41 pages • 1 hour read
Yaa GyasiTranscendent Kingdom
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Gifty
The central protagonist and narrator of the novel, Gifty is completing a PhD on reward-seeking behavior in animals at Stanford when her depressed mother comes to stay with her. This arrival prompts a series of reflections on her childhood and adolescence. She says at the start of Transcendent Kingdom that “I had a million selves, too many to gather” (14). This thought reflects a sense of dislocation that Gifty tries to overcome by narrating the events of her life. She discusses her father’s abandonment of her family and her brother’s opioid addiction and death when she was a girl. She then relates how this loss caused a breakdown and severe depression in her mother.
After a traumatic period during which she first has to look after her mother, then is sent to live with her aunt in Ghana, Gifty starts to excel in science. She graduates from Harvard University before moving on to Stanford for her PhD. Gifty, however, struggles with relationships and friendships. Her first serious relationship, with a PhD student named Raymond, breaks down because of her inability to discuss her past with him. Having completed her PhD and shown how mice can be cured of addiction, she starts going out with her lab partner, Han. In the postscript, set an unspecified number of years after the main story, and after her mother’s death, Gifty is living in New Jersey with Han. She says of him, “He knows everything there is to know about me, my family, my past” (398). As such, she seems finally to have established a successful relationship. This change has been premised on her ability, discovered through the telling of her story, to come to terms with her earlier life and to open up to another person about it.
Gifty’s Mother
Gifty says at the start of the novel, “my mother, in her bed, infinitely still, was wild inside” (5). This comment reflects the two-sided character of her mother, as well as revealing something important about the nature and causes of her depression. As her mother remains in bed, after having gone to stay with Gifty following a depressive episode, Gifty describes the story of her life. She was born and raised in Ghana, where she met the Chin Chin Man, Gifty’s father. Following the birth of a son, Nana, she decided to emigrate to America. As Gifty says, she “traveled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown, in the hopes of finding something just a little bit better” (365).
After moving to Alabama, she works as a carer for an elderly man and has Nana. Life is hard, but her husband’s return to Ghana, followed by Nana’s opioid addiction and death, push her over the edge, even more so because she placed so much hope and expectation in Nana’s future. She then tries to kill herself by overdosing with sleeping pills. In her subsequent depression, she neglects Gifty. However, she attempts, when staying with Gifty in the present, to get better and make amends. This is a slow process, and she initially spends most of her time in bed. Gradually, though, she recovers some tentative connection with her daughter, cooking for her, then visiting her place of work. At the end of the novel, she leaves her bed and the apartment by herself and goes swimming before being picked up by Gifty and her friend. This action, and her escape from bed, symbolizes the recovery of a sense of agency from depression and some form of personal redemption. This redemption is represented in her last words in the novel to Gifty: “Don’t be afraid. God is with me” (390).
Nana
Gifty’s brother, Nana, was born in Ghana and was loved as a baby and child by his local community. His prodigious size and potential motivate their mother to emigrate to America to give him more opportunity. At first, he fulfills this promise. He excels at soccer, then basketball, becoming a star player in his last years of high school. This bright future is shattered when he is prescribed OxyContin, an opioid-based painkiller, following an ankle injury sustained in a match. As Gifty says, “His body was of a kind that needed to be in motion for him to feel at ease” (159). Unable to move and express himself physically, he becomes addicted to OxyContin, then to heroin.
Following several unsuccessful attempts to quit, and time spent in rehab, Nana dies from a heroin overdose. This is just three years after the initial injury. Due to the trauma and shame of his final years, Nana comes to be defined by his addiction. Part of the point of Gifty’s retelling of her past, therefore, is to capture another sense of who he was. Thus, Gifty recalls times when he was a loving older brother to her. She wants to show “how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live” (314-15). In this way she seeks to recover a positive image of Nana from the shadow of his addiction—from the image of “the addict” that society attached to him, and from her own previous bitterness and resentment.
