Summary:
Transcendent Kingdom opens with a reminder that the
past rarely stays put. Gifty, a sixth year PhD candidate in neuroscience at
Stanford University School of Medicine, is reckoning with a relapse of her
mother’s depression. After years of remission, Gifty’s mother is unable to get
out of bed, and Gifty decides that she should come stay with her in California.
With her mother lying in her bed at home, Gifty’s work in the neuroscience lab
is charged with a weight beyond that of a typical student trying to publish
papers and make it to graduation. Her study of the neural circuits that
underlie reward seeking behavior and addiction in mice not only applies to her
mother’s disease, but also to the impetus for her mother’s first depressive
episode—her cherished older brother Nana’s long struggle with opioid addiction
and death by heroin overdose. As Gifty, long accustomed to keeping her emotions
to herself and clutching her past close to the chest struggles to keep her
mother afloat, she reflects on how her past continues to hold power and
relevance.
The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants,
Gifty grew up in the predominantly white community of Huntsville, Alabama.
Homesick and miserable amid a climate of overt racism and everyday
micro-aggressions, Gifty’s father abandoned the family to return to Ghana, leaving
four-year-old Gifty and 10-year-old Nana to be raised by their mother. Wryly
referred to as “The Black Mamba” by Gifty, their mother, an enigmatic mix of
deep tenderness and removed resolve, works long hours as a home health aide to
make ends meet. A deeply religious woman, she finds solace in The First
Assemblies of God Church, a Pentecostal congregation that, at times, seems to
be the only thing keeping her afloat. Gifty, too, is deeply pious as a child.
Continuously striving to be good and consumed by questions about God, she
writes to God in her journal in an attempt to find religion in the everyday.
Yet Gifty’s faith starts to fracture
in early adolescence. Her brother Nana, a basketball star and hometown hero,
becomes addicted to prescription opioids following an injury on the court. The ensuing
years of conflict overwhelm Gifty with feelings of shame, and sometimes even
hatred towards her brother. This, combined with increasing recognition that her
religious community—so reverent of Nana when he was healthy and so quick to give
up on him when he became ill—is not the bastion of morality she once idealized
it to be, prompts Gifty to reevaluate her upbringing. When Nana dies and her
mother sinks into a depression that culminates in a suicide attempt, Gifty
gives up on religion altogether.
As a college student at Harvard,
Gifty continues to eschew overt religious affiliation. Still, she can’t shake
the feeling that there’s more to be understood about the human experience. Call
it the soul, call it the mind, call it the sub-conscious, Gifty longs to
understand the neurologic underpinnings of the behavioral choices that make us
who we are. She ultimately chooses to study neuroscience because its rigor
appeals to her—if she can decipher which neurons control the behaviors that led
to her brother’s addiction, then maybe those behaviors can be changed and
controlled. But the more experiments she conducts the more she is forced to
grapple with the fact that science can only take her so far. Reconciling her
prior absolute belief in God with her current scientific practice isn’t as easy
as switching one for the other. Maybe, transcending to a higher level of
understanding requires a merging of the two, a recognition that understanding
ourselves takes, and is in it of itself, an act of faith.
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