they provide.

Gyasi masterfully combines the science by finding a way to tie that to an emotional aspect of Gifty’s character. By doing so, the readers can understand the influence Nana made on Gifty’s life, but also how her research continuously impacts her in the same way her brother did. This allows for a deeper impact and understanding of the infestation of science and emotion. While Gifty hid behind science as a way to stay hard, it only brought out the emotions and struggles that she had very well repressed. While intertwining these two contrasting concepts into one story, it shows how science, while based in fact, can be driven by emotions. Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom also allows for discourse surrounding the research behind addiction and reward-seeking behavior. Through all of this, Gyasi can use this factor to further develop Gifty’s character into one with different facets of emotion and understanding, allowing a reader to connect to the book on a deeper level.

Reference:

Yaa Gyasi. Transcendent Kingdom. E-book ed., Anchor Canada, 2020.