Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

  “What’s your mother’s name?”

  “How many siblings do you have?”

  “Where were you born?”

  Every question I asked was answered with silence. And then Nana died and I found myself on a plane, headed to a country I’d never been to before. When I arrived, I was met not by my father, but by a buxom, chatty woman whose face was the same as my mother’s.

  The first thing my aunt Joyce did when she saw me was inspect my arm, lifting it up and flopping it back down against my side. I would later see her do this with a chicken at the market, evaluating how much she was willing to pay for the meat by the sturdiness of its wing, the heft of its leg.

  “You’re too skinny,” she said. “You get the skinniness from your father’s side, as you can tell.” To demonstrate, she lifted her shirt, grabbed a chunk of her stomach, and shook it at me. I was mortified to see her perform this act in the middle of that busy terminal. She had an outie, something I had never seen before, and I felt as though I was being shown a vestigial tail. I wanted my mother to get up from her bed, to see that outie flashing in her mind’s eye like a glowing target, and come get me. I wanted my skinny arms to go unremarked upon. I wanted my brother.

  Outside the airport, Aunt Joyce flagged down a man selling koko in pouches. She bought two for me and one for herself.

  “Eat,” she said, ready to commence the fattening-up process right there and then. I sucked the porridge from the plastic, urging myself not to cry, while my aunt, the stranger, watched me. She didn’t look away, nor did she stop talking, until I had finished every drop in both bags.

  “Your mother always thought she was better than us, but you see,” she said, raising her eyebrows at me. What was I supposed to see? My too-skinny body? My presence in Ghana? Or maybe I was to see my mother, whom I could not see clearly that summer. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture her face. My aunt Joyce and I sat outside the airport for an hour while she told me story after story after story about my mother, but all I could picture was the sloping curve of a woman’s back.

  42

  “No weapon formed against me shall prosper. I said NO WEAPON. FORMED AGAINST ME. SHALL PROSPER.”

  The pastor of the largest Pentecostal church in Kumasi was stomping back and forth onstage, using his feet as exclamation marks. As he shouted, a chorus of Amens and Hallelujahs filled the sanctuary. A woman fell out in the Spirit and another rushed to fan her, shouting, “Thank you, Jesus,” as her white handkerchief fluttered birdlike over the woman’s body. I sat in the first pew with Aunt Joyce, who periodically nodded her head, pointed to the pastor, and said, “Enh-hnh. That’s right,” as though she and he were in private conversation with each other, not in the swelteringly hot sanctuary of a charismatic evangelical church in Kumasi with hundreds of other congregants all around them.

  We were engaged in spiritual warfare. Or, at least, everyone else was. I was swooning in the Sunday sun, watching the sweat bead on my arms. Every time the pastor stomped, his own sweat would fling from his hair and baptize those of us who were sitting in the front row. I was disgusted every time a droplet landed on me, but then I would remember my wish of only a few years before—to be baptized in water—and I would have to stifle a laugh.

  My laughter didn’t fit with the pastor’s message. “There are demons all around us,” he said. “There are demons who have tried to take our children. We cast them out in Jesus’s name.”

  To my left, the woman beside me put her hands to her chest, her stomach, her legs, before flinging them back into the air. Her face, almost angry in its intensity, told me everything I needed to know: she had demons in need of casting off.

  This was not the First Assemblies of God in Huntsville, Alabama. This wasn’t evangelicalism as I knew it. The noise of this worship service alone made the worship of my childhood church sound like the muffled, timid singing of a kindergarten choir. I had never heard Pastor John talk about demons and witches as though they were living, breathing beings, but this pastor spoke as if he could see them seated among us. My mother had grown up in a church like this, but she had not come back to Ghana to engage in spiritual warfare. She’d sent me as a kind of emissary. Sitting there, melting into a puddle at my own feet, I pictured my mother as I’d left her, and I knew that if her own faith, a living, breathing thing, could not save her, then my small portion would do nothing.

  Aunt Joyce and I took a taxi from the service back to her house. I rolled the windows down and tried to let my body air out.

  “That was a powerful service,” Aunt Joyce said. “Powerful.”

  I looked out of the window and thought about how much Nana would have liked to be here. To see this country of ours and to help me to navigate all of my own complicated feelings about it. “Very powerful,” I told my aunt.

  She smiled and took my hand. “Don’t worry. Your mother will be feeling well again very soon.”

  * * *

  —

  That summer in Ghana, I learned to pound fufu. I learned to haggle at the market, to get used to cold-water bucket baths, to shake coconuts down from their trees. I developed an Encyclopedia of Knowledge I Didn’t Want, waiting for the day when my mother would call me back to America and I could forget everything I had learned. One week became two became three. As time dragged on, I thought that maybe I was going the way of the Chin Chin Man, lost to this country, lost to my family.

  “Where’s my father?” I asked Aunt Joyce one day.

  I was already a month into my stay, and I hadn’t said a word about him. If Aunt Joyce had been waiting for this moment, she didn’t show it. “He lives in town. I’ve seen him a few times in Kejetia, but he doesn’t come to my stall very often anymore. I don’t think he even goes to church.” She said this last part with her nose scrunched, as though she had smelled something rotten. But the Chin Chin Man’s derelict church attendance smelled of roses when compared to the stench of all of his other misdeeds.

  “Can I see him?” I asked, and, minutes later, we were climbing into a taxi.

  * * *

  —

  The Chin Chin Man lived in Tanoso, off of Sunyani Road, not far from the Yaa Asantewaa Secondary School. His house was of a modest size, brick red in color, with a tall, imposing steel fence. He must have had at least five dogs, and all of them rushed to the fence in barking menace as Aunt Joyce and I approached. I stood there peering through the cracks, avoiding the gnashing jaws of the dogs, while Aunt Joyce pushed the button at the gate. She pushed twice, three times, and we could hear the high-pitched squeak it made all the way out where we stood.

  “Where is he?” my aunt said, pushing again.

  Finally, a woman came out to silence the dogs and open the gate. She and Aunt Joyce spent the next minute speaking Twi, too fast for me to understand.

  “Gifty, this is your father’s wife,” Aunt Joyce said.

  The woman turned to me and smiled. “Come in, come in,” she said, and we all wandered inside the house.

  The Chin Chin Man was waiting for us in the living room. He stood as soon as we entered, and stepped toward me, arms open. “Eh, Gifty, look how big you are,” he said.

  And I couldn’t hug him. I couldn’t stand to hear his voice, which for most of my life I had only ever heard in disembodied form, through electric currents. Now here it was, coming out of a mouth affixed on a head that rested atop that long, lean, muscular body. Nana’s body.

  “Did you know I was here?” I asked.

  He lowered his arms and his eyes. He cleared his throat to speak, but I wasn’t finished.

  “She tried to kill herself, did you know that? She almost died and then she made me come here and you knew I was here this whole time, didn’t you?”

  His wife stepped in, offering drinks and food. Though I had been taught it was rude to refuse Ghanaian hospitality, I did so anyway, and for an hour, I sa
t in complete silence, scowling while the Chin Chin Man talked.

  In person, he wouldn’t shut up. Nervous, loud, bumbling stories about his work, his friends, his life without us. He never said a word about my mother or Nana. He never said sorry, and I was old enough then to know that he never would.

  On the car ride home, I asked my aunt if my father had ever asked her about me or my mother on his visits to her stall.

  “Oh, Gifty,” my aunt said.

  “What?”

  “Ofɛre.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. I had already reached the limits of my Twi understanding, but Aunt Joyce either could not or refused to speak English for longer than a couple of sentences a day. Whenever I asked her to repeat something in English, she would tell me that I wasn’t trying hard enough to understand or she would point out, yet again, all the ways that she thought my mother had done a poor job of parenting me.

  “I don’t know in English. Your mother should teach you these things,” she said.

  So, it would be option two.

  Later that day I called my mother, something I did once a week. She answered the phone with false cheer in her voice, and I tried to picture which room in our house she might be in. Was she wearing pajamas or proper clothes? Had she gotten her job back?

  “She means he’s shy. He’s ashamed,” my mother said.

  “Oh,” I said. Nana might have cared how the Chin Chin Man felt, but I didn’t. He was as foreign to me as the language, as foreign as every person who passed me by in Kejetia. I’d felt closer to the dreadlocked man.

  “When can I come home?” I asked.

  “Soon,” she said, but that word had lost all meaning. I’d heard it from my father and understood it to be an empty word, a lie that parents told their children to soothe them.

  * * *

  —

  “Anhedonia” is the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure from things that are normally pleasurable. It’s the characterizing symptom in major depressive disorder, but it can also be a symptom of substance abuse, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease. I learned the term in a university lecture hall and immediately felt a shock of recognition. Anhedonia was the feeling of “nothing,” the thing that kept my mother in her bed.

  Professionally, I am interested in anhedonia because I am interested in reward-seeking behavior, but personally I have never experienced it to the degree of magnitude of the subjects in the cases I study. It is only a symptom, which means, of course, that something else is the cause. I’m interested in the cause as it relates to psychiatric illness, but I research only one piece, one part of the story.

  I know what my family looks like on paper. I know what Nana looks like when you take the bird’s-eye view: black male immigrant from a single-parent, lower-middle-class household. The stressors of any one of those factors could be enough to influence anhedonia. If Nana were alive, if I entered him into a study, it would be hard to isolate his drug use as the cause of this particular portion of his pain. It would be hard even to isolate the cause of the drug use.

  And that’s what so many people want to get at: the cause of the drug use, the reason people pick up substances in the first place. Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like “will” and “choice,” and they end by saying, “Don’t you think there’s more to it than the brain?” They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives.

  I understand this impulse. I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself. I don’t want to be dismissed the way that Nana was once dismissed. I know that it’s easier to say Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs, easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure that everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me, and when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It’s just that I’m standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.

  43

  Dear God,

  The Black Mamba had to work today so Buzz made us dinner. He asked me how school was and when I told him that Lauren made fun of me for wearing clothes from Walmart, he said, “Don’t worry. She’s got a place in Hell with her name on it,” and I know it wasn’t nice but it made me feel better.

  Dear God,

  Merry Christmas! We put on a nativity play at church last night and I played the part of a lost lamb. It wasn’t a big part or anything. I only had one line: “Behold, the lamb of God.” The rest of the time I was just sitting onstage, saying nothing. It wasn’t special at all, but when it was time for me to take my bow, Buzz gave me a standing ovation.

  44

  While I was in Ghana, my mother healed at home in Alabama. Her anhedonia was as severe as ever, but her time in the UAB psych ward seemed to have alleviated some of her symptoms. She had stopped going to therapy, but she was at least going to church again. I used to call Pastor John on Sundays, begging for progress reports, but he could tell me little beyond how she’d looked that day, what she’d worn.

  That summer, I knew that my mother needed healing, but I didn’t understand what she needed healing from. The only time I heard people talk about depression was when they were using it as a synonym for sadness, and so I never thought of it as a disease. “Gifty, I’m sick,” my mother had said, and I knew it was true, but the how of her sickness, the why of it, I didn’t understand.

  When I learned about major depression and anhedonia in college, I started to get a clearer picture of my mother. A few years after my return from Ghana, I asked her to tell me about her time at UAB and about the summer she’d spent alone.

  “Why do you want to know about that?” she asked.

  “It’s for a class,” I lied.

  She made a noise that sounded like it was halfway between a growl and a sigh. We had been trying something new in our relationship. It involved my mother not evading my questions; it involved telling me the truth. She hated it, but I held more cards than I had in childhood, and so she shared things with me that she never would have back then.

  “They wanted me to talk to the doctor, and they gave me some medication to take.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “Yes, I took them while I was in the hospital and then I kept taking them for a while when you were in Ghana, but they didn’t help so then I stopped.”

  “Did you tell them the medicine wasn’t helping? You’re supposed to tell them when the medication doesn’t work so that they can adjust it. The medication doesn’t always work in the beginning. It’s about finding the right combinations of things in the right doses. Didn’t they tell you that?”

  “I didn’t want to keep talking to them. I didn’t want to tell them that i
t wasn’t working because I didn’t want them to shock me.”

  It was my turn to growl-sigh.

  “I got better, didn’t I?” she said, and I couldn’t argue with that, not yet.

  Psychiatric care has come a long way since the days of lobotomies. Back then, in the wild, wild west of neurology and psychosurgery, human frontal lobes were excised with little more gravity than one might exhibit when performing an appendectomy. These were the days of lax trial periods, when people experimented directly on human patients, forgoing the many years of repeating the same experiment on mice and rats. When I think about how slow and tedious my research can be, I am sometimes nostalgic for that bygone era. I think, if only I could inject this virus-packaged opsin directly into human patients, I could turn on that blue light, see what this research can really do. But the thing is, you cannot deliver the light without also delivering the virus. And so while the thousands upon thousands of lobotomized patients sometimes improved in ways that related to the symptoms they once exhibited, they also, just as often, became little more than shadows of their former selves, abandoned to the wasteland of bad, hasty science, left sitting in pools of their own drool. Remembering them makes me thankful for my work, how long it takes, how slow it is.

  The “shocks” that my mother described have come a long way since they were first used in the 1940s and ’50s. We all remember that scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when electroconvulsive therapy was used not as a treatment for mental illness, but as a kind of mind control. Back then, the therapy was performed on anyone from the schizophrenics and depressives who needed mental health care to the homosexuals and “hysterical” women who neither needed nor asked for treatment, who simply lived outside the bounds of what society deemed “normal.” It’s hard to shake that image of people being forced to correct something that was never wrong. It’s hard to forget the primitive beginnings of this therapy, to stand by it. For many, like my mother, the “shock” of this treatment, the way it induces a seizure in order to treat something that is impossible to see, and often difficult to accept, feels like a bridge too far. But the truth is that electroconvulsive therapy can work, does work. It is often presented as a last resort, and it is just as often performed because the patient herself requests it in one final attempt to crawl out of the deep, dark tunnel.