Source of book:
Audiobook from the library
My wife and I
listened to this together on our recent anniversary getaway trip. A few years
ago, we both read Homegoing, by Gyasi, and had been eager to
read her second book when it came out. It worked out to listen to it as a
downloaded audiobook from the LA County Library. I should also note that the
audiobook is narrated by Bahni Turpin, who won a well-deserved award for her
work on The Hate U Give, which we listened to last year. (I mean, that
book was a command performance. One of the best audiobooks we have
experienced.) She was also excellent on this book: my wife has Ghanaian
immigrant coworkers, and noted that Turpin nailed the different accents
(yes there are more than one) of the characters.
Transcendent
Kingdom is a totally different book from Homegoing.
Rather than a sweep of several hundred years of history across two continents,
this book is far more personal (although it does not appear to be exactly
autobiographical from what I can determine.) It is the story of Gifty and her
family. Her parents meet and marry at a relatively older age, in Ghana. After
her brother Nana is born, they immigrate to Alabama, seeking a better life.
Gifty is an unexpected and unwanted child born a few years after that. Gifty’s
dad moves back to Ghana, and starts another family. Nana, a brilliant kid and
gifted athlete, is injured in a high school basketball game, and becomes
addicted to the opiates he is prescribed. Gifty is 11 when Nana dies of an
overdose after a failed rehab stint. This causes what is left of the family to
fall apart. Her mother suffers from major depression, and attempts suicide.
Gifty loses her faith in God, and is also sent to live for a summer in
Ghana.
As we pick up
the story later, Gifty has poured herself into science, and is now a PhD
candidate at Stanford, researching addiction in mice. Her mother has another
major depressive episode, and refuses help for months. As the book switches
back and forth between the present and the past, the book shows more and more
of the trauma that both Gifty and her mother have undergone, and the challenges
of overcoming them.
That’s
essentially the plot, but that undersells how good the book is. Gyasi is a
superb writer, and tackles quite a bit of metaphysics along the way, from the
nature of mental illness, addiction, religion, racism and prejudice, the
experience of being an immigrant and a minority in the South - and later in the
northeast and in California. Although Gyasi does not have a background in
neuroscience, she did her research for this book, and came up with a lot of
amazing passages about the philosophical, religious, and metaphysical overlaps
with neuroscience - things that I have myself thought about a lot (although not
in the scientific depth that Gifty would be thinking) lately.
One of the
things that I really loved about the book is that Gyasi is neither an apologist
for religion nor opposed to it. The book is fairly friendly to religious
experience and faith and practice, despite being all too accurate about
fundamentalist belief systems and racist subcultures. The clergyman who is a
significant secondary character, Pastor John, is a decent, kind man at heart.
In his own way, he tries to make Gifty and her family welcome in his
overwhelmingly white Pentecostal church. Not all of his parishioners are the
same, unfortunately, and John is limited in what he can see because of his
dogmas. Like many well-meaning pastors of our own time, doctrines get in the
way of understanding, and limit one’s ability to see clearly. The same old
religious platitudes are enlisted for every situation, and mental illness
becomes merely a spiritual problem, solvable by prayer. In a sense, I
recognized a lot of my own upbringing in this book, including some things from
our sojourn in Pentecostalism when I was a teen. (I have fewer scars from that
than from Gothardism, which came afterward.) Like Gifty, I have struggled with
my faith for decades, in part because of the toxic version I imbibed for so
long. And yet, like Gifty, at the end of the day (or the book), I still
believe, because I have lived it. As much as Gifty feels that God (and meaning
itself) have betrayed her, she still feels some connection, just a very
different sort of faith and experience than she grew up with.
I remembered a
number of quotes I liked, but obviously didn’t write them down while driving.
Goodreads has a bunch of them, and they sound accurate, but I cannot be
entirely sure without the book itself. Anyway, here are the ones that I liked
the best:
It took me many years to realize that
it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because
for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us
doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically,
physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We
drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing
protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of
our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every
day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can
handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s
something of a miracle.
We humans are reckless with our bodies,
reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what
would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right
up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.
There is
something very true about all of that. There is something about humans and
their embrace of risk and danger that doesn’t seem to apply to other animals.
We don’t take risks to get food, or to escape predators, so much as we take
risks for the thrill of the risk. Roller coasters are big business for a
reason.
This next bit
really resonated with me because of my similar religious background. My parents
were more open than true fundies, at least when I was a kid. It seems that
things have gone backwards since Gothard, alas. Mrs. Pasternack was Gifty’s
biology teacher, and, while a Christian like literally everyone else she knew
(this WAS Alabama…), she embraced science and uncertainty and doubt and what I
would call flexibility - the understanding that our current knowledge is
incomplete as was that of the past. And that as a result, belief had to be
flexible, to change to fit new knowledge and new circumstances.
Mrs. Pasternack said something else
that year that I never forgot. She said, “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, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark
hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries,
millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will
come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try.
Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
Another
fascinating quote was this one, from Gifty about her father.
My memories of him, though few, are
mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a
kind of pleasantness in their absence. It's those who stay who are judged the
harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.
The family
dynamics in this book are painful, particularly from the point of view of Gifty
- but also from that of Nana, who ultimately succumbs not just to addiction but
to the combination of the pressure of being the favorite and the horror of
abandonment by his father. Again, there are some great quotes.
“There is no living thing on God's
green earth that doesn't come to know pain sometime.”
“Nana was the first miracle, the true
miracle, and the glory of his birth cast a long shadow. I was born into the
darkness that shadow left behind. I understood that, even as a child.”
“It seems to me that this itself was
the disaster I foresaw, a common enough disaster for most infants these days:
that I was a baby, born cute, loud, needy, wild, but the conditions of the
wilderness have changed.”
As in every
family, dynamics tend to start early, and feed off of unchangeable realities.
Gifty was a difficult baby. But was she difficult because she just was, or did
she sense that she was unwanted? Was she unwanted because unplanned, or also
because she was difficult?
These are
questions I ask myself too. I was a sickly, needy, unhappy infant. I was sick a
lot of my childhood. My neediness led to my mom giving up her career. Which in
turn led to her rejecting my wife who didn’t give up her career. My siblings
were much easier babies, particularly my sister. Did that in turn lead to the
favoritism that would define our family dynamics as adults?
Questions about
religion permeate the story, and there are some profound observations.
“[N]ot all churches in America are
created equal, not in practice and not in politics. And, for me, the damage of
going to a church where people whispered disparaging words about “my kind” was
itself a spiritual wound—so deep and so hidden that it has taken me years to find
and address it.”
It is difficult
to explain to those outside the tribe just how painful and debilitating a
spiritual wound like this can be. Belonging is a hell of a drug, and the
withdrawal is horrible. And if you are forced out for daring to speak out
against the Orange Messiah and those who follow him, it is quitting cold
turkey. It was astonishing how fast you go from in to out when you go after a
sacred cow you didn’t realize existed.
Two quotes also
touch on the problem that fundamentalist religion finds itself in during
cultural change.
“We read the Bible how we want to read
it. It doesn't change, but we do.”
“Literalism is helpful in the fight
against change.”
These definitely
go together. Modern American Fundies mostly spend their time defending 19th
Century beliefs about the meaning of the Bible, from Young Earth Creationism to
sexism to white supremacy. And, of course, as any historically informed person
is aware, these beliefs about the meaning of the Bible have changed
dramatically over the last 2000 years, as ancient texts are reinterpreted and
reinterpreted to make them meaningful in circumstances and cultures far removed
from the ones they were written in. This is how every faith functions - it used
to be that flexibility and change were considered to be positive in a
religion. But with an Enlightenment belief in empiricism overlaid on an ancient
text, things became rigid, literal, and inflexible. Unable to adapt to change,
and thus transformed into a weapon against any and all positive change.
Literalism is a means to that end - it is an assertion of a single meaning, an
unanswerable argument, a Bible for thumping, not contemplation.
Later, Gifty
discovers a healthier Christianity - not coincidentally, from a tradition that
embraces female leadership. I wonder how my life – and my family – would have
turned out different had my parents’ spiritual journey led them in this
direction rather than to Gothardism.
“The reverend's sermon that day was
beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her
interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the
fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire
life would have been different if I'd grown up in this woman's church instead
of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world,
designed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to
undermine one's faith.”
At the same
time, Gifty wrestles with the question of meaning. This is another facet of the
“problem of evil” - and the problem with the problem is that so much of life
does not have a “meaning” in the Fundie sense. “Your kid died of cancer as part
of some great divine plan” is as nonsensical as it is cruel.
“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. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we
might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,”
or worse still, “Nothing”?”
But this
randomness of the universe isn’t the only reality for many of us. While I am
quite certain that God isn’t the white supremacist, misogynist, sociopathic
sort that Fundies believe in, I am also not an atheist - I have experienced
moments of transcendence, and whatever name you give to that is something that
I believe is real. Gifty notes the same thing.
“When it came to God, I could not give
a straight answer. I had not been able to give a straight answer since the day
Nana died. God failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my
capacity to believe in him. And yet. How to explain every quiver? How to
explain that once sure-footed knowledge of his presence in my heart?”
Gifty explores
this further in my favorite passage of the book:
“Here is a separation. Your heart, the
part of you that feels. Your mind, the part of you that thinks. Your soul, the
part of you that is. I almost never hear neuroscientists speak about the soul.
Because of our work, we are often given to thinking about the part of humans
that is the vital, inexplicable essence of ourselves, as the workings of our
brain-- mysterious, elegant, essential. Everything we don't understand about
what makes a person a person can be uncovered once we understand this organ.
There is no separation. Our brains are our hearts that feel and our minds that
think and our souls that are. But when I was a child I called this essence a
soul and I believed in its supremacy over the mind and the heart, its
immutability and connection to Christ himself.”
And this
one.
“At a certain point, science fails.
Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should
probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science,
who thought of it as a cunning trick to robe them of their faith, and I have
been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as
though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the
virtues of God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension,
this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is
false. I used to see the world through a God's 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.”
I am in a
similar place, honestly. Neither scientific materialism nor religion fully
satisfies. But I also do not believe they are in conflict. This is a false
idea, created by fundamentalists terrified about change and uncertainty. Rather
than embrace that change, and the uncertainty which defines our existence, they
took refuge in lies, in untruths that were elevated to the level of
unchallengeable dogma, and any beauty that once resided in religious belief was
extinguished. Plowshares were beaten into swords, to fight against the rest of
humanity, and indeed reality itself.
Gifty’s
observation that the scientific reduction of our humanity to “the brain” is
convenient for scientific purposes - and indeed, that is how science is
constrained to act, given it’s method and goals. But for purposes of the human
experience, we do have those three parts, so to speak. The intellect/mind,
feelings/emotions, and soul - the essence of being who we are. I believe that
in some way, the “we” that we are uses the body, including the brain, and that
we are in some sense, more than a brain. This isn’t in the realm of empirical
science, obviously, but in experiential metaphysics. But that doesn’t mean it
isn’t, at some level, true. To deny that is to some degree to deny the reality
of music and poetry. And indeed, I also believe that the denial of music and
poetry is one of the key failings of fundamentalism. By reducing religion to
assent to mental beliefs, and a treatment of scripture as a rule book and
weapon, it has stripped all the poetry and music and power from faith. It
becomes empiricism of a different kind - the literalist approach to the words
of holy men of millennia past and the words of men of the more recent past
applying those older words in ways calculated to support the cultural status
quo and all that meant: slavery, subordination of women, panic about sex, and
so on.
So yes, this
book made me think. The poetry of Gyasi’s writing is a big part of that. She
engages the mind, of course, the heart, very much so, and also the soul.
